Madame Bovary was Flaubert's first novel and the most important work of his writing career. The work brought him a great literary reputation during his lifetime, and also brought him to court —when the work was first published, he was accused of "defiling customs and desecrating religion" (and finally acquitted). The process of writing this novel is as painful as ever in the Style of Flaubert, "When I wrote this book, I was like a person with a lead ball tied to the knuckles of his fingers playing the piano". And when it was finished, Flaubert said to his friends, "Emma (i.e., Madame Bovary), is me," which of course shows a certain preference; likewise, he indignantly stated that he would buy all the Madame Bovary on the market at any cost, "I will burn them all, and I will never hear them again." ”
Gustave Flaubert (12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880)
He wrote "Madame Bovary" under the subtitle "Provincial Customs", which implies the idea of his literary works as "a mirror reflecting the reality of society", and "Madame Bovary" does reflect a certain factor of the times, as Flaubert said, "My poor Madame Bovary is suffering and weeping in twenty villages in France at the same time"; but in the same way, the fatal temptation of the nowhere romantic fantasy embodied in Madame Bovary, or the sorrow of silent love that is devoid of communication, Not far from the passage of time, this, together with Flaubert's exemplary language, constitutes the immortal artistic charm of Madame Bovary.
"Madame Bovary", Translated by Xu Yuanchong, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, June 2021 edition
What is happiness without reality?
The protagonist of the book is Emma, who after marriage is "Madame Bovary", she is a peasant daughter of a province, but she reads a lot of romantic novels, so for love, there are many romantic legendary fantasies, and the wind, woods, and knights in those literary works constitute all her imagination of love. The whole book also takes her love as the main line, and she mistakenly believes that she has entered "love" again and again, and she has been disappointed again and again. Especially after marrying Mune's honest Bovary, she could not see a trace of the romantic love described in the book in Bovary, and the more disappointed she was in reality, the more she pinned her hopes in those illusory romantic imaginations, she thought, "Without reality, the vastness is the vast area of happiness and enthusiasm." However, in the context of the time, because she was already married as a woman, she could only face the hopeless reality that romantic love either stayed only in fantasy or had to betray etiquette.
After getting married, she had three "loves." Initially, she and the young Man Leon are interested in each other, but she controls herself and escapes possible betrayal, the young man leaves with hopeless thoughts, and she also falls into a long period of sadness. The second time, the veteran of the love scene, Rodolfo, regarded her as a plaything from the beginning, and his superb love trick soon gave Emma a carefully constructed dream of love, but once this illusion touched reality, it shattered, and when the shrewd Rodolphre considered money and fame, he would not hesitate to abandon Emma, as planned at the beginning, and Emma fell into boundless despair. The last time she met young Leon, she was no longer cautious and restrained, "not so much his mistress as he became her mistress", and her life became "a series of lies", she spent lavishly in order to meet her lover; at the same time, she was deceived by the adulterer, and she mortgaged her husband's family property. When she was cornered, the lover was hopeless, and he would only flee cowardly—he was just a twenty-something child; Emma had her tragic end.
How to understand Emma's love? Some say she was blinded by romantic hallucinations, flawed in character, and hurt the people who loved her; others said it was an awakening of personality consciousness, a critique of lifeless reality. The former is too harsh, but the latter seems to fall into another kind of dream. "Romantic love" must enter life in order to get rid of illusions, why does Emma not know? She also wanted to know, "The words joy, enthusiasm and fascination, which she had read in books before, and she thought they were so beautiful, how should she understand them correctly in life?" "It's just that her situation is limited, the price is too high, the Rodolphs are wandering, the danger is small, and she feels the shackles of identity attached to her at all stages of her life. She has not really experienced love, she fell into the cage of marriage, after which everything is like walking a tightrope, if you do not pay attention, it is a bottomless abyss; and she meets some men who say the words of "love" and only have material desires and calculations in their hearts. Emma's "romanticism" is beautiful and not wrong, except that "romance" is not an illusion only in real situations; yet she does not have such conditions, and reality is so sinister. She harbors a "romantic fantasy" with nowhere to stay, and in the end she can only have a dream without an end, and live such a life that cannot be self-realized and self-completed.
The 2014 French remake of "Gemma Bovery" sets the story in the present
Quietly, but "love after all"
Emma's husband is a wooden man, but the beginning and end of the story are all him, and he is silent and taciturn, but he is the background of the story that cannot be ignored. Just as "husband" and "wife" always appear in pairs, this dull Charlie is also like the opposite of Emma. He was unpopular as a child, a life of conformity, he did not understand what "romantic" love is, nor did he know how to express his love or pain, he knew how to survive, how to bear, but did not know how to make life more "beautiful". Emma is like a cloud floating in the sky, and he always walks in the ground, he occasionally raises his head, and the cloud will fall on his heart, but it is always two worlds apart.
Flaubert wrote about the birth of his love in a large paragraph, which is really too beautiful and too freehand, just like Charlie's secret heart, and he does not know how to say:
"On the days of going to the granary, he got up early, rode on the cattle, and ran on it; then dismounted, wiped his feet clean in the grass, and put on black gloves before going in. When he saw himself coming to the yard, he felt that the fence door was turning with his shoulders, the rooster was crying on the wall, and the young men came to greet him, and he rejoiced. He loved the warehouse and the stables; he loved Papa Luo patting him on the shoulder and calling him a savior; he loved Miss Emma's little wooden slip-on shoes and stepping on the washed slate floor of the kitchen; her high heel raised her a little higher, and she walked in front, the wooden bottom rising rapidly, pulling the skin of the woman's boots, crunching.
She sent him forever to the first steps. If the horse hadn't been brought in, she would have stayed here. Having said it again, they would no longer speak; the wind would catch her, blowing the short hair of the newborn on the back of her neck, or blowing up the straps of the apron on her hips, like a small flag, rolling around. ”
But he could not realize Emma's imagination of romance, he was industrious and capable, but he could not ride horses, hunt, and sing newly written romantic verses under the window of a noble lady; he loved deeply, but he did not know how to speak; he felt the unhappiness of his wife, but he did not know why. Love is an ability that needs to be cultivated, but he doesn't know it, he learned how to heal the sick and save people, but he can't understand how to express his heart. So she hated him more and more, but he was unconscious, and he silently loved Emma in his own way, but she did not appreciate it. They all had troubles, but they couldn't communicate, they were in the same room, but they seemed to be far away, "so they quietly stopped, you looked at me, I looked at you, and because they thought of each other, they suddenly found that there were people around them, and they were almost stunned."
After Emma's death, he discovered her "betrayal" of him, and he also drank with Rodolph, "He really wanted to be Rodolphus", but he said "I am not mad at you", he said "wrong is fate". This statement, which the author has satirized as "the only great word he has ever said in his life", immediately reminds people of Rodolphus's rhetoric when he abandoned Emma: "Resentment can only complain about life", and for Rodolphe himself, "the word fate always moves people". Because he had a good life, Emma and Charlie only had a tragic life.
Charlie's fate appropriately complements another aspect of poetic "romantic love" and makes Emma's story more rich and profound, letting us know that there is not only the sky, but also the ground. The "romantic love" shaped by the romantic literature of the times has created a model of love, and this model has also created the good life of some people and the tragic life of some people. Emma has been deceived by illusory romantic love all her life, and she is not in a position to explore the "romantic love" in real life; Charlie may have been excluded from the standard "romance" in the first place; and the Rodolphs, with all kinds of luck, may not take "romance" seriously, but are very good at creating "romance", he is very good at creating "romance", he is like a fish.
In the city of Truville, in the Province of Calvados, France, the statue of Flaubert is located in the Marina of La Tux
epilogue
"Madame Bovary" caused a sensation after its release, and even produced a new word "Madame Bovary syndrome" to describe the kind of person who fell into romantic fantasies; a few years ago, the foreign version of the Chinese movie "I Am Not Pan Jinlian" was translated back, that is, "I am not Madame Bovary". Madame Bovary did not go away, and still "suffered and wept at the same time in twenty French villages (perhaps more extensively)." Re-reading Madame Bovary today, we can still gain many enlightenments from it, such as how not to fall into that romantic fantasy; how to escape the eternal cage of subjectivity, so that it is possible for people to reach or transcend understanding. We are still becoming "Madame Bovary", and there is still endless charm in the pursuit of "romance", but fortunately we still have more conditions and luck, we can surpass Emma and Charlie, and do not envy Rodolfo, and really look for a kind of "romance" in the situation.