Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary is bored of her banal and unromantic married life, and proceeds to find the idealistic romance she’s always read about in books. She enters into subsequent affairs with two superficial men, both more eager to play with her than play the part in some grand and vague notion of romance, and as her cautions slip away, so does everything else in her life. The story has lost a lot of its scandalous veneer as morals loosened around the topic, yet the realism of the work is just as relevant. As one of the works that departed romanticism and moved toward realism, I appreciated how Flaubert did not moralize (given how easy it would be to moralize on the topic) and simply told the story, and the detached tone worked wonders for dry humor. It’s also chilling how accurate the psychology descriptions are: despite how inconstant, flighty, and sometimes unreasonable Emma is, I – with a completely different identity living in a different world – can relate so much to her and so can others.
Emma’s high ideals or pitiful weaknesses don’t simply represent a bourgeois state of mind, nor a feminine state of mind, but rather just a universal human state of mind. The core emotion that drives Emma is ennui, a bored lack of excitement coupled with having a heart receptive to all the high and lofty and unreachable notions. From a psychological perspective, her troubles probably came from her lack of meaningful work: her husband is a doctor while the maid takes care of housework, and she spends idle time, reading love stories, dreaming of Paris and balls and dashing men on horseback. I’m reminded of Pascal’s philosophical notes on boredom: how work is simply a vigorous exercise of human attention and effort, and without, our thoughts wander aimlessly and wander down dark halls of insatiable, fantastical delusions, meaningless grandeur, and depression. In quarantine, I felt this acutely, as without daily work to keep busy (as some days when I took breaks), the boredom would be almost unbearable, and without the hope that things will soon change it would genuinely drive anyone insane.
% grep -i "madame bovary" quotes.txt6 matches
on passion
“Why rant against the passions? Aren’t they the only beautiful thing on earth, the source of heroism, enthusiasm, poetry, music, the arts – everything, in fact?”
— (Rodolphe), Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
on novelty
“Emma was like all other mistresses, and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
on disenchantment
“His [sexual conquests], like children in a schoolyard, had so trampled his heart that nothing green now grew there, and whatever passed that way, more heedless than the children, left behind not even its name”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
on inexpressibility
“None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a crooked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
on speech
“Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one’s emotions”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
on disillusionment
“She thought back to summer evenings flooded with sunlight… How happy those days had been! How free! How full of hope! How rich in illusions! There were none left now. She had spent them in all the different adventures of her soul, in all those successive stages she had gone through, in her virginity, her marriage, and her love – losing them continuously as her life went on, like a traveler who leaves some part of his wealth at every inn along the road”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary