As part of my ongoing mission to combat the lies about men and women that modern society attempts to beat in our skulls on a daily basis, I present “Mr. Bardamu’s Bookshelf,” an occasional series dedicated to analyzing works of literature that every right-thinking man ought to have in his personal library.
Why call it “Mr. Bardamu’s Bookshelf,” you ask? “Ferdinand” has one too many syllables.
If the amount of outrage and vitriol directed at something is correlated with its truthfulness, Madame Bovary was one of the most unpleasantly honest novels of the nineteenth century. When Gustave Flaubert’s seminal work was first published in 1856, public prosecutors charged him with “outrage to public morality and religion,” which lead to one of the most famous obscenity trials in literary history. Flaubert was acquitted of all charges the following year, and Madame Bovary went on to secure its place in the canon of Western literature. What about this little novel so upset the sensibilities of the French morality police? Quite simply, Madame Bovary laid bare the true nature of woman to an audience that had become dulled with Victorian sentimentalism. In particular, Flaubert exposed the nature of female infidelity and the role men play in fostering it.
Madame Bovary opens by describing the formative years of Charles Bovary, a quiet nerd of a man who spends his school years getting mocked by his classmates. After completing his education and opening a medical practice, his mother marries him off to an rich widow, who treats him like the glorified kitchen bitch that he is:
Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was master; he had to say this and not say that in company, to fast every Friday, dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients who did not pay. She opened his letter, watched his comings and goings, and listened at the partition-wall when women came to consult him in his surgery.
She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them round his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love.
Nobody respects doormats, least of all women.
After going on a house call to a farm, Charles becomes smitten with Emma Rouault, his client’s young daughter. Of course, in typical nice guy fashion, Charles spends his days hovering around her in a purely platonic fashion instead of just stating his intentions upfront. When his wife kicks the bucket, Charles courts and marries Emma. Unfortunately, not long after their marriage begins, Emma becomes bored with Charles, and begins dreaming of romance and adventure. Flaubert pulls no punches, blaming the inattentive husband as well as the disloyal wife. Charles is portrayed as a schmuck who is both incompetent at his job (he is not skilled enough to become a doctor, instead being an “health officer”) and hopelessly supplicating. He believes Emma to be perfect in every way, regarding her “conduct” as “irreproachable,” going so far as to give her complete control over their finances.
As the novel develops, Emma becomes obsessed with Léon Dupuis, a young law student with whom she develops a friendship. As Charles remains oblivious to her feelings, Emma becomes increasingly disgusted with him:
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.
On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
As far as Emma was concerned, Charles was guilty of EWB: Existing While Beta.
Later, after Léon departs for Paris, Emma meets the dashing alpha male Rodolphe Boulanger, who is able to see in a few minutes of conversation what Charles cannot:
“I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn’t shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. With three words of gallantry she’d adore one, I’m sure of it. She’d be tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?”
The men who know women best are the ones who have bedded countless numbers of them.
And with that, Rodolphe sets out to seduce Emma, a task made easy by Charles’ romantic ineptitude. After taking a fairytale-esque horse ride through the woods, Emma gives herself completely to him, as her gina tingles override her conscious brain:
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights.
Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without anxiety, without trouble.
Now where have we heard THIS before? Oh, right:
Women involved in extramarital affairs speak of “feelings unlike anything they’d experienced before. They felt ‘alive’ again.” This euphoria was, however, combined with pain and guilt. Often before a tryst, they would vow that ‘this would be the last time,’ but were unable to keep their resolutions. The author interprets this as addictive behavior related to the brain chemistry of erotic attachment. She conjectures that the “high” produced by adultery is more intense than that of lawful courtship because of its association with shame, guilt and secrecy: a plausible hypothesis, and possible topic for future research.
She spends the next few years in a affair with Rodolphe, lavishing him with expensive gifts that she racks up enormous debts in order to pay for, and even makes plans to abandon Charles and elope with him. Tired of her clinginess and worried that she will expose their secret, Rodolphe writes her a letter breaking off the relationship and vanishes. His rejection of Emma shatters her mentally and emotionally:
She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself, “Come! come!”
The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice calling her.
She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as if to examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to this work, counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent a pretext for leaving the table.
Again, this sounds awfully familiar:
Sometimes the paramour breaks off relations with the adulterous wife, for any number of reasons. In these cases, the women “experienced extreme grief, became deeply depressed and expressed tremendous anger toward their husbands” (my emphasis). In fact, according to Langley’s hypothesis, they were experiencing another form of withdrawal—they were stimulant addicts forced to go “cold turkey.” These women “placed the utmost importance on finding a relationship that gave them the feeling they experienced in their affairs.
No woman ever really gets over being dumped by an alpha.
After falling ill and recovering, Emma re-encounters Léon Dupuis, and she embarks on another extramarital affair. Like she did with Rodolphe, Emma begins buying expensive gifts for Léon, exhausting Charles’ savings and putting them in massive debt. Once Emma’s tab is called, she is unable to get the money to pay her bills from either Léon (who has gotten sick of her clinginess) or Rodolphe. In one last dramatic act, she commits suicide by swallowing arsenic.
Throughout the entire novel, Charles remains blissfully unaware of his wife’s indiscretions, and after her death, becomes so crestfallen that he abandons his practice and becomes a recluse. When he finally comes across evidence of Emma’s adultery, his response is stereotypically beta:
One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it and read: “Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your life.” It was Rodolphe’s letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes, where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe’s attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter deceived him.
“Perhaps they loved one another platonically,” he said to himself.
Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe.
Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable.
This continues when Charles meets Rodolphe for the final time:
One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse—his last resource—he met Rodolphe.
They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the public-house.
Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would have liked to have been this man.
The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the same look of weary lassitude came back to his face.
“I don’t blame you,” he said.
Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow—
“No, I don’t blame you now.”
He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made—
“It is the fault of fatality!”
Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean.
Is it any wonder the moral orels thought this novel was obscene? How can you sympathize with a man who upon encountering the rake who screwed his wife, FORGIVES him? If Charles Bovary was a real person, he’d be the Beta of the Decade.
Virtually every bit of knowledge imparted by game is backed up in Madame Bovary, a novel that is a century-and-a-half old. A woman despises it when the man in her life is a squishy, spineless lump, and will actively seek solace in the arms of manlier men. She’ll do things for those manlier men that she would never do for her schmendrick hubby, including showering them with gifts and dirty sex acts. She can only love one man at a time, meaning hubby will get replaced in her heart by whatever sweet-talking sexy dude has made her loins quiver. And hubby, because he failed to keep her in line and in love, is partially to blame for his wife’s whoring. All of these things were known, if not openly acknowledged, by our forebears, but we are just beginning to rediscover them.
For further reading, here’s the complete English translation of Madame Bovary that I used to write this post. For those of you who speak-a the language of love, the original French text is here.
