Madame Bovary

I'm in my fifties. I have a college degree. I consider myself very well read, especially when compared with the general population. Yet I seem to hit a wall when it comes to "classic" novels, especially those from the 19th century. I've enjoyed some Jane Austen, some Charles Dickens, but for many novels from that century I've crinkled my nose and thought, "I don't get it."

I can now add Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary to the list. This novel is acclaimed as one of the greatest ever, but I found it to be exceedingly boring and with a heroine who is one of the shallowest and least interesting I've ever come across. Adulterers were the subject of many of the century's biggest novels, such as Anna Karenina and The Scarlet Letter. I guess the concept of adultery was so shocking that it was even scandalizing to think about. Well, today it's not that big a deal, and I didn't find this book very interesting.

I liked the first part. The novel begins in the third person, with students commenting on a new pupil, the awkward Charles Bovary. Then it shifts to his point of view, as he marries an older widow. Lines like this made me think I was in for a good time: "Though she was ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds, Madame Dubuc had no lack of suitors."

The old woman dies, and Bovary, a country doctor, becomes enamored of the daughter of a patient. Eventually he marries her, and takes her away. It is at this point that the novel shifts viewpoint to Emma, the new Madame Bovary, and here is where the book goes south.

As the book goes on, she grows to hate her husband and has not one but two affairs. I can of course sympathize with a woman of that time, who has no choice in who she marries, but Flaubert casts Emma has a somewhat heartless woman. Many passages are taken up with how much she can't stand Charles: "Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As he grew older his manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles; after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up in the temples."

Her shallowness is best exemplified in a section in which Bovary performs experimental surgery on a man with a club foot that at first seems to go well, and Emma sees him with new eyes. But when the man ends up losing the leg to gangrene, she wonders how she could have ever seen him positively.

The stuff with her lovers is very boring, not romantic or sexy, and there is a lot about provincial life, especially as she gets further in debt with a local merchant. By the time she swallows arsenic I thought good riddance.

So, Madame Bovary to me is no classic. It's a short novel but it took me a long time to read because I wasn't very interested in what happened next.