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Flaubert's Madame Bovary: The Death of Romance (Lecture on Part Three, Chapters I-XI) (Patreon)

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'She wasn't happy, and never had been. Why was life so unsatisfactory? Why did everything she leaned on crumble instantly to dust?'

Today we draw to the close of Madame Bovary. The close of this deeply influential realist novel, but certainly not the end of our loving engagement with Gustave Flaubert.

We're discussing the climax of the novel, hedonic adaptation, tragedy vs comedy in realism, bourgeois passivity, extrapolating from single experiences, grotesque parody, dramatic foreshadowing, the indifference of Flaubert's universe, and much more.

Timestamps:

0:00 the tragic real-life inspiration for this novel

2:00 Flaubert’s relationship with Louise Colet

4:00 how Madame Bovary came to life

6:00 tragedy & comedy in the ending

8:00 compressing time heightens irony

10:00 birth of modernism & death of author

13:00 self-confidence depends on surroundings

16:00 Jean-Paul Sartre vs Gustave Flaubert

18:00 existential bad faith & bourgeoise passivity

20:00 is this seriously a novel about nothing?

21:00 Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

23:00 Leon & Emma meet again in Rouen

25:00 the theory of linguistic relativity

27:00 dramatic foreshadowing in the novel

29:00 inside the pharmacy of Monsieur Homais

31:00 the interplay between tragedy & comedy

33:00 why realist novels can’t be wholly serious

35:00 monotony banishes Emma’s compassion

37:00 being wildly inappropriate is realistic

39:00 how Emma sees her affair with Leon

40:00 on learning through role-modelling

42:00 how Leon sees his affair with Emma

44:00 taking the passions of others into us

46:00 extrapolating from just one experience

48:00 how Flaubert anticipates Freud & Jung

50:00 Emma Bovary lives in a world of lies

52:00 an exercise that will change your life

54:00 seeing Emma’s love turn into hate

56:00 being wary of hedonic adaptation

58:00 the Buddha’s teaching on suffering

1:00:00 Emma turns to Leon for the money

1:02:00 ‘she was at war with the world…’

1:04:00 Flaubert’s simple detached realism

1:07:00 Emma heads back to Rodolphe

1:09:00 how death/thanatos drives Emma

1:10:00 Emma’s fiery/apocalyptic vision

1:12:00 grotesque parody of tragic romance

1:14:00 a painful moment of anagnorisis

1:16:00 the death scene of Emma Bovary

1:18:00 feminist reading of her downfall

1:20:00 ‘she had ceased to exist…’

1:21:00 the end’s symbolic theological debate

1:23:00 Charles seeks closure after her death

1:24:00 would Emma like her own novel?

1:25:00 do we sympathise with the characters?

1:27:00 analysing the novel’s very last line

1:28:00 the indifference of Flaubert’s universe

1:29:00 the death of Charles Bovary

1:35:00 living great books & rise of Bovaryism

1:38:00 preparing for our next big reads

1:40:00 does Quentin Tarantino listen to the show?

1:42:00 what did you make of Flaubert’s novel?

1:43:00 congratulations on reading Madame Bovary

Resources to Explore:

  • Further Flaubert: Readers wanting to deepen their acquaintance with Gustave Flaubert, and further their appreciation of French realism, may find it rewarding to read Sentimental Education in the future. Written in 1869, this novel is seen by many as the pinnacle of his precise style. If you want a break from the realism, and are curious to see what Flaubert was working on before Madame Bovary, you could always give his The Temptation of Saint Anthony a read.

  • Flaubert's Parrot: I would personally recommend marking your finishing of Madame Bovary by treating yourself to Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot from 1984. This slim postmodern gem blends fiction, literary criticism, and biography in a way that will make for rewarding reading hot on the heels of Flaubert's great work. Other works mentioned in the discussion that you might like to check out include: Jean-Paul Sartre's The Family Idiot, Eric Auerbach's Mimesis, and Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author.

  • Music Appreciation: I've been so happy to hear that many of you have been enjoying the music selection for the lectures. If you want to enjoy the full pieces, they are: Debussy's Clair de Lune, Chopin's Nocturne in B flat minor, and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

  • Comparative Exercise: We're forming a chain of complementary writers with our readings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gustave Flaubert, and then William Faulkner. Reflecting on our first read of the year, can you see any similarities or Flaubertian influence in One Hundred Years of Solitude? And what are the key differences? Can you see how realism and precise style would be extended and revolutionised in the twentieth century? What what do you think about the idea that modern literature was born with Flaubert's Madame Bovary?

  • Film Appreciation: In our first discussion, we had some recommendations of film and television adaptations: The 1991 film directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Isabelle Huppert, he 1949 film directed by Vincente Minnelli, the Mia Wasikowska version from ten years ago, the 2000 miniseries, and the BBC adaptation from 1975. If you checked any of them out, what did you make of how they translated the story from the page to the screen? What artistic choices did you agree and disagree with?

  • Motivation: You have done such tremendous work with your reading in the first quarter of the year, which bodes well for the next leg of our exciting journey. As we're preparing to scale our next literary mountains together, now seems to be a good time to have some motivation. If you haven't seen it already, you might enjoy this video filled with twenty mindset tips, practices, and habits that will help improve your reading of difficult books: How to Motivate Yourself to Read.

  • Our Next Great Story: Congratulations on bringing yourself so powerfully to Madame Bovary. You should feel incredibly proud of your accomplishment. This weekend coming, we will have our introductory 'how to read' video for William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In this video, we will discuss everything from our practical approach, pacing, contending with the novel's difficulty, understanding its structure, themes, context, and the great writer's biography. We will be moving from the 19th to the 20th century, and from provincial France to the Deep South of the United States. You don't need to read anything for this work just yet, but, if you're keen to dive in, I have an optional recommended reading exercise for you at the end of the lecture above, along with information about this read. The main thing you want to do right now is to secure your copy of the book. And the weekend after our Faulkner intro, we will then have our formal introduction to Chaucer too. I'll be discussing our approach and advice for how we're going to make his Canterbury Tales accessible in that video, but, for now, you may wish to secure a copy of the work both in its original form (like with this Penguin edition) and in a version that translates the work into Modern English prose (like the Peter Ackroyd book). I am tremendously excited to conduct a deep appreciation of these great writers with you and am so grateful that you have made our read-throughs for the first quarter of the year so rewarding.

Questions for You:

1) What did you make of the ending of Madame Bovary?

2) What will you remember most from your time spent with Emma?

3) What area connected with Flaubert are you now most keen to explore?

4) How does Emma compare with the other tragic heroines you have met on your journey through great literature?

5) How would you persuade another to read Madame Bovary? And what advice would you give to facilitate a meaningful reading experience?

And please do share with us your impressions and favourite passages from the end of Madame Bovary.

Congratulations on reading Madame Bovary, everybody!

Files

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Comments

Bianca

You asked what we thought of Auerbach's comments on realism and tragedy. I found the quotation in the lecture a bit confusing, and so went back to the original. If I understand him correctly, Auerbach is arguing that Flaubert's realism extends the dignity of tragedy to a person who is mediocre, both in character and circumstances. He takes someone who is shallow, insincere, mundane and treats them with complexity and seriousness. (Auerbach contrasts this to the classical era in which tragedy was reserved for the great, the noble, and the upper classes or aristocracy. Those who do great deeds and whose suffering merits our pity.) In which case, if I accept this interpretation, Flaubert would be giving us a work of compassion, but a compassion shrouded in a detachment so strict as to seem cruel.

Bob

Monsieur Homais' efforts to try and conceal madame Bovary's suicide by saying she mistook the arsenic for sugar whilst making custard was some welcome comic relief after such a gruelling chapter.

Sunny

To be honest, I didn't see how she would get out of this predicament. I feel bad for her daughter, who is neglected. I recently read 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' by Ottessa Moshfegh, which also had an "unlikeable" female protagonist. Both of them were coping so hard in unhealthy ways. - I might need to sit with this ending for a bit to figure out how I feel about it.

Carmen Standop
>>170294198

Wonderful ! Yes, the cruelty is Flaubert`s weapon to force the reader to feel compassion. So we can`t avert our eyes as a society anymore.

Greg

M. Bovary is an exquisitely written novel, telling the most depressing story I have ever encountered. There are more gruesome stories, yes, but none so ruinous and so near to life. The moment I finished reading it I wished to put it on the shelf and never think about it again, it stirred such feelings of hopelessness.

Greg

Many people have commented on the characters, but I think Flaubert shows us something interesting about the zeitgeist of the time (mid-1800s) as well. Several of the characters speak about and act toward a "progress" that is, either or all at once, commercial, scientific, and/or patriotic. Noticeably, Flaubert depicts tension between the aspirations of progress and the traditional religious sentiment, ie. Homais vs. Bournisien. The characters who act in the name of progress speak derisively about religion and the Church. The progress of science and rationalism is shown to be ascending, by Flaubert, whereas religion is shown to be antiquated. As for Emma herself, Flaubert reports that she received a good education from the Catholic nuns. So, what do we make of her outcome? And, what does this say, if anything, about the place of the Church in the life of the people, or the reasons for its decline? Is Flaubert reporting through his realism that the Church was ineffectual at forming people, and a good and just society? Is he telling us that scientific and industrial progress offered more hope? M. Bovary, as an historical window, seems to show us what the secularization of (French) society looked like, in the everyday, as it was happening. Very interesting.

Peter Blasevick

Something that I didn’t see discussed but really struck me was the symbolism of fruit. It appears in various forms throughout the story (on trees, in baskets, in jam – including the portentous jam-making scene when Homais reprimands Justin who came perilously close to the jar of arsenic. Emma recalls reading Paul and Virginia and unrealistically dreams of an idealized man who would gather red fruit for her. There’s the extravagance of the oversized fruit piled up in baskets at the wedding feast. At the infamous ball, Emma has a maraschino ice – a literal taste of the high society to which she wishes she belonged. Rodolphe uses sensual, ripe fruit to cover up their clandestine letters, and ultimately the basket of ripe apricots covers his sour breakup letter (and Charles bites into the fruit of this labor, unwittingly enjoying the sweetness of Emma’s broken heart and dreams). Emma’s father plants a tree for Berthe, young fruit to represent the young girl’s life, and says he will make her jam when she visits – the growing tree could be representing the nurturing of a desired future represented that never comes to pass. And more I’m forgetting. Really curious as to your thoughts about the fruit that seems ripe with symbolism to me.

Kristen Egener Chaddah

Hello dear fellow HLBC members! I’m late to the party as I have just now finished Madame Bovary and not yet had the pleasure of listening to Ben’s final lecture on the novel. I was doing well with my reading but was interrupted by a pressing family matter. When I resumed, I was beginning Part Three and found myself quickly tiring of the performance. I thought the long drawn out death of Emma from poisoning was over the top. “The wages of sin is death” moral is laid on thick. I was repelled by the following: “(the priest) first he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again.” (Maybe this is meant to convey the priest’s attitude and thus ironic). What held my attention and my emotional connection to the story was the portrayal of Charles. I have not seen a movie adaptation of the novel and wonder how his embodiment of purity and grace would be conveyed or not. Would he be cast as simply a dimwit? He reminds me of Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov if that character had married and fathered a child. From the introduction to the Russian novel, it states: “Alyosha seems little more than a reactor to events. His opinions and judgments consist almost entirely of things others have just said to him, and are quite often wrong or absurdly out of place when he utters them. Dostoevsky obviously knew this. His critics, who expected something else, overlook the delicacy with which he allows us to laugh at his hero.” I see the same in the scene where Charles sits down with Rodolphe in a cafe and has a beer with him and says, “I don’t hold it against you.” “No, I don’t hold it against you, anymore” “No one is to blame. It was decreed by fate.” Wow. Mind blowing. “Rodolphe, who had been an instrument of that fate, thought him very meek indeed for a man in his situation — comical, even, and a little contemptible.” Oh my! It would take a very fine actor to convey the purity of soul in Charles, who saw Emma with his own purity. He projected that upon her. He could not see her as she really was. When he learned the truth, when he saw all there was to see, he couldn’t bear it. And this is so painful to witness. I think of Hemingway’s words: “the world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” And some don’t rally. I’m glad I finished this tremendously affecting novel. It will definitely stay with me.

Grant Tichenor

I feel horrible for not having been able to finish Madame Bovary sooner. With this read, I had to go seriously slow, and looking back I wish I had run through the novel. Maybe it's my youth talking or my recency bias which I have for every novel I read. But the last sixty or so pages of Madame Bovary are the most vivid, beautiful, and jaw dropping pages I have ever read (It might sound dramatic, but I believe it’s my accurate conclusion.). Now, what I can’t get over is how I found myself especially in the third part sympathizing with Emma. I detested her in the first two parts of the book for being a foolish, lost, and awful woman. However, in this third part, with her life crumbling around her in such a rapid fire way, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Of course all her troubles were directly caused by her. But seeing a woman’s life shatter in front of her simply because she doesn’t know how to be content is so tragic. I finally managed to pick a quote from this final part that has stuck with me. This is from the Francis Steegmueller translation (side note: it made my reading of this book incredibly enjoyable), “But casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn’t maltreat our idols; the gilt comes off on our hands.”. Emma has taught me of the horrors of setting unrealistic expectations. I want to thank Flaubert and especially Ben for bringing myself and so many others to this great piece of literature. I’m proud to say Madame Bovary will stick with me into my adult life.

Sarah Mekes
>>171045212

I’m so glad you pointed this out Peter! It really got me thinking… I wonder if there’s something here playing around with the “forbidden fruit” idea from Genesis; given the novel’s preoccupation with critiques on religion through Homais… Especially when you think about the fruit baskets from Rodolphe! The fruits literally conceal forbidden love letters. But also, if we think about fruit as they exist in our world, they are usually sweet, juicy… there’s something sensual about some fruits… they’re often utilized as symbols of wealth, hedonism, etc in visual art. But also, fruits ripen until they eventually rot if not consumed. If consumed at that point, they could sicken a person. I think they’re used in the novel in a cautionary way that foreshadows how Emma’s obsession with the pursuit of worldly passions for her fulfillment will only lead to her demise. After all, fruits are seasonal, temporary in their existence. They are sweet, but only for a glimpse of time. I agree with your analysis of the fruit tree for Berthe… perhaps it shows how life for Berthe could be peppered with sensuous, happy moments represented by fruits produced by the tree, but that ultimately, those sweet moments will also be surrounded by others less sweet, and that there’s nothing right or wrong about that, but only that it is the way of things, it is life as Rodolphe says. Wonderful that you noticed this in your reading and thank you for sharing!

Danielle Hovley

I read the Lydia Davis translation and absolutely loved the writing. One of the most memorable parts for me was where we got a little peek into Leon's head when he wants to start distancing himself from Emma. He felt like he was being taken over by Emma and actually losing himself in her, and then he goes on to say how he had actually begun to find her frightening. I love the contrast here from when we glimpse him right before/after he reconnects with Emma at the start of part three and his experiences in Paris has made him more sure of himself. I was also surprised by the ending, and I'm really glad that it was pointed out in this one. Not Emma's ending, or even Charles', but, as mentioned in this discussion, the last chapter devotes a good portion to the apothecary, and the last paragraph of the book wraps him up with a neat little shiny bow. I actually chuckled at the last sentence, completely baffled that that was how Flaubert wanted to close his tragic novel.

Tiffany

After finishing this, I can't help but return to the original inspiration-the TRUE story of Delphine Delamare. In my mind, I just picture Flaubert reading it in the paper, or hearing about it from friends and neighbors (men, primarily) and then discussing the scandal. Passing quick judgement on her life, disparaging her as an adultress and racking up the debt and then the poison/suicide. Everyone is scandalized, horrified, etc. They feel bad for the husband, maybe see themselves in him a bit (and probably thankful they were not him). I am sure in the original article the husband was just briefly mentioned (in my mind anyway). Then, in a few days or weeks, everyone moves on to discuss the next bit of news and scandal and life goes on. That is the realism of this story. Flaubert's version is the romanticized part (to me). He romanticized Delamare's real life. Brilliant! This story reminds me of Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Emma Bovary and April Wheeler have a lot of similar characteristics and the cautionary tale message feels the same for sure. It also makes me think of The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham. Kitty and Emma are both immature, dissatisfied, superficial, and self-absorbed. But, Kitty grows and redeems herself and Emma does not. Emma embraces the destruction.