Why Madame Bovary Is Not a Feminist Icon

As well read as I have been over the years, including many of the classics of Western literature, I have just gotten around to reading Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

How to account for this gaping hole in a bibliographic odyssey that has included a thousand or so books over four or so decades? I dunno. Maybe I thought this particular classic was a Doctor Zhivago without the snow.

Boy was I wrong.

Emma Bovary is in some respects the prototypical “Desperate Housewife,� a manic depressive spendthrift with eating and panic disorders who makes her life into a novel to escape the emptiness of her existence in rural France.

But like many great books, the message that I took from Madame Bovary resonates even more powerfully today than when Flaubert introduced it in the mid-19th century to a public alternately titillated and shocked by its sexual innuendo.

For me, that message is that there is no lonelier a woman than one who demeans her sex but uses it to get special favors.

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