Flaubert’s most famous novel leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. There are simply no characters worth rooting for and plenty of capricious, short-sighted, and disgusting behavior to last a lifetime. The eponymous character, Emma, is narcissistic and vain, bordering on evil. “The fact was, she no longer hid her scorn for anything, or anyone; and she would sometimes express singular opinions, condemning what was generally approved, and commending perverse or immoral things.” The bane in her life was her husband, Charles, the village doctor. “What exasperated her was that Charles seemed unaware of her suffering. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed an idiotic insult, and his certainty of this, ingratitude…. She wished Charles would beat her, so that she could more justly detest him, avenge herself.”
To that end, Madame Bovary’s first consummated adulterous affair was with Rodolphe, the countryside rake. ““Why, don’t you know,” he said, “there are souls who endure endless torment? They are driven now to dream, now to action, to experience the purest passions, then the most extreme joys, and so they hurl themselves into every sort of fantasy, every sort of folly.” The affair fizzles out, as could only be expected. “Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion.” Madame Bovary, to the end, was consumed by a selfish imagination, devoid of all reality, “Ah! if only, in the freshness of her beauty, before the defilement of marriage and the disillusionment of adultery, she could have rested her life upon some great, solid heart, then virtue, tenderness, desire, and duty would all have joined together, and she would never have descended from such lofty felicity. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie imagined in despair of all desire. She now knew the pettiness of the passions which art exaggerated.”
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