The Shadow Library: Madame Bovary

I suppose Madame Bovary cannot really be technically in the Shadow Library as I never owned it. It was, instead, one of the books we read in Mrs. Hardcastle’s World Literature class when I was a junior in high school. There was a pile of them in the classroom that got passed out every day. I think (though I am not sure) that at the end of the year such books were given away to any student who wanted a copy, especially if they were not to be read the next year. I don’t think many of us were used to the concept of ‘realism’ at the time and kept trying to force Emma (or to at least judge her) into and by the bounds of a romantic hero, someone to be admired. I always found her distasteful, especially her treatment of the dull but worthy Charles Bovary. I drew a picture parody of the cover, showing a cow in that fancy dress, ‘Madame Bovine.’ I didn’t guess that Flaubert’s judgement of Emma may have been much the same as my own. But in the Seventies popular culture, especially literature, adultery and suicide were seen as almost a sacrament and a heroic choice.

‘The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things. Thus it prefigures the work of modernist novelists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce’. – Wikipedia.

“In "Madame Bovary," his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day.  "Madame Bovary" has had an incalculable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steegmuller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert's text.”