{"id":5192,"date":"2016-01-19T08:30:16","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T13:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5192"},"modified":"2016-01-19T08:58:10","modified_gmt":"2016-01-19T13:58:10","slug":"madame-bovary-provincial-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5192","title":{"rendered":"***Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Madame

(graphic: wikimedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m envious of the women in my book group who are native French speakers and able to read Gustave Flaubert\u2019s classic <\/a>in its original language. I read the 2010 English translation by noted American short story writer and essayist Lydia Davis<\/a>, one of the 19 produced since the book\u2019s 1856 publication. Her intent, she has said, was \u201cto do what I think hasn\u2019t been done, which is to create a well-written translation that\u2019s also very close, very faithful to the French.\u201d Here is a Julian Barnes essay<\/a> comparing notable translations, including Davis\u2019s, across the generations. If you want to read Madame Bovary<\/em>, I suggest at least skimming Barnes\u2019s essay to\u00a0 find a translation suited to your reading preferences.<\/p>\n

The novel is a period piece, set in a particular, rather dreary locale, and not all periods and settings wear as well in terms of interest over 160 years. When Madame Bovary<\/em> was published, the government said the novel was a danger to morality and religion and put Flaubert and his publisher on trial, though they were acquitted. However, in general, \u201cprovincial French woman has affairs with doltish men\u201d is no longer a riveting or scandalous storyline, and \u201cspends more than she should\u201d is the modern way of life. Likewise, the beliefs and foibles Flaubert pokes fun at (conventional and bourgeois views, including religion, chief among them) are of varying relevance today. In an Introduction Davis quotes Nabokov\u2019s view that, in Madame Bovary<\/em>, \u201cthe ironic and the pathetic are beautifully intertwined,\u201d and it is those sly revelations about society and how people move in it, rather than plot, that give the modern reader the greatest satisfaction.<\/p>\n

Reader tastes have changed not just with regard to content, but regarding style, too, and a book about that same period written today would be very different from Flaubert\u2019s approach. One consequence of what now seems a rather disordered style is that Madame\u2019s character never quite came into focus for me. She is motivated by the ill-considered whims of a moment, a pliant object for the men around her, and rarely self-actuated until of course the end. It turns out, as Barnes notes in his essay, that translator Davis doesn\u2019t actually much like her, or the book. Interesting.<\/p>\n

As an exemplar of realist fiction, Madame Bovary<\/em> was a path breaking book. Unlike most novels that came before, it didn\u2019t romanticize (in the literary sense) or try to draw moral lessons\u2014the lessons were clear from the book\u2019s events and their consequences. Flaubert\u2019s intention was to make the novel not just not<\/em> \u201cromantic,\u201d but anti-romantic, in that Madame\u2019s susceptibility to and pursuit of romanticism and shallow gratification are what cause her downfall. Occasionally, thought, the authorial voice does make a judgment in the nature of a delicious truism, for example: (about the lovers) \u201cShe was as weary of him as he was tired of her. Emma was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Translator Davis in an introduction says this novel\u2019s \u201cradical nature is paradoxically difficult for us to see: its approach is familiar to us for the very reason that Madame Bovary<\/em> permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter.\u201d
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