Madame Bovary was a turning point in the development of the European novel Playboy promoted a recent translation as “ the most scandalous novel of all time”. Does this make Emma a pitiable prototype for the passive female gull of mass culture, operating mindlessly under “false consciousness”, or a feminist avant la lettre who subverts bourgeois morality and suffers the consequences? Yet Flaubert’s early disapproval of his heroine’s self-absorption, “icy charm” and vanity is curiously transformed, in the last 100 pages or so, by a softening towards, even forgiveness of, her tawdry and narcissistic escapism. To borrow a refrain from Sex and the City, Emma’s raison d’être is the pursuit of “labels and love”. This might seem unlikely, not least because the story of a bored French housewife seduced into conspicuous consumption and extramarital affairs by unrealistic expectations of love, romance and purchasing power promulgated by popular culture would seem an ironic choice for women who epitomise precisely this ethos.īut the paradox is appropriate, for Emma Bovary is herself nothing if not paradoxical.
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