By emily
GRADE: A

What an excellent book. There is probably nothing original left to be said about this Classic of Western Literature, so I’m not even going to try to literary-criticize it or say that it’s ‘about’ class warfare or feminism or, you know, blah blah. I will leave that stuff to people like the previous owner of my copy, whose marginal notes indicate a less-than-rigorous engagement with whatever class he read it for, as well as a deep-seated confusion about how to spell the word “bourgeois.” I didn’t read this for school, so my viewpoint is more on the level of: ‘Madame Bovary: better than Us Weekly if you’re looking to raise yourself in the esteem of your fellow subway riders.’

And of course, I do care whether my L-train buddies think I’m a brainless twerp who is fascinated by blueprints of the Olsens’ penthouse megadorm. I care because I’m shallow and obsessed with what the world thinks of me. I’m also materialistic and gluttonously demanding of creature comforts. Oh, and I often fantasize that I am the main character in a novel about my life. I love to live at emotional extremes – perfect misery or perfect happiness, with no allowance made for mediocrity, which I tend to see as failure. Historically, I’ve been irresistibly attracted to guys who are not merely wrong for me but are, in their own petty way, evil – and then I’ve become so involved with the passion and drama of being In Love that I’ve neglected to notice the evilness of the love-object. I’m also extremely self-centered (you can tell from the number of sentences I start with “I”). In short, Emma Bovary, c’est moi (and probably toi, aussi).

In modern-day publishing-industry parlance, she’s the most profoundly ‘relatable’ protagonist I’ve ever come across.

Everyone, including Flaubert, empathizes completely with this character. So the weird, fascinating thing about the book is how much pleasure he seems to take in describing Emma’s descent into ruin and (spoiler alert) death. His tone relentlessly mocks and condemns her, but then he turns around and lavishly praises her mass of dark hair, her pale skin, her dark eyes, her endlessly rustling dresses, her dainty footwear. So . . .WTF? (I’m basically quoting Harold Bloom here, I realize.) Is this about misogyny or self-hatred? About disguising the book as a moralistic tale? If anyone did learn this stuff in college, please share it with me, because I am too lazy to make up my own mind.