Scenes From A Provincial Life Essay Research

Scenes From A Provincial Life Essay, Research Paper

Scenes from a provincial lifeShe was a bourgeois narcissist in 19th-century France who was destroyed by her daydreams. But the brilliantly observed tragedy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary still resonates todayReading Madame Bovary for the first time was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life – at least up to that point. I was a very young woman – not even eighteen. I was au pair in the French provinces in the 1950s, and I read Madame Bovary in French, sitting in the furrow of a vineyard. I was like Emma Rouault before she became Madame Bovary, someone whose most intense life was in books, from which I had formed vague images of passion and adventure, love and weddings, marriage and children. I was afraid of being trapped in a house and a kitchen. Madame Bovary opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness, which was all the more appalling because it was so full of things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens. The worst thing of all was that it was the books that were the most insidious poison. Recently Madame Bovary appeared in a British newspaper listing of the ‘fifty best romantic reads.’ It was, and is, the least romantic book I have ever read. If I have come to love it , it is because now I am half a century older, and not trapped in a house and kitchen, I can equably sympathise with the central person in the book, who is its author – endlessly inventive, observant, and full of life.Madame Bovary was published in 1856-7 and is at the centre of any discussion of the European realistic novel of bourgeois life – especially provincial life. The nineteenth-century novel, however much it criticises the bourgeoisie, is a bourgeois form that grew up with the prosperous middle classes who had time for reading, and were interested in precise discriminations of social relations and moral and immoral behaviour. It comes after the chivalric epic with its codes of honour and courtly love, and after the religious epic, Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy, religious dramas of the nature of the human soul in the mythic cosmology. The dense social novel flourished in countries with large cities – London, Paris, St Petersburg, Moscow – in which populations were in a state of rapid change – and provincial societies in which old orders and hierarchies and habits persisted and change was slower. The novel was interested in the structures of societies – from money to education, from religious habits to kinship and marriages, from ambition to failure. Fairy tale images, the hopes of princesses and kitchenmaids, of youngest sons and poor old women, are contained in but also corrected by the realist novel. Fairy stories end with the lovers marrying and living happy ever after. Jane Austen’s novels keep that pattern. The great realist novels study at length what happens after marriage, within marriages, within families and businesses. One of the great subjects of the realist novel is boredom – narrow experiences in small places and unsympathetic groups. There is no greater study of boredom than Madame Bovary – which is nevertheless never boring, but always both terrifying and simultaneously gleeful over its own accuracy.Madame Bovary is also at the centre of any discussion of literary descriptions of adultery. Denis de Rougemont, in his book, Love in the Western World, observed that ‘to judge by literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most remarkable occupations in both Europe and America’. He discussed the great lovers of mediaeval Romance – Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Iseult – and pointed out that the difficulty and unlawfulness of their love is part of the essence of their passion. Marriage is so to speak the social and normal framework of the human story – adultery is the great act of individual self-assertion and longing. In terms of mediaeval Romance which takes place in a world of dynastic marriages and chivalric devotion, such transgressions are doomed and glorious. In terms of bourgeois monogamous society they are different. Engels believed that ‘individual sex love’ is a recent concern in human societies, and in our modern capitalist monogamous world is more difficult for women than for men – for men are not condemned and ostracised for promiscuity as women are. Anna Karenina and the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton suffer for their desires; their souls are battlefields between good and evil, their fates are tragic. The outward events of Emma Bovary’s life are a petit bourgeois version of the doom of Anna Karenina – with important differences. Both heroines have sexually unappealing husbands, and lives that leave them dissatisfied. Both take lovers and both, in their ways, are betrayed or let down by their lovers. Both are sensual and vulnerable and both commit suicide. It might even be said that both are physically attractive to the men who invented and trapped them in their stories, and that both are punished by their authors, as well as by society. Anna Karenina is tragic almost despite Tolstoy. But if Emma Bovary – who is small-minded and confused and selfish – is tragic, it is not in a romantic way, and not because her readers share her feelings or sympathise with her. Our sympathy for her is like our sympathy for a bird the cat has brought in and maimed. It flutters, and it will die.When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary – the fairy tale happy ending – she becomes the third Madame Bovary in the book, a