The Extravagance of Emma
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is fully deserving of its canonical status. The portrait of Emma Bovary, whose extravagant passions and dreams that cannot be contained by a dull marriage, result in adulterous affairs, debt, and suicide, is unforgettable. The reader is absolutely persuaded of her fullness of character; indeed, this is woman as seductress in part, but she can hardly be regarded as a type. If anything, her husband Charles, adoring, long-suffering, and deluded, might be more archetypal. Leslie Fiedler has observed that while Flaubert wrote of adult male-female relationships in the 1850s, American male novelists wrote gothic "boy's books" almost in evasion of those same themes. In Flaubert's novel, there is a knowingness about marriage, sexuality, the bourgeoisie and its values, obsession, deception, and death, even a prefiguring of black comedy and the grotesque in the eyeless beggar whose song ironically foretells Emma Bovary's demise.
