[JPK]

I'm at 75% on MADAME BOVARY now and it's fine. I don't hate the book, though I do hate Emma. Is there a read where she's sympathetic? Cause I just don't see it. She's awful.

It's also interesting reading this with an eye on the prose. Seeing how it really mirrors Emma's mental state and how it tends to be very drab when she's depressed but really opens up when she's going through one of her manic episodes affairs.

This post has been edited by JPK: Yesterday, 04:02 PM

[QuickTidal]

JPK, on 17 September 2025 - 04:02 PM, said:

I'm at 75% on MADAME BOVARY now and it's fine. I don't hate the book, though I do hate Emma. Is there a read where she's sympathetic? Cause I just don't see it. She's awful.

Gods no. Though ostensibly the protagonist, she's 100% visited upon Charles as revenge for him marrying (being married off really) a rich widower himself because she rolls through that life having unrealistic views of society (stemming from her love of art and theatre) and therefore is never EVER happy with her state...and every time Flaubert gives her something that should satisfy her, she balks and it doesn't. To me she represents the death of idealism in youth.

JPK, on 17 September 2025 - 04:02 PM, said:

It's also interesting reading this with an eye on the prose. Seeing how it really mirrors Emma's mental state and how it tends to be very drab when she's depressed but really opens up when she's going through one of her manic episodes affairs.

Yeah, Flaubert is really adept at showing us how Emma sees the world through art and romance to the point where the prose mimics those things....but Emma presented with something akin to it, she loses interest and plunges herself back into depression.

[JPK]

You make some really good points about Emma. I'd missed the aspect of her being karma for Charles's previous marriage. I just couldn't tell if I actually hate Emma because of who she is or because of a bias I personally have about adultery.

Spoiler

Her frustration about just wanting to bask in the aftermath of her affair with Leon while Charles and his mother are grieving the death of his father just rips at me.

.

I guess I'm trying to see if there's a read where her circumstances can justify the shitty person she is and the bad choices she makes like with Lydia in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

[QuickTidal]

JPK, on 17 September 2025 - 05:59 PM, said:

I just couldn't tell if I actually hate Emma because of who she is or because of a bias I personally have about adultery.

The French, especially the French of Flaubert's day didn't think Adultery was that bad (it's present in The d'artagnan romances as well and just feels "normal" there too), so I think it's more about her being constantly given life things that should satisfy her...but they never do. Like Leon...she just lets him leave to go off and live his life, despite being infatuated with him...the chase feels romantic to her, the nuts and bolts of relationships feel boring to her.

JPK, on 17 September 2025 - 05:59 PM, said:

Lydia in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

Indeed. Another commentary on the starry-eyed idealism of youthful belief in romance is torn asunder...but where Austen has Lydia fully realize her mistakes and accept they were her own stupidity, Flaubert makes sure Emma simply can't even though she's given ample opportunities to.

[worry]

Got nothing smart to say, but do any of y'all ever pronounce his name "Flo-bert"? Like gogurt.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

worry, on 17 September 2025 - 08:22 PM, said:

Got nothing smart to say, but do any of y'all ever pronounce his name "Flo-bert"? Like gogurt.

Beaux + vary --- so beautiful, so various, so nu?... Or perhaps in French it sounds nothing like "Beaux" (to a native speaker, that is).

Bit of a tangent, but yesterday I read an interesting reference to Flaubert (and implicitly to Mme Bovary especially):

Quote

Stein herself insisted that Tender Buttons was entirely "realistic" in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert. "I used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it clear and separate in my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen," she recalls in "A Transatlantic Interview—1946" with Robert Bartlett Haas. What she no doubt means is that reference remains central to her project even if representation does not. Unlike her contemporaries (Eliot, Pound, Moore), she does not give us an image, however fractured, of a carafe on a table; rather, she forces us to reconsider how language actually constructs the world we know.

"Do not forget," Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, "that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information." Stein's poems illustrate this aphorism at every turn: she takes ordinary language—the "language of information"— and makes it strange, forcing us to be acutely aware of the way words work. Here, for example, is the first of the "Objects" in Tender Buttons, "A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass":

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

https://poets.org/te...-gertrude-stein

A stein of beer in a cart of oxen
yoked to the slow revolutions of the sun...
which looked at close up would be
too unimaginably energetic for us to see.
So too each object in its quantum forms
as quantum foam, or stranger undulations...
with microscopic black holes passing through and waving
like puns in brains.

Or the way Flaubert describes a boring
hat as if it were a glittering whirlwind...

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: Yesterday, 09:09 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Oh, and for a sympathetic reading of the protagonist... here you go:

Quote

I've heard people say this is a hard novel to read. It might be because none of the characters are likable, but I think it's also because it hits a little too close to home. When Flaubert said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," what he really meant was that Madame Bovary is all of us. Her chronic dissatisfaction with life is humanity's default setting.

[link contains spoilers]

Spoiler

https://darlingaxe.c...s/madame-bovary

I'd guess Flaubert was also tragicomically alluding to Louis XIV's "L'etat, c'est moi", unless that was just a common construction.

He also wrote that he wrote it because he hates realism:

"On me croit épris du réel, tandis que je l'exècre ; car c'est en haine du réalisme que j'ai entrepris ce roman. Mais je n'en déteste pas moins la fausse idéalité dont nous sommes bernés par le temps qui court." .

"People believe I am infatuated with reality, whilst I find it execrable; it is out of hatred for realism that I undertook this novel. But I no less detest the false ideality with which we are deceived by the times we live in." (I think he's sort of punning on "épris" / "enterpris", so an alternate translation would be "believe me taken to infatuation ... that I undertook".)

Flaubert studied Buddhism extensively before writing Madame Bovary:

Quote

So you turn to an unlikely source to frame your remythologized account of the Buddha's life: a novel by the 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert. [....] it turns out that Flaubert was a very serious scholar of Buddhism. That is, he had read Burnouf; he had read all of the texts that were available at that time; he'd read Burnouf's translation of the Lotus Sutra; he knew that quite well. And a student of Burnouf named Édouard Foucaux had translated from Tibetan a work called the Lalitavistara, one of the very famous biographies of the Buddha, and Flaubert had read that. So this became the basis of Flaubert's Buddha coming directly from a very important Indian Buddhist text. And so I decided, well, let's just use that, because for anybody who sets out to write a life for the Buddha, you need some frame. I mean, otherwise it's just complete chaos. What do you decide to leave out, and what do you decide to put in? So I just used Flaubert's story as the frame and I quoted his passages and then laid out exactly what was happening in each of those things.

[...] Flaubert begins not with the Buddhist's teachings but with his body [...] the thirty-two marks, or the thirty-two major marks, as we say in English, and the eighty minor marks of the Buddha, and these are the marks of a mahapurusha. Mahapurusha means "great person," but "great person" doesn't do much in English, so I tend to translate mahapurusha as "superman"—that is, the thirty-two marks of a superman. So the thirty-two, these are going either from the top of his head to the soles of his feet or the other direction, and we have these things which are often just like he has good skin, things that would be kind of normal, but he has flat feet, starting from the bottom; strangely, standing upright, his hands extend below his knees. And so next time you stand up, reach down and see how far your hands go, and you'll see how long the Buddha's arms are. He has webbed fingers and toes. This is quite unusual, and there are some art historical reasons for that possibly. He has his famous retractable penis, which he can retract entirely inside his body. He has forty teeth, which is a lot more than the rest of us have. All of his hair curls to the right. He has a tongue that is long enough that he can lick behind his ears, and it's wide enough that he can cover his entire face when he sticks out his tongue and points it upwards. And of course he has the famous bump on the head, the ushnisha, a word that just means like a turban in Sanskrit. But ​​the ushnisha is very important. It probably just began as a top knot, but it turned into this almost magical thing on his head, which is kind of a no-fly zone. Gods can't fly over it, and it actually becomes later on a deity. It's deified, this ushnisha, as a goddess who's called the victorious crown protrusion. So that's just among the thirty-two. And then there are another eighty on the list.

Donald Lopez: Revisiting the Story of the Buddha

And hence the hat.

Seriously though, the plot of Madame Bovary closely resembles the Buddha Gautama's diagnosis of the human condition: endless craving is only briefly satisfied, leading sentient beings to be lost in dukkha (suffering); through mindful awareness, even of details ordinarily regarded as boring---like the close attention to "boring" details in Madame Bovary---and the flux of energies and thoughts and references to other than the flow of the present, and through other meditative means, including fantastical visualizations and ecstatic meditations on the pseudo-"realism"-annihilating jhana, one can strive to transcend suffering, however partially or temporarily.

Quote

When Buddha was on Vulture Peak he twirled a flower before the assembly. Everyone was silent. Only Maha-kashapa smiled. Buddha said: `I have the eye treasury of the true teaching, the heart of Nirvana, the true form of non-form, and the ineffable gate of Dharma. It is a special transmission outside the teaching. I now entrust it to Maha-kashapa.' This story is not historically true but it isn't made up either.

https://everydayzen....wirls-a-flower/

Perhaps Flaubert's language is like that twirling flower (and the plot of the novel is like Maha-kashapa's past up until that moment twirling around the infinite vacuum of desire... if we can have sympathy for humanity, perhaps we can have sympathy for Madame Bovary (or vice versa, even!... well maybe).


[Edit: correction---"L'etat, c'est moi" was Louis XIV not Napoleon]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: Today, 04:39 PM