Madame Bovary

Gustav Flaubert

No matter: she wasn’t happy, and never had been. Why was life so unsatisfactory? Why did everything she leaned on crumble instantly to dust? But why, if somewhere there existed a strong and handsome being—a man of valor, sublime in passion and refinement, with a poet’s heart and an angel’s shape, a man like a lyre with strings of bronze, intoning elegiac epithalamiums to the heavens—why mightn’t she have the luck to meet him? Ah, fine chance! Besides nothing was worth looking for: everything was a lie! Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse; every pleasure, its own surfeit; and the sweetest of kisses left on one’s lips but a vain longing for fuller delight.

There isn’t a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn’t thought himself capable of boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of every notary’s heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.

If a man were to rewrite Don Quixote, and this man were French and alive some 500 years later, he probably would have come up with something very much like Madame Bovary. Eyes that are always seeing a dreamworld, hearts which are always grasping after the only thing which is truly unattainable--unattainability itself: this is the stuff which composes both novels.
I'm tempted to start some sermon-like thing about never being content and the modern disease--something that would go on for paragraphs about always wanting what we do not have only because it has the magical property of not being ours. But I am not sure I wouldn't be indulging in a little of the thing I'm criticizing.
If you like a story which is mostly depressing, Madame Bovary is the thing for you. There surely is not much to redeem any of the characters, save perhaps the hope of the blind man who Flaubert describes with such clinical relish. The story begins with such happiness, maybe even joy, but it does not take one long to realize that the beginning was the high point--from here on out it's a downward spiral.
As you read about the adulterous Madame Bovary's slide into complete betrayal of her husband and child, you will be surprised by very little--only if you step back and think will you notice how terrifyingly smooth is her slide. She moves from pleasant young wife to seasoned woman of the world to suicidal slut without some violent action or dramatic event shaking her off her placid course. It is as simple as being alive.
I wonder if Flaubert shouldn't have ended with some warning such as: Beware! This could be you! But at the same time, the novel is about much more than that. Though I neglected him above, I wonder if Charles Bovary is not a very hopeful character indeed. Sure his life is ruined, he is cuckolded, betrayed, bankrupted, broken, driven to madness, and finally killed by his wife, but how wonderfully he deals with it all. Most of the time he is oblivious--and though it may seem this way, it is not because of a lack of love. He loves his wife to a fault; he loves her as a goddess rather than a human, but his love is entirely human. His adoration of her while she lives, his sorrow while she dies, his anger when he finds she has betrayed him--these are all passions any heart is capable of, although most characters in novels fail to embody them.