Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

OK, so I want to focus on the contrast between Leon and Rodolphe.

Leon, being the mirror of Emma, is allowed to escape the unrequited love problem by going off to Paris to make his way. She is not allowed to escape and so sinks deeper into her "torpor."

Rodolphe is ... well, he's a charlatan, a playboy with a lover in Paris who is getting too fat.

I love the agricultural fair, the part in Chapter 8 where the dialogue is interspersed with the political speeches about the Voltairian virtues of "going to work in the garden."

At first I was wondering why this conversation was placed here, where Emma could so obviously compromise herself in front of the village busybodies. But about 2/3 of the way through the chapter, it's made clear:

"A hundred times I've tried to leave you, and yet I've followed you, I've stayed with you."

"For manures --"

...

"So that I'l carry the memory of you away with me..."
"For a merino ram..."
"Whereas you'll forget me. I will have passed like a shadow."

...

"Oh, thank you! You're not rejecting me! How good you are! I'm yours; you know that! Let me look at you, let me gaze at you!"

"Use of oilseed cakes..."

..."Liquid manure... cultivation of flax... drainage... long-term leases... domestic services."

Oh, it's just priceless and hilarious and perfectly displays that he is playing the politician with her, the Brutus to the crowd.

Although that last one touches on some of what Emma says earlier, when she reminds Rodolphe that he is free, being ... rich. And a man.

OK I will only post about this about 3 more times and then I'll wait for everyone to start talking again...

Hey guys,

I don't know who here might be interested, but when I was a kid I had several pen pals all over the world. And I was at a renegade craft fair this weekend where I stumbled on this little gem of an organization:

http://www.16sparrows.com/

and they have this, which I joined, and then joined their pen pal program:

http://www.16sparrows.com/shop/Letter...

The cards and paper are excellent. I have several favorites, but these are the awesomest:

http://www.16sparrows.com/shop/Love.html

Elizabeth, usually we go through the whole book the same way. I am happy to continue. I just didn't want to be the last person at the party mumbling at the fireplace. ;)

I figure with the holidays things are getting crazy for at least a few people, so I'm going to keep going with Section 2 this week.

Yesterday, within 20 minutes, my kids had built 2 snowmen in front of our place! One of the things I love about Chicago is that you are pretty much guaranteed a White Christmas, which is something that never really happened in other places I lived (not reliably, anyway).

OK. On we go, with Emma!

So... is anyone interested in continuing...?

I was *so* hoping this was filmed at Port Townsend.

LSD testing in the military

Look! Me and Emma, at the beach.

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An interesting gender point, made by the narrator early in Part II, Chapter 3, after the birth of their daughter:

A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.

So, I don't disagree with the subjection to the law bit so much... but I wonder, what do you all think of that? And what about this inert/pliant/softness/subjection that makes will so fleeting and desire such a pull?

Leon. Ah, Leon.

So Leon is Emma's mirror.

Early in Chapter 2, I think we get what seems to me to be the essence of their connection...

"Have you ever had the experience," Leon went on, "while reading a book, of coming upon some vague idea that you've had yourself, some obscure image that comes back to you from far away and seems to express absolutely your most subtle feelings?"

..."these days, what I really adore are stories that can be read all in one go, and that frighten you. I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life."

"Yes," observed the clerk, "those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art. It is so pleasant, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to let one's mind dwell on noble characters, pure affections and pictures of happiness. For me, living here, far away from the world, it's my only distraction; Yonville has so little to offer!"

And very late in Chapter 4, as Emma begins to compromise herself (not unlike Lily in House of Mirth):

... they felt the same languor invading them both; it was like a murmur of the soul, deep, continuous, louder than the murmur of their voices. Surprised by a sweetness new to them, they did not think of describing the sensation to each other or of discovering its cause. Future joys, lik etropical shores, project over the immensity that lies before them their native softness, a fragrant breeze, and one grows drowsy in that intoxication without even worrying about the horizon one cannot see.

This is such an intoxicating passage... even I was totally swept up in it and didn't think of "compromising" one's reputation.

And more later, because I have to take my kids to see Harry Potter.

The first scene at the inn is hilarious. This has to be one of my favorite sentences:

"He was skilled at all card games and a good hunter, he wrote in a beautiful hand, and in his home he had a lathe on which he spent his time fashioning napkin rings with which he cluttered his house, with the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois.

I laughed out loud on the plane and my kids told me I was weird.

The pharmacist ... apart from being a blowhard, I don't know... I think he's going to be trouble.

I am a bit behind and started section 2 this morning.

I am going to try to go chapter by chapter, or theme by theme, which may help our discussion a bit.

The first chapter of part two goes to great lengths to describe the new place Emma and Charles will live, which we don't get in section one (or, at least, in a much more limited way). Of the area they move Charles' practice to, during the approach, I started writing down phrases and thoughts I viewed as key:

-uncultivated
-lazy
-without character
-"language is without expressive emphasis"

-Much of the land is left to pasture and the farmland that does exist not very fertile, but the townspeople won't change how they do things

-The windows on houses in the country look like they have "fur caps pulled down over eyes"

-The Virgin Mary's cheeks look like an "idol from the Sandwich Islands" (hilarious, actually)

And the most "exotic" home in town belongs to its most pompous resident, the pharmacist.

What could this possibly MEAN!? :)

I like that you have healthy boundaries, Ben.

Who says we aren't being haunted all the time... but it's not really haunting, it's just being watched?

I went to a psychic circle once where the psychic claimed that by the end of the 2 hours we were all surrounded by the souls who watched over us. Including our animals. I have no idea who was standing around me, but if there were a whole bunch of people (or my dog) there I would have taken their money and chocolates. No one gave me any, though. No flowers, either. That IS rude, come to think of it.

But I'm kinda glad my dog didn't give me chocolates. They would have been a slobbery mess and she shouldn't be anywhere NEAR chocolate...

I actually don't think they are supposed to be likable and that's not what I'm going for -- I think they are supposed to be people we can or can't relate to in varying ways, but I have noticed over the years that people seem to have a strong response to these characters in particular.

To me, that signals really good characters and so the response is worth discussing, that gut response. It's based on our own experiences and perspectives, sure, but it's also based on what Flaubert is doing, where he's taking us. One of the great things about our group is that we do have strong responses, and we usually back them up with the text. And we have really different perspectives, and so very different readings.

For my part, having been a wife, in being a mother of a girl, and in remembering what it was like to be a young woman, can relate to her, and can admire that while she is stumbling, while she may be misguided and come across as callous, at least she's looking, at least she is trying to figure things out in her own way. I can see myself as a younger woman, as caustic and black-and-white as I was at the time, not liking her very much, thinking she is provincial, silly, and uncaring about others.

The way that he pairs up Charles and Emma, at least in the first section, I think is about showing two people mirroring one another. Charles is allowed to roam the village, he bumbles through school (I would NOT want him so much as putting a bandaid on a cut), Emma dreams her way through it, trying to find something to be passionate about, becoming bored but not wanting to admit it... both of them are terrifically superficial.

And the mothers... their mothers...

I agree - that is the moment, it would seem, that Flaubert is signaling to us that our character becomes ... the main character she is meant to be, maybe it's even her being born, a result of that period of discontent that leads them to move -- although I am pretty sure she doesn't know she's pregnant. There is more to unpack in the birth/pregnancy/becoming picture we are getting there that gets back to Elizabeth's gender role comment from earlier. Anyone care to run with that one? :)

I have deliberately not started Section 2, but maybe she will become the Mme people either loathe or love.

As someone who's only really heard and read about other people's responses to this book, it seems like people do either love the characters or hate them, are bored out of their skulls, think she's selfish, think the characters are unredeemable, etc. I'm reserving judgment.

So far I think we are being presented with two people who, given not the exact same circumstances but enfolded in the same kind of society, respond to the world very differently. I don't know yet if we are simply being set up to see two people in relief of one another, or two people with two distinctly different lenses through which life is viewed being thrown together, or if we are learning something about where their marriage is going (when Mme decides to stray, does Charles notice?).

I think the hardest part of talking about this book, for me, will be not spending time typing out all of the turns of phrase I admire... all the details I adore, the irony and yes, humor (like children sleeping under the furniture after the wedding dinner... damn, those people could par-tay) and draw up into the loftier themes. I mean, they pop into my head while I read but I just love the voice so much.

I do think the narrator is Flaubert, and I don't think his intention is un-knowable. (I know not many people will agree me on that one.) I think he is by turns offering scathing critique and a gentle, tender touch to his characters. To the world that surrounds them, less tenderness. More... seeing through human institutions for what they are.

Interesting comparison to Fyodor, another writer I adore. And it is true, say in Brothers K, that there is a narrator who seems to be watching his characters bounce off of each other like sound waves in an echo chamber.

And of course she is Madame now, Hugh. She's about to become a real woman by poppin' out a baby. I tend to believe that childbearing and childbirth, as nasty as it was, as earthy and bloody and messy and deadly and primal as it was (IS, actually), was a pretty good equalizer from a class/wealth/societal perspective.

Thanks for all this, Danielle.

What caught my eye here was the description of Charles' first marriage. There are so many of these little stories dropped in for us, and Flaubert leaves out the right details while providing us with a picture of a marriage in which Charles seems to be... Emma. His wife just wants a little more love, attention. But Charles is rescued by the circumstance of his wife's death, whereas Emma is not.

I thought it was a brilliant picture of a marriage, actually. The details we have are all we need to know without being hit over the head. Like the dinner after the Charles' and Emmas' wedding, or the procession itself where we are given a perfect positioning of everyone in terms of class, manners, and coarseness.

Detached? Interesting. I haven't read a lot (ok, well any) of the critique of Flaubert but detached isn't what I would say. Even as I thought of that feeling of the camera zooming in and out, I didn't think detached -- I thought a world so completely imagined, the inner and outer workings so complete, and Flaubert picking out the details he wants us to have to build his story. What's that quote, about writers who know what to leave out?

No, go right ahead, please... I was looking at them as representing different approaches to life, an embrace of the sensual and real vs. someone whose reality doesn't live up to the sensuality she thinks she should indulge in... not focusing so much on gender, which does certainly play a role in terms of what's expected, acceptable.

I didn't see Charles as stereotypically strong. I saw him as kind of bumbling and boring, and that as long as he's happy, why wouldn't she be.

I thought the shifting color of her eyes was about the changeability of her soul. But maybe I'm reading incorrectly...

I don't know about anyone acting their age, though. I mean, I'm 37 and I have no idea how I'm supposed to act.

That's interesting, Dan. I found the ball to be the culmination/climax of the first section but I found the chapters on Charles and Emma's respective childhoods more interesting. Or is the announcement that she's pregnant... that's practically a Dickensian cliffhanger. Will Emma grow up? :)

I don't think we're supposed to like them, but they do spring to life as real people, to me. And people do seem to end up with strong feelings about Emma. So I kinda want to keep a finger on the pulse of what people think and feel as they read.

Measured, contained, delicate. For sure, Elizabeth.

I woke up this morning and rested my elbows on the windowsill. My hair fell across my cheek in soft ribbons and my eyes started changing colors (that was a little freaky, I must say). I thought, what day is it today? Surely not another day to walk around my boring little garden. Oh, no. Today is November 13. It's time to kick off Madame Bovary.

First, I've never read it, so this is like uncovering new treasure, for me. I have read a ton of French writers, many from this period, and I've never read this one. It is SO very, very different. And I SO love this book.

(I'm going to try to keep this high level and not throw in the several dozen passages I have underlined. That's kind of hard.)

What Flaubert is doing with point of view, diction and style, I find amazing. In the opening pages, it's not just 3rd person omniscient, it's like a highly precise camera zooming in and out, moving in and out of the character's consciousness, stepping back to show judgments about what is proper and acceptable -- from the beginning, it felt so very, very real. Which is what he's going for, I know, but I've never read a novel written so far away from my own time that brought me right into the lives of the characters.

This first section seems to me to be about what is on the outside and what is on the inside, at a variety of levels. What is considered acceptable, or fashionable, and what actually happens in day-to-day life as it's really lived. How decisions get made. Love lost, love gained. The disappointment.

Also, unreality and reality -- Emma's aesthetic and emotional life develops in a vacuum. I watch my 11 year old daughter swoon as she reads Twilight and think, well, I guess it's ok to start out in that place but I hope she doesn't stay there... where Emma seems to stay, in a haze of Orientalism, chivalry, courtly love and a life that is perpetually aesthetically pleasing. Most of us have a piercing of that veil at some point, but she seems to believe life will really turn out "that way" -- and in this sectio we begin to see the letdown that inevitably happens when it doesn't.

How do you feel about the main characters? I think that's important, how we feel about them, what our gut response is.

What do you think of the minor characters? I particularly liked Emma's father, and the old soldier at the ball who completely ignored what was expected of him and was allowed to get away with it because... he was a war hero.

OK, just one quote, from early in Chapter 9:

In her desire, she confused the sensual pleasures of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling. Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great chateaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.

I wonder if they would export for us. Wait. I think I asked this before.

MySpace still exists?