Madame Bovary

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 947, 4 October 1957, Page 19

Madame Bovary

AVE you ever imagined yaurself getting a large sum of money, unexpectedly and through no special merit of your own? "Most of us," says Meredith Money, "have run to an imaginary binge of this kind-but does our imagination always take us through to the hangover. . . The author of Madame Bovary has carried out the whole process for us. Madame Bovary is Flaubert himself-yes, with a change of sex -having a wonderful time-but reviewing in the cold, grey light of sobriety, or satiety, all the magic moments." With its rigorously impersonal style, says Mr Money, it yet contrives

a studied spoiling of the "magic moments" and an insistence on the stupidity of all and sundry. It’s a little over 100 years since Gustave Flaubert finished Madame Bovary. One of the most painstaking of novelists, he had spent ftve years writing the book-his best known and one of the great novels. When Mr Money talks about it in No Orchids for Madame Bovary (3YC, October 8 and 15: other YCs later), he will recall also his visit a few years ago to the house in Rouen where Flaubert was born, now an unassuming little museum crammed full of bric-a-brac. "The museum," he says "did at least show that Flaubert liked to have objects under his hand. The inanimate object would stand long scrutiny and would yield to the artist its story of human association." And Mr Money goes on to talk of some of these-from the death masks of several guillotined criminals to an antique piece of "church-going bedroom china." Meredith Money’ cannot believe that all Flaubert’s immense labour on Madame Bovary took much of the sting out of his initial emotion. Flaubert, he concludes, "feels real indignation at the treachery that adultery represents, yet hates the glibness of the empty condemnation which popular judgment passes on it. From his indignation there arises, not a sudden burst of romantic visualising, but reality observed, experienced and reborn in the imagination."