The Heroines Read Online Free PDF Page B

pounded and dripped down the windows while I read, kept company by a half dozen box fans, the dollhouse replica of the house, three antique trunks, and the occasional scamper of a mouse across the floorboards.
    I read to discover why Madame Bovary needed us, yet I soon became engrossed in the plot. I adored learning about the customs of the French country folk, the descriptions of hills and fields, the little towns, the ritualized, careful courtship of Charles Bovary and Emma. Their wedding feast delighted me, and I dreamt that I would one day have a country wedding where the guests processed through an open field following a fiddler. But did I understand Emma’s character—the soul fed on romance novels, the convent girl who fasted with pleasure, who mourned her mother’s death with a delicious sadness she deemed “inaccessible to mediocre spirits”? Emma drew deep and somewhat perverse pleasure from her pain, cultivated terrific funks that I didn’t yet recognize as similar to my own teenage disposition. Everything she experienced seemed fathomable. I didn’t judge this Heroine, as I took Flaubert’s word as gospel. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that women who made bad marriages lived to regret them.
    Charles revered her delicate hands, her dark hair, her pale complexion. He adored her drawing skills, her piano playing, her ability to run a household. But she quickly grew bored with him. He lacked finer sensibilities. When she botched a piano sonata, he told her she played beautifully. He backed off when she was in a foul mood, rather than diving in to explore it. When she fell into a depression, the quintessential nineteenth-century antidote was prescribed—a change of scenery! When they arrived in the slightly bigger town of Yonville, Emma easily attracted Monsieur Léon Dupuis. He shared her love of the arts, especially literature. This interchange about reading killed me:
    “The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I’m wandering in countries I can see every detail of—I’m playing a role in the story I’m reading. I actually feel I’m the characters—I live and breathe them.”
    “I know!” she said. “I feel the same!”
    When the naïve Léon realized his love could never be consummated, believing that Emma was happily married to Charles, he fled Yonville for Paris. Bereft, Emma suffered dizzy spells and tried to cope with the loss. She took Italian, changed her hairstyle, went on shopping sprees, chugged brandy. I loved when Charles’s mother showed up and blamed Emma’s depression on novels and banned them from the house. She went to the library and canceled Emma’s subscription and warned the librarian that she would call the police if he “persisted in spreading his poison.” The only thing that cured her latest malaise was the arrival of Rodolphe Boulanger, who immediately decided to seduce Dr. Bovary’s beautiful wife. After a lathered horseback ride, he took her in the grass. After that, they had weekly trysts in her arbor; she snuck to his château for liaisons; they engaged in a heated letter exchange; they swapped locks of hair. They planned to run off together.
    The problem was, Emma couldn’t keep from going overboard, and Rodolphe decided to ditch her. She revered love and romance to a degree that made her lovers bristle. She was impulsive (showed up uninvited to Boulanger’s château), reckless (walked boldly arm in arm with a lover in the streets of Rouen), and dramatic (sobbed uncontrollably when a lover was late for a date). As a wealthy woman, Madame Bovary could easily pawn her child off on the nurse or maid; she took erratic interest in her household responsibilities. She couldn’t escape the feeling that there was something more out there. That something had to be a man.
    I was versed enough in the language of feminism to get that much. At thirteen, I found Emma absolutely reasonable. (I’d had the same experience reading Catcher in the Rye at ten. I