Madam Bovary and the Fear of Being Ordinary

*James Tissot, Young Lady in A Boat, 1870.*

In 2001, Stephanie Meyer published the first novel in the Twilight series. The plot — if you did not participate in the sweeping drama— follows a young girl, Bella, who moves to Forks, Washington and falls in love with a vampire, Edward. How does a teenage vampire romance relate to 19th-century French literature? The link lies in the world view of their characters. In Twilight, Bella is a fundamentally ordinary girl. In fact, she is so plain and ordinary that many have been led to question why Edward — her opposite in that he is special — would fall in love with such an unexceptional girl.

Today, this is a popular plot in romance novels: the exceptional man falling in love with the exceptionally ordinary woman. We have created the “ordinary girl syndrome” (my term) in which normal, ordinary people expect exceptional people to fall in love with them, simply because they are ordinary. Despite offering nothing unique, these characters suggest some unspoken, unidentified (and nonexistent) promise that they are somehow “not like everyone else,” regardless of being, in fact, just like everyone else.

Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary represents the pinnacle of the “ordinary girl syndrome.” The novel follows an unexceptional woman — perhaps exceptional only in her profound delusion of thinking she is exceptional — and her disappointment and resentment when she discovers that she is destined to live an ordinary life. Madame Bovary gives voice to our deepest fears of being ordinary and shows the consequences of allowing imagination and expectation to invade and dictate our reality.

*Auguste Renoir, A Road in Louveciennes, 1870.*

The Fall of Idols

Emma Bovary’s delusions begin at a young age. Raised by her father and sent to a convent for her education, Emma cultivates dreams about her future life, filled with fantastic adventures. Partly contributing to these dreams are her novels, which she reads voraciously while in the convent. It is no surprise that she dreams up such a life for herself, as within them,

“Couriers were killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page; there were gloomy forests, broken hearts, vows, sobs, tears, and kisses, skiffs in the moonlight, nightingales in thickets; the noblemen were all brave as lions, gentle as lambs, incredibly virtuous, always beautifully dressed, and wept copiously on every occasion.”

The action is constant, the emotions are endless. These fictional worlds create expectations for Emma’s life, and she cultivates the confidence that she deserves them.

The dreams are carried into her marriage with Charles Bovary. Emma anticipates marriage to be a grand adventure; however, living in 19th-century provincial France, there are limited opportunities for such a life. Nevertheless, she has high expectations for her love:

“Love, to her, was something that comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightning — a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping away every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.”

When she marries Charles and discovers that this torrent of feelings is absent, she believes that she could not truly be in love with him:

“Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words ‘bliss,’ ‘passion,’ and ‘rapture’ — words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.”

Emma mistakes novels for narratives of real life. It is the standard to which she holds all of her experiences. When Charles fails to live up to heroic adventurer and passionate lover, she condemns him with the crime of being ordinary. Where, she asks, is this extraordinary life she was promised? Rather than create this life for herself, she believes that marriage will simply provide it for her. Although she does not bring anything unique to the marriage (save for her inner delusions), she expects Charles to create an exceptional life for her. She laments,

“Wasn’t it a man’s role, though, to know everything? Shouldn’t he be expert at all kinds of things, able to initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all the mysteries? This man could teach you nothing; he knew nothing, wished for nothing. He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.”

Charles offers stability and peace; Emma yearns for thrills and adventure. She never seeks to provide this for herself, rather she searches for others to bestow this on her. When Charles fails to supply the drama she desires, Emma finds it in a string of lovers. In each man she continues the search for a lover worthy of her romance novels:

“‘I have a lover! I have a lover!’ she kept repeating to herself, reveling in the thought as though she were beginning a second puberty. At last she was going to know the joys of love, the fever of the happiness she had despaired of. She was entering a marvelous realm where all would be passion, ectasy, rapture: she was in the midst of an endless blue expanse, scaling the glittering heights of passion; everyday life had receded, and lay far below, in the shadows between those peaks.”

In adultery, she seeks excitement and passion and confuses this with love, which is steadfast and brings peace. When Emma finds herself disillusioned even in these relationships, she becomes angry and resentful, preferring to part with the men rather than parting with her ideals.

*Ivan Kramskoy, Reading Woman, c. 1866.*

Emma’s Search for Meaning

Emma’s real search is not for adventure. It is within her different identities and stories that she searches for a sense of meaning. To accomplish this, Emma forces herself into states of suffering, believing that artificially experiencing pain will imbue her with a kind of distinctiveness. While at the convent, she romanticizes suffering:

“When she went to confession she invented small sins in order to linger on her knees there in the darkness, her hands joined, her face at the grille, the priest whispering just above her.”

When her lover leaves her, Emma fashions a new, distinguishing identity:

“Among the illusions born of her hope, she glimpses a realm of purity in which she aspired to dwell … She conceived the idea of becoming a saint. She bought rosaries and festooned herself with holy medals … she was convinced that hers was the most exquisite Catholic melancholy that had ever entered an ethereal soul.”

These fantasies and identities are devised to make Emma feel special, but since they are inauthentic they always fail to provide her meaning, leaving her perpetually dissatisfied.

Ultimately, Emma does not take responsibility for her own happiness; she tries to outsource her happiness to artificial identities and other people. When they do not furnish this, she places the blame on others rather than herself. The primary criminal is Charles:

“Wasn't he the obstacle to every kind of happiness, the cause of all her wretchedness, the sharp-pointed prong of this many-stranded belt that bound her on all sides? So he became the sole object of her resentment.”

This is the essential point: she does not hate Charles, she hates herself. Not because her life is boring, but because she is boring. She tries to live through others rather than creating her own sense of meaning and worth. When others do not provide happiness or fulfillment, she searches for some sort of life change — new curtains, a new dress, a new lover — to manifest these things, without realizing that they are intangible and must come from an inner place.

Emma fails to find meaning as a wife, mother, lover or even simply as a woman — she hates her own sex, despairing when she gives birth to a daughter, rather than a son. She sees these roles as merely parts to play, identities to try on and then cast off if proved unsatisfactory:

“There were no illusions left now! She had had to part with some each time she ventured on a new path, in each of her successive conditions — as virgin, as wife, as mistress; all along the course of her life she had been losing them, like a traveler leaving a bit of his fortune in every inn along the road. But what was making her so unhappy?”

Emma never discovers the true source of her unhappiness. Her failure lies in assuming herself owed something greater. Despite being ordinary, she expects her life to be extraordinary, and when it fails to manifest, she assumes others are jeopardizing the life she was promised. She fails to understand that the only thing that could raise her above the ordinary is the creation of an authentic, individualized sense of meaning.

*J.M. Gonzalez, A Little Love Affair, 19th c.*

Out, Out Brief Candle

Emma’s death is a final irony. She contrives a romantic death, but instead her end is realistic and ugly. Her ideals come crashing down, struck by the bitter realities of life. Emma tries to manhandle life, but death deprives of her of this final exertion of her will.

Ultimately, Emma dies without any finding any meaning. Not only this, she leaves the world much worse than she found it. She has destroyed lives: Charles is heartbroken upon discovering her affairs (likely dying as a result) and her daughter is left an orphan, working in a cotton mill. Real people always came second to Emma’s delusions. Her sense of entitlement allowed her to sanction any behavior so long as it fed into her resentment.

Gustav Flaubert famously wrote “Emma Bovary c’est moi.” Although Madame Bovary does speak to a part of the human condition, I hope she is not us. Self-righteous to the end, Emma Bovary proves to be quite the literary villain. If this is humanity, it is a dark condemnation of us. We are owed nothing and promised nothing in life, save for the chance to live — not reside in fantasies. It is only through authentic living that one has the opportunity to become extraordinary.