Madame Bovary Readalong - crinolines, carriages and lovers this way, 1 October

[StColumbofNavron]

Following the successful Anna Karenina readalong (almost coming to a close), Emma Bovary has come up in conversation as a comparison piece. You don't need to have read Anna Karenina though to join in.

We start on 1 October, mark your spot.

The goal is to read one chapter per day. There are three parts, 35 chapters and we'll take a day break between each part. It is fine to post as we go along but no further than the chapter for that day.

I have opted for the Aveling Marx translation (Wordsworth Classics) as that is what is on my shelf, however, more on translations below.

https://welovetranslations.com/2022/04/08/whats-the-best-translation-of-madame-bovary-part-1/
https://welovetranslations.com/2022/04/08/whats-the-best-translation-of-madame-bovary-part-2/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/21/translating-madame-bovary-adam-thorpe

Part 1
1 01-Oct
2 02-Oct
3 03-Oct
4 04-Oct
5 05-Oct
6 06-Oct
7 07-Oct
8 08-Oct
9 09-Oct

BREAK 10-Oct

Part 2
1 11-Oct
2 12-Oct
3 13-Oct
4 14-Oct
5 15-Oct
6 16-Oct
7 17-Oct
8 18-Oct
9 19-Oct
10 20-Oct
11 21-Oct
12 22-Oct
13 23-Oct
14 24-Oct
15 25-Oct

BREAK 26-Oct

Part 3 27-Oct
1 28-Oct
2 29-Oct
3 30-Oct
4 31-Oct
5 01-Nov
6 02-Nov
7 03-Nov
8 04-Nov
9 05-Nov
10 06-Nov
11 07-Nov

I've been mulling over your question, Cornishlizard. It's too early to talk about her character, but at the end of the book I felt sympathy for her. She is not a likeable person, however, in my opinion.

Thank you Fuzzy, intrigued, I shall wait and see.

Part One, Chapter 7

• Emma wonders if these "honeymoon days" (I.7.1) are really the best days of her life. She starts to feel cheated, as though Charles has deprived her of the clichéd, romantic fantasies she cooks up. She’s sure that she would be happier if only she was somewhere else…preferably with someone else…
• Emma wants to reveal these feelings of discontent to somebody, and wishes Charles could be a little more sensitive. Day by day he just grows less and less interesting to her, and she is consistently disappointed in the man she married. She believes that men should know everything and be able to do anything – Charles, however, is just an average guy.
• Emma attempts to express her turbulent feelings through drawing and music; Charles loves to watch her, and the people of the village are impressed by her accomplishments.
• Speaking of which, Emma turns out to actually be a pretty capable wife when she tries. She knows how to take care of the house and of Charles’s business, and this makes the village respect the doctor and his young wife even more.
• Charles is also extremely impressed himself for having such a terrific wife. In his view, everything is just peachy keen. As far as we can tell, he’s a really simple creature, with very few desires and no ambition at all. He’s stingy and kind of oafish, but is generally still the same old predictable Charles – the kind of nice guy that finishes last.
• Charles’s mom approves of her son’s ways wholeheartedly, but she’s skeptical of her daughter-in-law. She’s worried that Emma wastes too much money, and every time she visits (which seems to occur pretty frequently), the two women harass each other relentlessly. This springs largely from Mom’s anxieties about Charles’s love for Emma – she’s no longer the favorite, now that Wife #2 is in the picture.
• Charles is caught in the crossfire between the two loves of his life. He can’t believe that his mother could ever be wrong, but he also can’t believe that Emma ever makes any mistakes. It’s a confusing time for him; mostly, he just bumbles about, which doesn’t help.
• Emma decides to at least attempt to "experience love" (I.7.13). She sings songs and recites poetry to Charles, but it doesn’t accomplish anything.
• That’s it. Emma is certain she doesn’t love Charles, and furthermore, that she’s incapable of loving him. She’s way, way bored with her life on the whole.
• One of the great constants in life is the fact that Puppies Are Awesome. Emma receives a little greyhound pup as a gift from one of Charles’s patients, and for a while, the awesomeness of the puppy actually makes her feel a wee bit better. She names the dog Djali and tells her about the troubles of married life. You may not have realized it, but dog is woman’s best friend, too.
• Emma is certain she could have married someone different – and better – given the chance. She wonders about her former classmates from the convent school, and is sure that they have better husbands than she does. Her former life seems painfully far away.
• Just when it seems like nothing will ever happen for Emma, an invitation arrives: she and Charles are invited to a party at the home of a local big-shot, the Marquis d’Andervilliers. The Marquis, a former patient of Charles’s, was impressed by Emma’s elegance.
• The chapter ends as the couple arrives at the Marquis’ château.

@EmmaOvary wow, fantastic! It's a small world! Did you study Flaubert with her?

I'm keen to take part in the discussion of Emma's character but work is Too Much and I have already fallen several chapters behind. I'm hoping to catch up tonight or tomorrow.

I did finally get my English translation, so that's good. Image attached! It's a nice paperback, but I feel the little blurb that says 'Winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize' is rather misleading, because Lydia Davis won the prize for Proust, not for Madame Bovary! But never mind. It looks like a very readable translation.

I’ve just started, so am catching up and have ended up with a Penguin Kindle edition, as well as my Marx translation.

I'm reading the Lydia Davis translation and I think it's good. It flows well. Some American words pop up occasionally.

I googled the Marx-Aveling translation and found the Wikipedia entry on Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Wow. She was the daughter of Karl Marx and very active in socialist politics. And she did the first ever translation of Madame Bovary into English, in 1886. How cool is that?!

When her partner was unfaithful to her, she committed suicide by poison at age 43. 😢😮

Ah, I'm glad you recommend it, Fuzzy.

I’m all caught up. I do like Charles and feel a bit sorry for him. I do think Flaubert (or the translator) has a wonderful way with words, so much biting humour and satire.

‘She was dead. How astonishing!’

‘Charles’s conversation was as flat as any pavement.’

There is a good book about Eleanor Marx.

I have got the Vintage edition which was recommended as being the least American sounding of the modern translations. It does read well.

Part One, Chapter 8

• The château is everything Emma could have dreamt of. It’s gorgeous and extravagantly beautiful. Emma is profoundly impressed by the whole thing and notices every detail.
• At dinner, Emma sees that many of the ladies take wine at dinner (putting one’s glove in one’s wineglass means "No thanks," and in the circles Emma grew up in, women just don’t drink).
• Emma is fascinated by an old, unattractive man, the Duc de Laverdière; rumor has it that he had been Marie Antoinette’s lover.
• Emma gets her first taste of champagne, pomegranates, and pineapple. Everything here seems better than it is at home. We get the feeling that she finally feels she’s getting what she deserves.
• Getting dressed for the ball, Emma and Charles have a little spat. Charles wants to dance, but Emma claims it’s ridiculous, saying that people will laugh at him.
• On this night, Emma looks better than ever. Charles, taken with her beauty, attempts to kiss her, but she just shoos him away.
• The ball is like one of Emma’s romantic daydreams. It’s filled with beautiful women in gorgeous dresses and jewels, and – to Emma’s excitement – with beautiful men, too. Everything about these gorgeous guys radiates wealth, from their clear, white complexions to their well-cut clothes.
• Emma and Charles are clearly in a brand new world. Emma sees some peasants looking in through the windows, and is reminded of her former life on the farm at Les Bertaux. These new visions of luxury and beauty totally sweep her off her feet, and she begins to wonder if she ever really was a simple country girl.
• Emma witnesses a lady and gentleman exchange a secret love note.
• Hours into the ball, a second gourmet meal is served. After this, people start to leave. By 3am, it’s time for the last dance, a waltz. Emma dances with a man Flaubert simply calls the Viscount, despite the fact that she doesn’t really know how to waltz. She stumbles, then watches the Viscount resume the dance with another lady.
• Charles, who’s been watching (but not understanding) a game of whist at the card table all night, takes Emma up to bed, complaining all the way about his tired legs.
• Emma stays up late, looking out the window and hoping to prolong her stay in this fantastical other world. Eventually she lets herself fall asleep.
• In the morning, the remaining guests eat a quick breakfast, then walk around the château’s extensive grounds. Charles and Emma pack up their buggy, say their thank yous, and head back to Tostes.
• During the drive home, they encounter a party of riders on horseback. One of them, Emma thinks, is the Viscount. Shortly thereafter, Charles has to fix something on the buggy. While he’s outside, he finds a green silk cigar case.
• Home again, Emma is really in a foul mood. She fires the maid, Nastasie, because dinner isn’t ready on time. The word that comes to mind is "irrational."
• Charles, on the other hand, is happy to be home. He’s a little sad to see Nastasie go, since she’s gone through a lot with him, but doesn’t want to argue with his wife.
• After dinner, Charles tries to act like an aristocratic man by smoking one of the cigars he found in the silk case. Embarrassingly, he makes himself rather ill. Emma is disgusted.
• In the following days, Emma rehashes the ball over and over again in her mind. She tries to remember everything about it.

Piggy, I was tempted by the Vintage translation; it looked excellent.

Thanks too for the Eleanor Marx book rec. My DH says there's also a recent film about her.

Translation good....bookbinding not so much...

I’m not normally a fan of over-description but I really enjoyed all the detail in this chapter and could really envisage it.

Part One, Chapter 9

• When Charles is out, Emma lovingly looks at the green silk cigar case and invents stories about its origins. She imagines that an adoring mistress gave it to the Viscount – she even imagines herself in the role of the mistress.
• Paris becomes a new obsession for Emma. She jealously looks at the fishmongers’ carts on their way through the village, thinking about their journey to the capital city. She buys herself a map of Paris, and studies it endlessly, imagining herself there.
• In her passion for the metropolis, Emma attempts to cultivate herself by reading magazines about arts and culture. She learns all the details of fine Parisian life, and reads the novels of Honoré de Balzac and George Sand (two authors that wrote about Parisian society). In these books, she finds more and more similarities between the Viscount of her imagination and the characters.
• To Emma, everything seems possible in Paris, a city of languid, beautifully-dressed women and extravagant, thrilling men. Everything else fades around her, and Emma lives completely in the fantastical (rather ridiculous) world she constructs.
• Emma longs for luxurious boudoirs, lingering embraces, moonlit rendezvous. Instead, what she has is a number of awkward peasant servants in tattered clothes. To replace Nastasie, she hires a young girl, Félicité, who seems to be sweet but rusticated.
• With nothing else to do, Emma wanders around the house languidly, wearing a fancy dressing gown. Bored, lonely, and utterly discontented, she halfheartedly wishes both to die and to escape to Paris.
• Charles goes about his business, totally unaware of his wife’s unhappiness. He’s still his usual, dull self, perfectly happy and blissfully ignorant. He’s just so pleased with everything Emma does, and by her city-like airs. She attempts to create some kind of false happiness through buying things; Charles goes along with it gamely.
• Everything looks great for Charles. His reputation as a doctor established, he generally does pretty well…that is, he doesn’t kill anyone. He prescribes the same course of treatment to almost everyone: sedatives, the occasional emetic, footbath, or leeches, and on special occasions, he bleeds people or pulls teeth. He attempts to keep current with the latest medical news by subscribing to a professional journal, but it doesn’t inspire him to any thrilling feats.
• Emma is fed up with all this. She wishes Charles had more ambition and intellectual oomph. She is more and more irritated by him with every passing day. Even when she straightens his clothes in an attempt to make him look more presentable, it’s for her sake, not his.
• She continues to talk to Charles, however – her reasoning being that if she has to resort to talking to the dog, she might as well talk to her husband.
• Emma waits and waits, and grows more and more impatient with her unchanging life. She imagines a ship of dreams that will come and carry her away; unsurprisingly, it never does. Every day feels the same, and she’s sure that God has doomed her to a monotonous fate.
• Disgruntled, Emma gives up on all of her pastimes – she stops playing the piano, abandons her sketchbook, and ignores her embroidery. She falls into a deep depression, and feels profoundly alone. She even wishes she could chat with Félicité, but her pride stops her. It’s not just Emma’s life that’s dull and unchanging; she observes the townspeople doing the same boring things day after day. We get the feeling that Emma’s not the only person who’s unenthused about provincial life.
• A wandering peddler of some kind comes around on occasions, bringing with him a hurdy-gurdy (a kind of big music box). Emma listens to the waltzes and thinks of her brush with greatness at the ball.
• Meals are the worst. Emma feels as though she can’t bear it any longer, as she regards the gross-sounding meals and watches her bovine husband slowly chew his cud.
• By the springtime, Emma has given up on everything, including taking care of the house. She doesn’t even make the effort to maintain her personal appearance. Her mother-in-law arrives for a visit before Easter, and is shocked by the change; she’s taken aback, and can’t even muster up a critical comment. Emma actually succeeds in cowing the old Madame Bovary.
• Emma starts to exhibit some kooky behavior. She goes on weird diets, has violent mood swings, and is totally unpredictable.
• At the end of February, Monsieur Rouault comes for a visit and brings a huge turkey to Emma and Charles at Tostes to celebrate the anniversary of his broken leg (nice and weird, we know). Emma spends most of the visit with him, and is surprisingly glad to see him go. He reminds her of her hick background, something for which she has a great amount of contempt.
• Actually, she’s contemptuous of pretty much everyone and everything at this point, so much so that Charles is shocked by her behavior.
• All of this takes a toll on Emma’s health, and Charles gets worried about her frailty. He prescribes some rather useless cures, and it makes her seem worse than ever. She demonstrates what we might call manic-depressive symptoms around this time.
• Emma complains and complains about Tostes, and Charles realizes that something about the town is making her unhappy. He ponders moving the little family elsewhere.
• Oddly, Emma starts drinking vinegar to lose weight (the nineteenth century equivalent of SlimFast?). One of Charles’s old teachers diagnoses her with a so-called "nervous malady" (I.9.41), and it’s decided that they’ll move away.
• Charles finds a slightly larger town called Yonville-l’Abbaye that needs a doctor, and decides to move by spring if Emma stays ill.
• While preparing for the big move, Emma discovers her bridal bouquet in a drawer. While this might be a sentimental moment for some other women, she is disgusted, and throws it on the fire.
• What else could Emma and Charles possibly need in their complicated lives? You got it: a baby. By the time they move away in March, Emma is definitely pregnant. You can bet her mood swings aren’t getting any better.

I agree, StColumb, that was a magnificent description. I'm not one for big parties myself, and I fear that I (or at least current middle-aged me) would have been dozing off against the wall like Charles, and breathing a big sigh of relief once home! I'd rather read about it than be there, ha.

Can't believe we've finished Part One already. I'm almost caught up, but haven't read Ch. 9 yet. At least tomorrow is a 'break' day.

I really loved the chapter about young Emma and her reading and daydreaming; I definitely identified with her to some extent there. My thoughts about Emma so far: yes, she's a bit shallow and self-centred, but she also seems very young. Charles may be a good man, but he's boring. I would hate to be married to someone boring. And the spark of sexual attraction clearly isn't there on her side, even though she wants to make it happen.

She also seems quite lonely. Like Anna Karenina, she lacks women friends. I think part of the reason she is nourishing her life in fantasies is because she finds so little to interest her in the now.

Being grateful for the present moment isn't easy (I find it hard), and it's harder when you're young and immature and isolated. But her fantasies are making her even more discontent with her real-life state, so it's kind of a vicious circle.

Yes, I agree with all that, cassandre.
I wonder too if her education was lacking. It seemed very narrowly focused on religion in the hope that she might enter the novitiate. Or was Emma a day dreamer and preferred to live in her fantasies. It's hard to say.

I must catch up on the big party later on.

Thanks for the summaries and insightful comments. I’ve just finished chapter 9 which I felt read like a modern take on bipolar. I’m already feeling a more complex response to Emma than my earlier straightforward irritation.

But what’s with all the italics? Were they a new invention?

I was thinking similarities with bipolar disorder at times too in that chapter. I came into this expecting to dislike Emma but agree it's complex.

Do you find you keep reading it in your heading an italics voice??

Or in your head in...

I don’t think I have one yet… should I go for arch or simpering?

Lol at Piggy and Cornish😄 * *

Part 2, Chapter 1

• Welcome to Emma and Charles’s new home! Yonville-l’Abbaye, their new town, is a small step up from Tostes. It’s a market town in the Neufchâtel region of France, not too far from Rouen (the closest city). The town is bordered by farmland, and it actually sounds fairly attractive. Flaubert, ever the party pooper, describes it as "characterless," and claims that it makes the worst Neufchâtel cheese in the whole district (II.I.4).
• Despite new improvements in roads and trade routes, Yonville is still really slow and old-fashioned. We can already tell that this doesn’t bode well for Emma.
• The actual town is pretty simple; it has a nice house or two, a church and graveyard, some brandy distilleries and cider presses, and an inn. Most notably, it’s also home to a very peculiar building: Monsieur Homais’ Pharmacy. It sounds like a pretty exciting place, covered in signs advertising the pharmacist’s products.
• Apparently that’s all there is to see in Yonville. Our sense of dread increases. Emma is so not going to like this…
• The church’s caretaker (also the town gravedigger), Lestiboudois, is in the practice of planting crops right up to the cemetery, a rather sketchy thing, if you ask us. The priest claims half-jokingly that he’s "feeding on the dead" (II.1.13) – creepy!
• All in all, we get the picture – nothing ever changes in Yonville. It’s not exactly the booming metropolis Emma dreams of.
• On the day of the Bovary’s arrival, the innkeeper, Madame Lefrançois, is busy preparing everything for the coming week. She’s all in a tizzy because she’s got a lot of food to prepare, both for her regular boarders, and for Charles and Emma. As she’s in the midst of preparations, Monsieur Homais (the pharmacist) pays her a little visit. He immediately appears to be quite an arrogant guy.
• Monsieur Homais and Madame Lefrançois have a somewhat aggressive conversation. They chat about town affairs, including a rival bar, and about the inn’s boarders. Among them are an oddly dull man named Binet (the town tax collector) and some young man called Léon.
• Binet enters on cue, ready for his dinner. He seems like a normal guy, but is really, really boring. Monsieur Homais obviously isn’t a huge fan.
• The town priest stops by to pick up his umbrella. He and Monsieur Homais clearly have some kind of antagonistic relationship (does this guy actually get along with anyone?), since Homais bursts out in a big anti-clerical rant after he leaves. Homais clearly regards himself as quite an intellectual. He’s immoderately proud of himself.
• Finally, the Hirondelle (a kind of big, ugly, inexplicably yellow stagecoach) pulls up with the Bovarys inside. The driver, Hivert, is immediately besieged by questions from the townspeople (along with driving the coach, he runs errands for people in Rouen).
• Hivert explains the Hirondelle’s tardiness: Emma’s beloved greyhound, Djali, ran away and they had to stop to look for her. She was nowhere to be found. A local merchant, Monsieur Lheureux, who was along for the ride, attempts to console Emma by telling her that Djali will find her way home.