Finished: Madame Bovary (Flaubert). Well, another tragic book, albeit very well written. Emma Bovary is a married mother of one who isn't satisfied with her provincial French life. She has always longed for adventure, white knights, balls, society...but she marries a country doctor who can only offer her the "boring country life" of wife and mother. He is ecstatically happy with her, and she is miserable with him. This leads to her having two devastating adulterous affairs and borrowing her family into ruin to shower herself with material possessions to make herself happy.

I don't really find Emma Bovary to be any more sympathetic than I did Anna Karenina. I don't have sympathy for a woman who puts her own whims and desires before her child...especially when she is living a comfortable life and her whims and desires are not basic needs, but the flowers on the icing on the cake! I do understand that back in the day...back when these characters existed, that many times marriages were arranged or strongly suggested by parents. But, in Emma's case, she went into her marriage willingly, and thinking she was in love with Charles Bovary. A few months and a little boredom later and she was woefully unhappy. She was also very negligent to her baby daughter.

Flaubert is a very good writer and did a very good job of describing Emma's feelings and unfulfilled desires. I even felt sorry for her at one point, knowing how unhappy she was. She was the epitome of the unfulfilled stay-at-home mom. (Side note: I was a stay-at-home mom and was anything BUT unfulfilled!) Instead of diving into her interests, though, like reading and the arts, or heaven forbid...adoring her child, she became so very narcissistic. And when she began to, first, detest everything about her husband, who was a genuine, although, unambitious man, and, second, to let those feelings blossom into adulterous affairs, then she lost my sympathy.

Flaubert kept me turning the pages, though. Besides the three hours I spent yesterday watching my DVR'd episodes of Revenge, so I could be ready for the season finale last night, I could barely put the book down! :-)

I only made note of one passage to include here, but the entire book was really very good. In this passage, Emma Bovary meets the man who will later become her second lover. While her husband, Charles, is busy talking with the town pharmacist at dinner, she strikes up a conversation with a young law clerk from town, Leon. She does at this point become infatuated with Leon, but doesn't act on her feelings. She can't believe, though, that she has actually met someone who is as passionate about reading and romanticism as she. I love his description of reading!

"My wife doesn't care much for it (gardening)," said Charles. "She'd rather, even though she's been recommended to take exercise, stay in her room the whole time, reading."

"That's like me," remarked Leon. "What could be better, really, than an evening by the fire with a book, with the wind beating on the panes, the lamp burning?"

"I do so agree," she said, fixing on him her great black eyes open wide.

"Your head is empty," he continued, "the hours slip away. From your chair you wander through the countries of your mind, and your thoughts, threading themselves into the fiction, play about with the details or rush along the track of the plot. You melt into the characters; it seems as if your own heart is beating under their skin." 

"Oh, yes, that is true!" she said.

"Has it ever happened to you," Leon went on, "in a book you come across some vague idea you once had, some blurred image from deep down, something that just spells out your finest feelings?"

"I have had that," she answered.

"That," he said, "is why I particularly love the poets. I find verse more tender than prose, and it brings more tears to the eye."

"Though rather exhausting after a while," Emma went on, "and at the moment, you see, I adore stories that push on inexorably, frightening stories. I detest common heroes and temperate feelings, the way they are in life."
.....

Without realizing, while he was talking, Leon had put his foot on one of the bars of the chair in which Madame Bovary was sitting. She was wearing a little cravat made of blue silk, that made her tube-pleated batiste collar stick up like a ruff; and, whenever she moved her head, half her face was screened by the fabric or else was pleasingly revealed. So it was, side by side, while Charles and the pharmacist were chatting, they embarked on one of those vague conversations in which every random phrase always brings you back to the fixed centre of a mutual sympathy. Paris theatres, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the society they knew nothing of, Tostes where she had lived, Yonville where they were, they went through it all, talked it over until the end of dinner.

After meeting Leon, and clearly meeting more of a soul mate, yet not acting on her feelings because of her husband and family, was probably when I had the most sympathy or understanding for Madame Bovary. However, when she then deteriorated into the selfish being she became, then I pretty much just told her character to "talk to the hand", and then I enjoyed the rest of the book for the good writing it put forth!