| WHO IS EMMA BOVARY?
The protagonist of Madame Bovary (1857), a novel by Gustave Flaubert. Emma Bovary is a farmer's daughter, educated in a convent where she learnt embroidery, the piano and pious submission but also acquired a taste for crazy romantic fiction. Married young to the local doctor who is a devoted husband but sentimental and inept. Deeply discontented since the birth of her daughter Berthe, she spends far too much on dresses, curtains and beautiful useless trinkets. Bored by her dull adoring husband , restless and sick with disappointment , disilluision and idleness, she begins an affair with Rodolphe, the local squire. The plan is to elope with him to some faraway place, but Rodolphe gets cold feet and ditches her. Outraged, she falls ill, hallucinates, recovers, spends most of adoring husband's money on beautiful clothes and other luxuries. Soon she begins an affair with a young lawyer, falls deeper and deeper into debt, swallows arsenic powder and dies horribly before the eyes of puzzled adoring husband, who has truly loved her all along. In the French language, Bovarisme, has become a word that stands for romantic illusions and unfulfilled expectations. Emma Bovary is a pathetic character, but she's also the great nineteenth century heroine: reckless, dreamy, voluptuous, discontented, and marked out for a most unromantic early death. She's also one of the most magically erotic characters in modern fiction. According to Geoffery Wall of "Penguin Classics" , women often used to write to Flaubert. They were fascinated by his heroine. They wrote: "I recognised her, I loved her, as if she had been a close friend. This story can't be made up, it must be true, this woman must be real..." How had he managed it? How had he, a mere man, found out such things about the female heart? But mainly they wanted to know who this extraordinary Emma was? Who was the model, the original? He usually gave them the same puzzling, throw-away answer: Madame Bovary, c'est moi. She's just me. An answer which is wonderfully clever and quotable, but not strictly true. The real answer is even more interesting. To find out, follow this LINK |
 |