We met Wednesday night at Liz's for a spirited discussion of Madame Bovary. We all read different translations, and if I'm not mistaken, this was the first time for all of us reading it. I had e-mailed everyone the WaPo review from last summer as well as an essay by Erica Jong that appeared recently at Salon. I particularly liked the latter; I agree that Emma Bovary was trying too hard to live a fantasy life like those that she read about in romance novels. I don't think she could ever be happy; she kept thinking that there would be some magic bullet that would rescue her from her ennui, whether it was religion, a husband, a child, a lover, or lots and lots of possessions. Nothing ever satisfied her for long. Jong quotes Mario Vargas-Llosa:
In Madame Bovary, we see the first signs of alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies (the women above all, owing to the life they are obliged to live): consumption as an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual. Emma's drama is the gap between illusion and reality, the distance between desire and its fulfillment.
None of us had much patience for Emma, nor could we say we liked her, although we recognized that there were no options available to her in mid-nineteenth- century provincial France. She couldn't just decide to go to law school or get a divorce or whatever. The only freedom she could pursue was to commit adultery. In truth, her lot in life was way better than most of her contemporaries'; she had a loving and indulgent (if boring) husband, a healthy child, a relatively high standard of living, and so on. But none of it was enough, because she could see only what she didn't have, and that was some unattainable ideal of happiness. Liz felt that she was simply suffering from clinical depression and could have benefited from a heavy dose of Paxil! She went the extra yard and also read the Flaubert biography by Geoffrey Wall, so we got to learn that he was a pretty unlikeable guy, whatever one thinks of his writing.
Next up is The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.
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