Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, at great length, has died. With marked delectation Flaubert caused her to suffer all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning (and for good measure several torments that probably belonged to other people). Her tongue lolls, her eyes bug, she turns blue and then verminous soon after she expires. The method he chose to cause her death has as little dignity as can be arranged.
Of course she has gotten herself in a terrible fix. She is petulant at being put off by her lover Leon after he is unavoidably delayed, and she ends her standing weekly plowing but then rushes to him when she finds that the notes she signed on loans for frivolities have come due. She seductively suggests he rob his employer. She has already robbed her own husband of his ancestral land- mortgaging it without telling him- and wasted the money that this produced. Leon humors her, but she soon realizes that he will not give her the money she needs. Desperately she tries to prostitute herself, in different ways. Initially she refuses to put out. She is selling only pity, and when she is misunderstood, she stalks off in a huff.  Then, upon reconsidering her position she offers her body and is rebuffed. Finally she returns to Rudolfe to redeem the deposits of true and deep feeling she assumed were banked within him. She is offering to renew a fervid romantic feeling, that had previously been concocted to facilitate a sexual relationship. She is again rebuffed and in her fury denigrates her former lover, criticizing his taste for opulent knick-knacks (which is what she needs the money herself for) and flees to the shop of Homais, (above) the pharmacist. She prevaricates and wheedles and flirts with her big black eyes on the pharmacist's assistant, a callow boy, and when she gets the door to the laboratory opened she grabs the jar of arsenic,  sticks a greedy finger in and slurps it off, as willful and  repellent a child as ever.
Flaubert grudged compliments about her appearance, one must attribute her attractions to the natural draw of the indefinable and the (nominally) unattainable. Her eyes are of indeterminate color, her figure is passable, but heavily swathed-  in death he makes her an unsure clay, opening holes, spilling black fluid. 

In effect, by eagerly killing herself, she is signing additional notes to delay being punished for the previous notes she had signed for loans on the fancy goods which were beyond her means. God (if there is one, Flaubert doesn't say) will collect. It is, in some ways, her own terms.

But Madame Bovary taking her fate in her own hands is not a feminist act. Flaubert finds nothing noble in her clumsy attempts at free will. Her story reads like a fable in which a creature born without its sexes' predispositions and bereft of the conditioning influences of culture and family must decide what it is to be regarded as within society and how to best become it. So the creature lumbers through situations, some of its own making, some inspired by it being the only viable object in proximity to men bored with their lives and diverting themselves with a seduction. The thing called Madame Bovary is alternately conniving and connived against. It appears ingenuous. Its hold on its own identity is tenuous and most marked by contingency. It is the third Madame Bovary, after the Widow Deluc and Charles' mother, and none of the three flourish in the role.  It uses romance novels as catechisms and catechisms as romance novels. It is incapable of receiving grace though it is in abundant supply- then when it is sought, it becomes too vulgar and inconvenient to bother with. Exercises of the will or renunciations of it are its main occupation and amusement, though it doesn't really desire the goal, nor comprehend the real effects of its actions. It is by turns melodramatic and frail- a buffeted wisp to the powerful influences of life: girlish, mannish, nunnish. It is indifferent to the sight of blood or its husband's and daughter's anguished needs for love, but strives to appear a being of highly refined sensibilities. At times Madame attempts to embody the stoic sufferer, and at times she allows herself to become a violently slobbering mess. Madame finds the little girl she gives birth to ugly and a nuisance, but crushes it to her with saccharine pleas of love when she feels that an exhibition of something conventional is all that tethers her to reality.

In the third part when her punishment rushes towards her, the novel takes flight, and she seems to flee and re-cross her own paths like a panicked, cornered bug.

The avid, clawing, rotten horror that is Madame Flaubert only increases the joy of knowing her.
When Charles' father dies:
She began to eat heartily while Charles remained motionless looking stunned with grief.
He would occasionally lift his head and look at her mournfully, lingeringly. Once he sighed, "If only I had seen him once again".
"How old was your father?"
"Fifty-eight."
"Ah."  And that was all.
Fifteen minutes later he added, "My poor mother. What's to become of her now?"
She shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of ignorance.

I also enjoyed the exit from the church when she and Leon are being chased by the verger who shouts, "At least go out through the north portal to see the Resurrection, The Last Judgement, Paradise, King David and The Damned In The Flames Of Hell".

Also read Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, from which the following is exerpted:

In December 1849 Flaubert and Du Camp climbed the

Great Pyramid of Cheops. They had slept beside it the

previous night, and rose at five to make sure of reaching

the top by sunrise. Gustave washed his face in a canvas

pail; a jackal howled; he smoked a pipe. Then, with two

Arabs pushing him and two pulling, he was bundled

slowly up the high stones of the Pyramid to the summit.

Du Camp-"-the first man to photograph the Sphinx-

was there already. Ahead of them lay the Nile, bathed

in mist, like a white sea; behind them lay the dark desert,

like a petrified purple owan. At last, a streak of orange

light appeared to the east; and gradually the white sea in

front of them became an immense expanse of fertile

green, while the purple ocean behind turned shimmering

white. The  sun lit up the topmost stones of the

Pyramid, and Flaubert, looking down at his feet, noticed

a small business-card pinned in place. ‘Humbert, Fret-

teur’, it read, and gave a Rouen address. »

-What "a moment of perfectly targeted irony. A mod-

ernist moment, too: this is the sort of exchange, in which

the everyday tampers with the sublime, that we like to

think of proprietorially as typical of our own wry and

unfoolable age. We thank Flaubert for picking it up;»in

a sense, the irony wasn’t there until he observed it. Other

visitors might have seen the business-card as merely a

piece of litter--it could have stayed there, its drawing-

pins slowly rusting, for years; but Flaubert gave it func-

tion. *

 And if we are feeling interpretative, we can look fur-

ther into this brief event. Isn't it, perhaps, a notable

historical coincidence that the greatest European novelist

of the nineteenth century should be introduced at the

Pyramids to one of the twentieth century's most notorious

fictional characters? That Flaubert, still damp from skew-

ering boys in Cairo bath-houses, should fall on the name

of Nabokov’s seducer of underage American girlhood?

And further, what is the profession of this single-ba-

relled version of Humbert Humbert? He is a frotteur.

Literally, a French polisher; but also, the sort of sexual

deviant who loves the rub of the crowd.

And that’s not all. Now for the irony about the irony.

It tums out, from Flaubert’s travel notes, that the busi-

ness-card wasn’t pinned in place by Monsieur Frotteur

himself, it was put there by the lithe and thoughtful

Maxime-du Camp, who had scampered ahead in the

purple night and laid ‘out this little mousetrap for his

friend’s sensibility. The balance of our response shifts

with this knowledge: Flaubert becomes plodding and pre-

dictable; Du Camp becomes the wit, the dandy, the teaser

of modernism before modernism has declared itself.

But then we read on again. If we turn to Flaubert’s

letters, we discover him, some days after the incident,

writing to his mother about the sublime surprise of the

discovery. ‘And to think that l had specially brought that

card all the way from Croisset and didn’t even get to put

it in place! The villain took advantage of my forgetfulness

and discovered the wonderfully apposite business-card

in the bottom of my folding hat.’ 






and Nabokov's lecture on Madame Bovary in Lectures on Literature, from which he give this chronological perspective:

The reign of Louis Philippe, the citizen king (le roi bourgeois), from 1830 

to 1848, was a pleasantly dingy era in comparison to Napoleon's fireworks 

in the beginning of the century and to our own variegated times. In the 

1840s "the annals of France were tranquil under the cold administration of 

Guizot." But "1847 opened with gloomy aspects for the French 

Government: irritation, want, the desire for a more popular and perhaps 

more brilliant rule. . Trickery and subterfuge seemed to reign in high 

places." A revolution broke out in February 1848. Louis Philippe, 

"assuming the name of Mr. William Smith, closed an inglorious reign by an 

inglorious flight in a hackney cab" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, 

1879). I have mentioned this bit of history because good Louis Philippe 

with his cab and umbrella was such a Flaubertian character. Now another 

character, Charles Bovary, was born according to my computations in 1815; . 

entered school in 1828; became an "officer of health" (which is one degree 

below doctor) in 1835; married his first wife, the widow Dubuc, in the same 

year, at Tostes, where he started practicing medicine. After losing her, he 

married Emma Rouault (the heroine of the book) in 1838; moved to 

another town, Yonville, in 1840; and after losing his second wife in 1846, 

he died in 1847, aged thirty-two. 

This is the chronology of the book in a capsule.