Born in 1857 from the pen of Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary is this year the heroine of the bicentenary of the birth of the writer. Romantic and tragic muse, inveterate dreamer, eternal dissatisfied, what if she looked more like us than we thought?
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In a century and a half, its notoriety has only increased. Emma Bovary, this is the first desperate housewife modern times. She perishes of boredom in her Normandy countryside, and throws herself headlong into adultery. The novel’s tour de force is not to decide: Emma is both a tragic heroine (passion and money debts lead her to suicide) and a jug!
Flaubert is not tender, the subtle irony of the writer underlines the stupidity which loses her, this dissatisfaction which will earn Emma to become a concept, ensuring her a lasting celebrity: bovarysm, meaning, roughly speaking, to have desires who go beyond his condition, let his imagination run wild, dream of a less banal life… Suffice to say that many of us suffer (or enjoy?) from bovarysm. The potential misogyny of the concept will not escape anyone, which translates the eternal “they are never happy” expressed by these gentlemen.
Towards the modern novel
Jean Oddes imagines a journey at Maison Marrou in Rouen, with sound and olfactory creations to feel close to Emma. And at the Opera, it’s a musical journey from box to box. From April 9 to November 14, at Rouen.
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Collection La Dame d’Atours / Patrick Dallanégra
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Flaubert was far from that: he who was very close to his mother never recovered from the death of his adored sister, and took loving care of his niece. It was for him to break in literature with the excesses of romanticism: it is Emma’s readings that put her at odds with the normality of her life. The stubborn realism of Flaubert (obsessed with Balzac) and the frenzied sobriety of the style are a critique of Emma’s sentimentalism and the literature of the time, and pave the way for the modern novel.
Today, Emma would find her drug in the press people, fantasizing at the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool with Brad Pitt. Suffice to say its universality, because we are all Quixote gifts (Flaubert’s bedside book) dreaming of living in a romantic work. The writer Daniel Pennac even speaks of a “textually transmissible” disease.
The photographer Éric Bénard offers us a walk among the places of nature dear to Flaubert, to be savored at the Château de Martainville from March 27 to September 26. www.chateaudemartainville.fr
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Eric Bénard
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A paradoxical icon
The novel was the subject of a lawsuit for “insulting public and religious morals and good morals”, which gave it raucous publicity. Flaubert was acquitted, while Baudelaire, the same year, was not so lucky: his Flowers of Evil were amputated of six parts, which were not rehabilitated until 1949. The enigmatic “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” by Flaubert, who contributed to the success of the heroine, undoubtedly meant that he was put in his skin, but also that he was at a loss to put an end to the splendours of the imagination.
For women today, the novel can nurture an awareness of the alienation caused by passionate love. Emma is concrete proof that women should not expect men to serve them as their destiny, but make it themselves. The stream gender fluid, who tries to get out of the masculine-feminine binary system, would rather be interested in Charles Bovary, the dominated husband, not gifted for virility, but ready to do anything for his wife, a pretty specimen of neuter. Like Mona Lisa, Emma Bovary has become an art object with multiple resonances, because she keeps the essential: its mystery.
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