Her baby daughter doesn't interest her, her lovers are manipulative cads, and her husband, Charles, is the quintessential amiable boor. Madame Bovary is the rather uneventful fictional biography of a shallow young woman.
"To be simple," wrote Flaubert, "is no small matter." Repetitions of words, sounds and even letters annoyed him, particularly so in this emotionally radical novel where so much depends on style alone.įor what's really scandalous about Madame Bovary - besides the infidelity plot for which it was put on trial for obscenity when it was first serialized in 1856 - is its absolute demolition of sentiment. As Davis says in the introduction to her translation, Flaubert created Madame Bovary through a process of ruthless pruning: sometimes, he would report in letters to his mistress, a weeks' worth of hard labor would result in one meticulous page. It's cheering - isn't it? - the way Playboy upholds the primacy of the erotic canon over the claims of postmodern challengers like Roxana Shirazi's salacious memoir, The Last Living Slut.įor a translator, even one as renowned as Lydia Davis, Flaubert, the great apostle of le mot juste - using exactly the right word - must surely be the Matterhorn of authors. "The most scandalous novel of all time!" hisses a headline on Playboy' s cover. No, what's wresting attention away from the latest lineup of hydroponically enhanced models is an excerpt from Lydia Davis' new translation of Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece. Of course, what the Playboy connoisseurs are surveying is not Madame Bovary's fine form, nor her much-commented-upon smooth bands of black hair or great dark eyes. How tickled Madame Bovary herself would be by the latest homage paid to her - a feature in the September issue of Playboy magazine! For the "original desperate housewife," as she's been called, the knowledge that she's the object of the collective male gaze might have relieved some of the dismal boredom that characterized so much of Emma Bovary's provincial life.
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