Madame

         “The scariest horror movies are the ones that can happen in real life”. So begins one of my Dad’s favorite tangents, where the specific horror movie in mind was an otherwise unknown 1970’s film where a couple thieves methodically robbed and killed a family over the course of a weekend. There was no supernatural, no special effects, no gore. But the realness, the immediacy, and the relevance of it to his life invoked a degree of horror that no other has since matched.

         For a long time, up until now, I thought it was an interesting, but – for me – benign statement. One of those ideas that is understood like a fact in an encyclopedia. One that registers, but doesn’t resonate. In physical response you shrug the shoulders, and it soon passes out of your mind as quickly as it entered it.

         As you can guess, that changed after finishing Madame Bovary. I understood in a new sense, in an emotional sense, the idea he described. It transformed from a small speck into a large looming mass. For the realism that Flaubert is known for, and the incredible accuracy (if exaggeration, like the phantoms in our nightmares that mimic those we know) of his characterizations, imbues a far-reaching relevance, emotion, and grasp into the novel. Though it’s been several hundred years and counting, Emma commands our attention beyond the grave as effortlessly as she does Charles’s. I come back and reflect frequently on her, and on her effect on nearly everyone in the novel perhaps somewhat proportionally to its magnitude on each individual.

         Charles, first and foremost. As the novel begins and essentially ends with him, so he draws a special focal point for the reader. The cliché of the early 2000 teen movies was the wimpy guy overcomes his fears and insecurities in order to act with courage, transform into a hero, and earn the respect and love of the (hot) heroine he fancies. It’s the naïve but inspirational cornerstone of any man who wasn’t the standout or superstar of his circle. And it’s this narrative that Flaubert so grisly and sadistically shreds like a grater against soft cheese. I mean he absolutely eviscerates Charles, and never for a moment hesitates or relents, even to his last harrowing, parched breath. The image of Charles – and by the way what incredible imagery Flaubert creates (it is on par with the best I’ve ever read) – sunk back on the garden bench with mouth half-open and holding a lock of Emma’s long black hair was petrifying.

         I hoped, prayed (Homais – the pseudoscientist who specializes in the mainstream cultural opinions of his label like condescending religion (a phony!) – would disapprove) that there would be some move, some change or at least the littlest insight or realization sparked in Charles. Some mercy from the author to placate just a little a good man who fulfills his duties, provides for his family and is satisfied with his life and station, no matter how naïve his conception of his world is. In a similar vein of let bygones be bygones, let Charles be Charles. What happiness would exist if we knew the constructed realities of others’! If only their life could have passed without external incident, without some unignorable rupture, then at least one character would have been happy, and maybe two if his attitude rubbed off on little Berthe. Naturally, this yearning is precisely what Flaubert lengthened, drew upon, and played with in order to drive home his unyielding contempt for the bourgeois. At the end of it all, the hope for placation is extinguished in the final meeting with Rodolphe: Charles is nothing but “comic…and…abject.” The final scene writes his fate as nothing more than pathetic and unredeemable. For some reason, that was a really sad realization for me to come to (even though I and probably everyone else knew it all along). It shows that man in his natural, jovial, at-ease state is not enough. The guard must remain up; the vigilance of a soldier on watch must be exercised. In the end, he tells us what we already know: that the Eden of the content husband, of the blissful world he imagines where the status quo is satisfactory and the comfortable routines he settles and slacks into are a net positive rather than negative, is in fact fantasy.

         Yet sifting through the piles of his mediocrity, one can find, if he or she looks closely enough, his singular strength. He never once wavers – even after her transgressions, even after her passing – in his love, devotion, and commitment to his wife. It is the most pure and strongest force in the novel besides Madame herself. The haunting mistreatment he suffers for his arête, his goodness, extends not just to Emma but to the schoolchildren in the opening scene. It indicts the human race for its cruelty; have any strength, it says, except kindness. Be exceptional at something, except goodwill. Have anything but contentment and happiness. The lurid glare of Flaubert’s observations and morals show us the shameful sides of ourselves.

         And yet there’s something admirable about the aspirations of humanity. They bully to strengthen; they overlook because they are looking for something higher. Contentment, perhaps, gets you killed in the wilderness. Without striving for something, you are languishing. It’s the irony of our state that perpetual unease isn’t a coincidence or unexplained: it’s what makes/made us great. From our ancient history as single-cell amoebas, the one that dared to grow a second appendage shares in the same glory and empire that its descendants cultivated, step by step, cell by cell, innovation by innovation. From an unlikely upbringing, who but Madame Bovary would have the ambition, the appetite, the imagination to experience as a poor unknown farmer’s daughter the manifold stories and incarnations she assumed throughout her life? The nuns loved her before she grew bored – their conceptions too stagnant and flimsy to keep her attention – of them. The viscount – and really any other man in the novel – captivated by her, though she had not a lesson of formal dance. Even the womanizer Rodolphe grapples with the idea of leaving with her, and – oh the player’s infidelity – giving her money when she comes back begging. She has both a brilliance in her fantasies as well as an incredible, admirable, and fearless resolve with which she pursues and attempts to manifest them. Her only fault it seems, is that she was French and not American. Her passion, her ability to shake things up, to stir life and bring out things that would have lain stagnant, has tremendous value in and of itself. What started the universe and all that exists but the Big Bang? What are we really, and how do we find out, but when a Madame Bovary enters our life? How can we ever be as interesting as her? No man can, I don’t think. All we can do, as the stolid sex, is have our principles ready with, paradoxically, an open mind to receive and (to the best of our ability) know her. Men by themselves are boring. Women, in a reductive and particular sense, drive the interest, drama, and depth of our species. Emma is, and always will be, a fascination to behold (“her infinite variety”, “for there she was” and all that).

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