By Misa Ramirez
Have you read Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert? It’s not really a romance, and it’s coming up on being close to 200 years old, so unless you’re into classics or majored in English in college, a lot of people probably haven’t read this book. Heck, I know a few women (ehem…angels) who haven’t read Gone With the Wind, and that has an award winning movie to go with it. (Actually, so does Madame Bovary, but it’s not as widely acclaimed)
So Madame Bovary? Not getting a lot of face time outside of college lit and masochistic reading groups (like mine!). But the fact is, Madame Bovary is often described as a work of utter realism (at least that’s how one of my lit professors referred to in way back when I was in college. Was it realistic in the mid 1800s? Probably, but only in a closeted sort of way. People certainly didn’t admit to having affairs back then, and though rakes and the like are glorified in our historical romances, they likely didn’t enjoy quite the same honor back in the day).
Realism. What does that mean?
Well, the book is about-gasp!-adultery. And not the “acceptable” adultery of a married man, but the adultery of-double gasp!-a married woman! We suffer the same gender inequities today, the same double-standards, that Gustav Flaubert suffered through the attack of his ‘masterpiece’. How dare a woman behave as Emma Bovary did? How dare a woman be dissatisfied with her lot in life, her provincial life, her banal existence? Isn’t her duty to suffer? After all, she made her bed, now she should have to lie in it-miserably. (Truth is, Emma Bovary is an example of an early feminist.)