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The Americanization of Emma Bovary: From Feminist Icon to Desperate Housewife
Author(s): Suzanne Leonard
Source: Signs, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 2013), pp. 647-669
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Suzanne Leonard
The Americanization of Emma Bovary: From Feminist Icon
to Desperate Housewife
I
magine a gathering of the following book club, itself comprised of invented characters: precocious teenager Rory Gilmore of WB’s Gilmore
Girls ð2000–2007Þ; brassy Carmela Soprano, the materialistic and multiply betrayed wife in HBO’s The Sopranos ð1999–2007Þ; introspective Sarah
Pierce, the women’s studies major–cum–adulteress in Little Children ðPerrotta 2004; Little Children 2006Þ; and the outspoken core cast of ABC’s
Desperate Housewives ð2004–2012Þ. The reason for this eclectic gathering?
It would assemble a group of women who collectively help to define
American postfeminist media culture, all of whom have engaged in the act
of reading Gustave Flaubert’s controversial Madame Bovary ð½1857 2005Þ,
the story of a bored French housewife who fills her disappointing days
with extramarital affairs and excessive purchases.1 Though the reading
group has become a standard site of female sociality in contemporary representations, Madame Bovary’s surge in visibility nevertheless represents a
surprising trend, not in the least because the story of an ultimately doomed
female reader led astray by popular culture would seem, frankly, to be an
unlikely object choice for women who inhabit precisely this realm. As we
might remember, Madame Bovary offered a scathing indictment of the
attitudes and operations of female mass culture in the nineteenth century, a
critique it made primarily through a portrayal of a woman seduced by the
generic notions of love, romance, and sexuality on offer in women’s magazines and pulp novels. Despite long-standing critiques of such coercions,
American postfeminist popular culture ðincluding some of the books, films,
1
Though I list the novel’s appearance in postfeminist popular culture only, Madame Bovary
has inspired a veritable culture industry. There have been countless film and television adaptations
throughout the twentieth and now early twenty-first centuries, but the past fifteen years in particular have witnessed a marked surge of interest in rewriting or reimagining the original text. See
Madame Bovary’s Daughter ðUrbach 2011Þ, which follows Berthe’s career as a fashion designer;
Reading Madame Bovary ðLohrey 2010Þ, an Australian short story collection; The Saturday Wife
ðRagen 2007Þ, a satiric Jewish chick-lit novel featuring a materialistic rabbi’s wife; Julian Barnes’s
rewriting of the ending of the novel where Emma not only lives but stays with Charles ð2006Þ;
Madame Bovary: Breakfast with Emma ðWeldon 2003Þ, Fay Weldon’s stage play set on the last
day of Emma’s life; Gemma Bovery ðSimmonds 1999Þ, a graphic novel that transposes Gemma,
a Londoner, to the French countryside; and finally, Madame Blueberry ðVeggieTales 1998Þ, a cartoon meant to teach children the dangers of greed.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2013, vol. 38, no. 3]
© 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2013/3803-0007$10.00
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and television shows listed hereÞ offers similar fantasies: romantic intrigue coupled with passionate love, visions accompanied by consumptive excess, and
nonstop diversion. The resulting comparison between Emma Bovary and
modern-day heroines is perhaps inevitable: assessed in terms made popular by
Sex and the City, Emma’s raison d’être also appears to be her pursuit of “labels
and love.”2
Such a comparison elides an important and puzzling disconnect, however, one that will guide this investigation: how did Emma Bovary, with
her miserable marriage, her boredom, her lack of interest in motherhood,
and her repeated infidelity, transition from cautionary figure to postfeminist icon? Take as a starting point the seeming fabulousness of the contours with which Emma is drawn in contemporary American discourse,
as evidenced by accounts that term Madame Bovary “nothing less than the
first sex-and-shopping novel” ðMacDonnell 2007, 17Þ. Emma was likewise
routinely invoked as a “desperate housewife” ðHarrison 2010Þ in publicity
materials surrounding the 2010 release of Lydia Davis’s acclaimed English
translation of the novel, a translation soft-porn purveyor Playboy excerpted
with taglines touting Emma’s move from “bored provincial wife to enthusiastic adulterer” ð2010, 57Þ. These ðmisÞrepresentations of Emma as one
who uses libidinal liberation to resist domesticity cohere with an American
culture fond of framing discussions of gender politics around images of
misbehaving girls or housewives, conversations that often inadvertently
highlight the rather ambivalent gains women have made with respect to
sexual empowerment.3 Furthermore, defining Emma solely according to
her penchant for sexual adventure patently ignores another equally, if not
more, salient feature of her textuality: Emma thirsts for a different life yet
conceptualizes betterment through formulaic romantic narratives that lead
her to debasement at the hands of ruthless and caddish men, a process that
results in her financial ruin and painful suicide. Most sex-and-shopping novels
do not end thus, and this begs the question of why female popular culture—
as illustrated in the imaginary book club that opens this article—is so drawn
to the figure of a woman suffering under patriarchal social orderings that
consigned middle-class women to limited spaces ðthe homeÞ and affective
relations ðmarriageÞ. If, as postfeminist rhetoric is so fond of pointing out,
these constrictions have been rendered largely obsolete in contemporary
American contexts, why does Emma Bovary still serve as such a handy metaphor for modern women?4
2
For a discussion of how modern femininity demands engagement with consumer culture,
see Radner ð2011Þ.
3
See Siegel ð2000Þ, Levy ð2006Þ, McCabe and Akass ð2006Þ, and Valenti ð2008Þ.
4
For book-length investigations of postfeminism’s tendency to assume that the work of
feminism is complete, see Tasker and Negra ð2007Þ, McRobbie ð2009Þ, and Negra ð2009Þ.
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To understand how such an unlikely figure became iconic in a postfeminist moment, I argue that Emma Bovary must first be read as having undergone a transformative Americanization. Though long regarded as a canonical fixture of male-authored Western literature, during the 1970s and 1980s
she garnered attention from Anglo-American feminist scholars, many of
whom were intrigued by Emma’s violent rejection of a life to which she
was flagrantly ill suited. Bringing Emma to popular consciousness on these
terms was nevertheless a riskier endeavor than might have been imagined at
the time, given the universalizing nature of subsequent women’s media
culture. Though the goals of the feminist movement were robust and
manifold, postfeminist thought paradigms in the early twenty-first century
have narrowed to focalize on two stock figures: the girlish singleton and
the bored wife. Though Emma clearly fits the latter designation, calling
her a desperate housewife inevitably flattens and distorts her most prickly
aspects and evidences a postfeminist tendency to circulate stories of female disillusionment in a tongue-in-cheek manner. A study of Emma’s cooptation by popular culture thereby provides a metacommentary on postfeminism’s operations at large and testifies to the harsh light often trained
on modern women in mainstream media products. More specifically,
Flaubert’s ambivalent treatment of Emma, and particularly the authorial
distance with which he regarded her, is remarkably akin to postfeminist attitudes toward middle-class women: in both the source novel and its contemporary progeny, tonal fluctuations waver between sympathy and disdain.
Though it is perhaps belied by the ubiquity and popularity of recent
texts that use allusions to Emma Bovary as a shorthand for female discontent, readers have famously anguished over the proper reading of her, as
encapsulated in the title of Dacia Maraini’s feminist investigation Searching For Emma ð1998Þ. Articulating a veritable crisis in reading, Maraini
writes that when she first read the novel she saw Emma as “brave and passionate,” before realizing all the indignities Flaubert had heaped on her:
“how detested Emma Bovary truly was” ð1998, 2Þ. Emma’s inscrutability
in many ways originates with Flaubert, who famously compared himself
to her—particularly in his oft-quoted confession “Madame Bovary, c’est
moi”—though his text coldly appraises her failings at the same time. The
illegibility of this authorial position has inspired assessments that characterize Flaubert as an ambivalent narrator “who at some points identifies
with Emma . . . and who at others seems to be repelled by her” ðStam
2004, 536Þ. At once admirably headstrong and abjectly deluded, Emma
troubles contemporary interpretation because she continues to writhe free
of fixed judgment, a difficulty echoed in postfeminist texts that feature the
novel. Such texts often directly represent women charged to read about
Emma, yet these women are mishandled in ways that likewise highlight
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their simultaneous tragedy and triviality. As is Emma, these women are frequently lampooned as failed readers; their myopia is suggestive of the potential for their own humiliating demises, though this possibility is signaled
more often than fully enacted. Such trajectories reveal much, however, about
the operation of female mass culture in the early twenty-first century, a process best understood through the lens of two key movements: Emma’s initial Americanization, which localized her as a figure of interest to feminists,
and her postfeminist resurgence in stories of misguided female readers.
Madame Bovary: C’est American feminism?
In Cathleen Schine’s 2003 novel She Is Me, a Los Angeles film studio hires
Elizabeth, an English professor, to write an updated screenplay of Madame
Bovary for the modern age after she publishes an article cheekily titled
“The Way Madame Bovary Lives Now: Tragedy, Farce, and Cliché in the
Age of Ikea.” She Is Me expresses its organizing principle and simultaneously explains its title when Elizabeth, afflicted with a case of writer’s
block, watches other films for inspiration on late-night television and registers that “Every movie was Madame Bovary . . . Dodsworth, Niagra, Thelma
and Louise were all Madame Bovary. The Postman Always Rings Twice was
Madame Bovary. Move Over, Darling was Madame Bovary. Madame Bovary,
C’est moi, Flaubert had said. She is me, too” ð2003, 174Þ. Though Elizabeth professes affinity with Emma, translating Flaubert’s French into “she is
me,” which also provides the novel’s nomenclature, her eclectic list nevertheless highlights the absurdity of calling a person or a work a “Madame
Bovary” simply because it summons the figure of a discontented and potentially unfaithful wife. This metaphor saturates American popular culture; as
Elizabeth’s Hollywood boss asks in frustration, “how the hell do you update
Madame Bovary when every picture with an unhappy housewife is Madame
Bovary?” ð12Þ. Emma’s instrumentalization as a figure meant to stand in
for any sort of domestic or marital discord regardless of the legitimacy of
this comparison has provided media culture with an elastic metaphor, an association that has surely benefited from the fact that Emma Bovary’s name
is practically synonymous with adultery.5 Her recognizability in this context is not, however, without its conundrums; as Elizabeth muses, “Funny
Because Emma is remembered primarily for her adultery ðand little elseÞ, her invocation provides a shorthand reference to the infidelity plotline, as evidenced in the Columbus Dispatch review of Lauren’s Fox’s 2007 novel Still Life with Husband, which reads, “It’s the story of Madame Bovary with dairy products instead of arsenic” ðQuamme 2007, 6DÞ.
5
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that someone so French, so much a creature of the nineteenth century, could
turn so easily into someone so American, and so contemporary. Searching
for happiness just like everyone else” ð80Þ. Elizabeth locates but does not
extemporize on the Americanization of Madame Bovary, a process that can
best be explained by reference to the relationship between her life circumstances and the history of the American feminist movement. Emma’s relevance to American women vastly intensified when she was implicitly taken
up by American feminists; critics saw in her story shadows of the same concerns that were animating the women’s liberation movement more broadly,
and feminist literary criticism more specifically.
Feminist literary criticism as a discipline has an avowed relationship to
the women’s liberation movement since both share an interest in the question of how gender shapes experience and opportunity. Emma Bovary
quickly became an important figure in this discursive regime, her plight and
seemingly mandatory death serving as proof that women suffered more severely than men when violating social mores. Feminist critics regarded Madame Bovary as evidence of what Jane Gallop calls “a truly literary problem,
sexism as structurally inscribed in literary form” ð1992, 84Þ. Framed in this
way, the novel was frequently maligned, as Elizabeth Ermarth claimed in
1983, for failing to allow Emma’s competing versions of reality to offer a serious challenge to the prevailing textual viewpoint and for forcing her to participate in the system as “a sacrifice, not a survivor” ð1983, 14Þ. The recognition that women were punished unjustly for their indiscretions circulated as
well in feminist fiction, a body of popular literature that originated during a
period loosely coterminous with the women’s liberation movement. As I
have argued elsewhere ðLeonard 2010Þ, novels such as Ella Price’s Journal
decry this troubling convention; the eponymous Ella, for instance, believes
that Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Main Street teach “despair” because each shows female rebellion as futile ðBryant ½1972 1997, 78Þ. Feminist fiction in this respect often served as literary criticism by proxy of its
female characters, who themselves often cited Madame Bovary in their
musings on double standards—literary and otherwise. In The Odd Woman,
Gail Godwin’s heroine Jane, an English professor, identifies the “theme of
literally dozens of 19th century novels” as the “Emma Bovary syndrome”;
“literature’s graveyard positively choked with women who chose—rather
let themselves be chosen by—this syndrome . . . who ‘get in trouble’ ðcommit
adultery, have sex without marriage, think of committing adultery or having
sex without marriageÞ and thus, according to the literary convention of the
time, must die” ð1974, 293Þ. Erica Jong’s fifteenth-anniversary introduction to her best-seller Fear of Flying contains similar observations; Jong re-
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veals that she felt “considerable pressure” to kill off her adulterous heroine
Isadora, and “contemplated the heroine’s suicide a la Madame Bovary”
ð1988, xiiiÞ. In these cases, Madame Bovary emerges as a cautionary tale that
female authors intentionally wrote against.
Despite the unforgiving nature of these accounts, Madame Bovary simultaneously attracted positive attention from feminist critics who found
in the novel a useful interrogation of the regulatory function of marriage
and motherhood in middle-class women’s lives. Thanks to its foregrounding of Emma’s many domestic failures, Madame Bovary also registered as
a convenient vehicle for a larger systematic investigation of the strictures of
bourgeois womanhood. Susan J. Rosowski contended this in 1979, claiming
Madame Bovary as one of five prototypes for “the novel of awakening,” a
genre concerned with a female protagonist who “attempts to find value in a
world defined by love and marriage” but ultimately realizes that living in
that world is difficult or impossible ð1983, 49Þ. Rosowski borrows her title
and conceptualization intentionally from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,
and the unlikely alliance she makes between the two novels—one by an
American female author with an unabashed interest in the limited roles available to women and the other a male-authored tale of a selfish French wife
felled by desire and debt—helped to inaugurate a critical turn whereby
stories of female limitations were read as sympathetic to female difficulty
rather than as tacit endorsements of the status quo. Though Rosowski contrasts Flaubert’s ironic distance with Chopin’s narrative sympathy and never
uses the word “feminism” as such, her article illustrates a more general turn
in which Madame Bovary came to be seen as a feminist primer, one that helpfully elucidated sites that could benefit from feminist intervention. Apprehending Emma’s ennui as a cultural symptom rather than a personal failing
further allowed for a recasting of her dilemmas, so that, for example, her marriage’s failure to live up to her romantic expectations, her disdain for ðand simultaneous inability to leaveÞ her provincial country town, her humiliation at
the hands of thoughtless lovers, and her lack of access to financial resources all
cohered into a portrait of the effects of gendered power.
While Emma’s story broadly resonated with issues gaining prominence
in the feminist movement, her frustrations with marriage and motherhood
received the most attention. To cite one example, in Ella Price’s Journal, the
title character initially decries Emma’s mistreatment of her daughter but
then remembers the difficult birthing of her own child and the ambivalence she too felt as a new mother. Ella recalls with consternation having
read articles that encourage women to feel ashamed of having painful births,
as she herself had, and writes: “Such a profound experience for so many
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women—and you can’t even be honest with yourself about it, much less
talk about it” ðBryant ½1972 1997, 70Þ. Ella’s revelation rather obviously
references the then-burgeoning field of women’s health, proponents of
which encouraged women to validate their perceptions and take responsibility for their bodies in the face of a medical establishment that tended to
pathologize such self-reports. Ella’s extrapolation from Emma’s treatment
of her child to her own situation represents, however, something of a consistent anachronism as it relates to Emma, into whose nineteenth-century
life a twentieth-century concern is thrust. In this case, Emma’s lack of concern for her daughter Berthe transposes into a rumination on natural childbirth, as well as a discussion of how Ella felt trapped by her pregnancy but
took on the role of mother with increased gusto in order to make up for her
husband’s initial indifference to parenthood. Ella concludes this section:
“Of course, all these thoughts were mixed with others, with great rushes
of love for my baby. But some of Emma Bovary’s hatred for it all was
there too” ð71Þ. Emma’s troubled relationship to her daughter translates
into a contemporary feminist issue, utilized to illustrate the lack of attention paid to women’s prerogatives in arenas like childbirth and to emphasize gender inequity in parenting.
This move to take a sliver of Emma’s experience, particularly as it concerns her marital or domestic life, and amplify it to fit the lives of American women proved a surprisingly consistent theme during the second
wave. Yet we should make no mistake—this estimation occurred during a
historical period in which it was not merely the white middle-class woman
but the white middle-class housewife who became the figure on whom
feminist concerns were mapped, and who postfeminist media culture would
later similarly centralize ðMatthews 1989; Brunsdon 2000; Johnson and
Lloyd 2004Þ. These preoccupations can be traced in part to Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique, which diagnosed a wide-scale malaise felt by housewives in America’s suburbs, women who shared with Emma “a devastating
boredom with life” ð½1963 2001, 75Þ that they often, Friedan argues, channeled into sex.6 Though Friedan vilified the American advertising industry and its relentless push for consumption in the name of household and
personal perfection as much as she criticized the expectation that women
channel all intellectual and emotional energy into the home, the legacy of
6
Friedan quotes one woman who describes her affair in terms that seem to be taken almost
verbatim from Emma: “She was thinking of going away to Mexico perhaps, to live with a man
with whom she was having an affair. She did not love him, but she thought if she gave herself
to him ‘completely’ she might find the feeling that she knew now was ‘the only important
thing in life’” ð½1963 2001, 363Þ.
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her work was to inaugurate the housewife as the sort of woman who
needed to be rescued from stultifying domesticity through the pursuit of
meaningful labor. Emma’s status as a white wife and mother who pursues
sex and consumption to fill her meaningless days identified her as precisely
such a deprived figure, and, accordingly, her plight is called a “feminist
tragedy” in Lisa Gerrard’s “Romantic Heroines in the Nineteenth Century
Novel: A Feminist View” ð1984, 15Þ. Gerrard blames Emma Bovary’s sheltered lifestyle, as mandated by her position as a wife, for having bred her
obsessive fantasies, her narcissism, and her self-delusion, and she concludes
by charging Madame Bovary, along with La Regenta and The Mill on the
Floss, with “revealing the failure of female education, the injustice of a society that denies its women productive work, and the futility of a life built
primarily on dreams” ð1984, 15Þ. Though there is no mention in Madame
Bovary of Emma’s urge to obtain an education or to work—the novel’s
only portrayal of her pedagogical training occurs during her time at a convent school, when she concerns herself more with its mise-en-scène than
its mission—the article instead engages with a liberal feminist worldview
that touts education and meaningful work as the means by which to achieve
a realized life.
As Gerrard’s article illustrates, aligning Emma with America’s bored
housewives and, in turn, importing the solutions of the second wave to
solve her problems became a routine way to narrate her dilemmas, a strategy often found in self-proclaimed feminist readings of the novel. In the
Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, Lilian R. Furst’s ð1995Þ article carries the title “Emma Bovary: The
Angel Gone Astray,” yet while the image of the “angel in the house” conceptualized the nineteenth-century expectation that women serve as domestic
gatekeepers of morality and virtue, it was twentieth-century women seeking
to dismantle this myth who brought the term into popular usage. Because
the angel image is so often invoked with the intent of troubling it, Furst’s
title appeals to a readership likely to consider it a triumph for an angel to
“go astray.” Furst also begins her article with the assertion that “Emma is,
by profession, a housewife” ð21Þ, which, while true in a literal sense, nevertheless calls on popular Anglo-American understandings of the housewife
as a woman defined by her roles as wife and mother, and at least obliquely
references a feminist movement that sought to interrogate that position.
As do Gerrard and Furst, feminist-inspired discussions of Emma frequently underline the similarities she shares with privileged American women.
Even those that assiduously avoid such a comparison, however, tend to read
her plight in terms that suggest a familiarity with liberal feminist ideals
concerning education and paid labor. Naomi Schor’s essay, “For a Restricted
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Thematics: Writing, Speech, and Difference in Madame Bovary” ð½1980
1988Þ for instance, offers a rigorous feminist and deconstructive reading of
the novel and sympathetically argues that Emma’s gender prohibits her
from achieving status as an author, though her letter writing to her lovers
could qualify her as such if she were not a woman. Essays like Schor’s have
in turn prompted the literary community to credit feminists with Emma’s
recuperation, as respected critic Jonathan Culler does in a 2007 article on
the novel. He writes: “Of course modern feminist criticism especially, declining to treat Emma as small and futile and looking at the historical condition of women of her day, has stressed that her difficulties come less from
some innate foolishness than from her situation as an imaginative woman
in the provinces, with no occupation, deprived of the city that would give
her more scope, or of the pen, as Naomi Schor suggests, which would allow the exploitation of her imaginings, however clichéd—as a writer of
romance novels, for instance” ðCuller 2007, 688Þ. When Culler traces Emma’s malaise to her lack of a profession ð“with no occupation”Þ and her geographical locale ð“deprived of the city”Þ, he affirms how commonplace the
idea is that Emma’s difficulties merit comparison to the afflictions experienced by Friedan’s housewives. Not coincidentally, the two factors that he
believes most severely disadvantage Emma—her inability to access work and
her physical distance from urban space—characterize the thrust of postfeminist representation, products that understand liberation as the opportunity
to earn wages and live in a metropolitan setting. Culler’s statement symptomatically illustrates a key turning point in the cultural valuation of Emma
insofar as it confirms not only that Emma has benefited from feminist rescue
but also that her story serves as the inverse of what is today touted as a realized female life, one where women have both mobility and access, where
their passions can be translated into productive labor. In this, Culler unwittingly narrates an important transition in the iconography of this figure,
modeling sympathy for the ways in which Emma’s gender conspires against
her and calling on the answers that a feminist and also postfeminist culture
typically provides its unsatisfied women.
To recap the history I have here constructed: Emma became a figure of
interest to feminists when they recast her failings as indictments of gendered expectations and laid blame for her sad fate on the biases of a culture inhospitable to women who stray from proscribed roles. Emma’s feminist recuperation began with a recognition of these limitations but took
hold with even more vigor when she was made into a figure of identification for feminist critics and fictional women alike who located characteristically female struggles in her plight, though these alliances were sometimes forged at the expense of historical accuracy as it concerned the novel
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or its contexts. In this way, Emma was imported as a figure of identification, though her emulation was often regarded as problematic rather than
praiseworthy. A woman like Ella Price, for instance, identifies herself with
Emma after she too begins an extramarital affair, but Ella does so in a selfdeprecating way, commenting “I must really be an Emma Bovary—narrow and petty and worrying about my love affair” ðBryant ½1972 1997,
170Þ. Whereas this quote expresses Ella’s awareness that this similarity reflects poorly on her, a second turning point occurs in Emma’s iconography
when she transitions into a figure to whom postfeminist women are compared from the perspective of ironic distance.
Failed female readers in the Madame Bovary book club
Emma’s invocation in the popular mediascape in roughly the past fifteen
years appears initially symptomatic of a willful shift in the framing of American women and American feminism, whereby victimization gives way to
girl power. Each narrative relies on the other for its existence, since a critique
of feminism’s supposed victim mentality fueled the postfeminist perception that women should stop bemoaning gender inequality.7 Postfeminism’s reliance on ideals of strident individualism pairs handily with the
image of an Emma Bovary who pursues her romantic goals without regard
for the obstacles that stand in her way, and this version of Emma perhaps
best begs comparison to the so-called liberated women featured in postfeminist media who likewise possess no qualms about pursuing personal
desires.8 An implied affinity with Emma might thus appear to comment
on, and even praise, a particular character’s attempt at sexual agency. In
a season 5 storyline of The Sopranos, Carmela Soprano ðEdie FalcoÞ, for
instance, receives a recommendation to read Madame Bovary and is later
given a copy of the novel by the man who becomes her lover, an exchange
that represents a turning point in Carmela’s narrative arc for it disrupts
her longtime fidelity to her chronically unfaithful husband, Tony ðJames
7
See Sarah Gamble’s entry on “Postfeminism” in The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism ð2000Þ for an overview of how postfeminist attitudes “crystallize around
issues of victimization, autonomy, and responsibility” ð43Þ.
8
Emma’s identity as notionally sexually liberated has oddly benefited, I suspect, from the
attention of author Erica Jong, who has commented repeatedly on the novel’s relevance to
American women. In 1997, Jong wrote an entry for the online “Salon Classics Book Group”
on Madame Bovary ð“Fiction Victim” appeared on the Salon.com website in September 1997
but is no longer available onlineÞ, and she also appears in a 1999 “Films for the Humanities and
Sciences” documentary on Madame Bovary. Known for her celebration of female eroticism
ðmost famously, the “zipless fuck”Þ, Jong implicitly casts Emma as a similarly sexually frank.
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GandolfiniÞ. The Desperate Housewives episode “Anything You Can Do”
ðseason 1, episode 7Þ features Gabrielle Solis ðEva LongoriaÞ fanning herself with the book after trailing her hand along the sculptured, shirtless
torso of her teenage lover, with whom she is conducting an extramarital
affair, and early in the first Gilmore Girls season Rory ðAlexis BledelÞ reads
Madame Bovary with such concentration that it captures the interest of a
potential male suitor. In each of these cases, an association with Madame
Bovary identifies a female character as participating in a libidinal economy.
Yet, while they may achieve some degree of sexual satisfaction, these comparisons with Emma often signal a depravity akin to hers, for which these
women also receive punishment. Unlike the sympathetic terms with
which Emma was regarded during feminism’s heyday, postfeminist products that employ Flaubert’s classic novel tend to adopt a tone of detached
omniscience, one that borrows from the source text a decidedly chilly view
of its female lead. In the examples I will provide, postfeminism satirizes the
gulf between female characters’ self-estimations and their actual situations,
operations that verify Rosalind Gill’s incisive postulation that “no discussion of the postfeminist sensibility in the media would be complete without
considering irony and knowingness” ð2007, 266Þ. Relatedly, it bears emphasizing that such perspectives emerge not from a prefeminist past but
from an all-knowing postfeminist present, a time when the feminist ideals
once thought to offer women relief from dispiriting domestic realities
now warrant mild mockery.
An unlikely exegesis of popular culture’s transition from feminist empathy to postfeminist derision can be found in Tom Perrotta’s 2004 satire,
Little Children, which readily displays its intertextual interest in Madame
Bovary. Emma’s exuberant “I have a lover! I have a lover!” provides the
epigraph to the novel, an entire section of which is titled Madame Bovary,
and the novel’s characterizations reflect this controlling influence. Thirtyyear-old Sarah Pierce shares a structural position with Emma in that she,
too, is an unhappy second wife with a young daughter, and both demonstrate a haughty disdain for their provincial surroundings. Though hardly
a spendthrift like Emma, Sarah nevertheless feels herself reinvented through
the mail-order purchase of a red bikini, and the act of donning it affords her
the sexual confidence to pursue the “Prom King” Todd, a handsome, married, stay-at-home father with whom she partakes in a torrid extramarital
affair. Despite these similarities, when asked to read Madame Bovary by her
older neighbor Jean, who invites Sarah to be her “little sister” in a local
book group, Sarah exhibits reluctance to slog through such “depressing material” ð2004, 161Þ, having first encountered Madame Bovary in
a college class titled “Sexism in Literature.” As Sarah remembers, Emma
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was “exhibit A” ð161Þ when it came to cataloging male writer’s strategies
for oppressing and marginalizing their female heroines; the class instructed
her to regard Madame Bovary as a “dreamy, passive narcissistic figure enthralled by paralyzing bourgeois notions of ‘love’ and ‘happiness,’ utterly
and indiscriminately dependent on men to rescue her from the uselessness
of her empty life” ð161Þ. This description caricatures women’s studies as a
discipline driven by didactic ideologues, flattening and at the same time
inflating the sorts of observations detailed in the previous section of this
article. Yet this portion of Little Children gently mocks Sarah as well, locating the real reason she cannot read the book in her susceptibility to distracting fantasies wherein Todd rescues her from her own empty life. In lieu
of reading the book, Sarah pictures herself running away with her lover,
“just herself and Todd, no children, complete freedom” ð161Þ and envisions them “sipping champagne in a first class train compartment in Europe” ð161Þ and “filling a cart with organic produce, fresh pasta, freerange chicken, sinful desserts, Australian wine” ð161Þ. In fact, Sarah is too
much like Emma Bovary—dreamy and prone to formulaic, bourgeois imaginings—to finish Madame Bovary. In scripting Sarah as held sway by the
very romantic imagery her college curriculum attempted to eradicate, Little
Children reveals its own postfeminist logic whereby feminist gains are simultaneously taken for granted and disavowed. Though it incorporates feminist knowledge of how gender norms circumscribe Emma’s situation, the
novel simultaneously questions the totality of such a critique by offering the
winking commentary that contemporary women like Sarah still find themselves seduced by the escapist inventions on which Emma thrives.
Little Children does not, however, limit its critique of pernicious romantic delusion to Sarah, or even to women. The section titled “Madame
Bovary” begins not with Sarah but with her emotionally distant husband
Richard Pierce, a move that recalls Flaubert’s decision to open his book
with Charles Bovary rather than Emma. Richard, a corporate drone specializing in branding, becomes enthralled with an online personality, “slutty
Kay,” a “married, bisexual exhibitionist actively pursuing a swinging lifestyle” ð99Þ, who casts her life as a nonstop orgy and offers paying customers
the option of procuring her used underpants. Richard’s fascination with
Kay’s constant sexual availability mimics Emma’s attraction to the romantic heroes who populate her reading material, men who, she believes, offer
their female lovers nothing but a series of transcendent romantic experiences. Richard’s role as a reader, or rather in this modern scenario, Internet user, mirrors Emma’s insofar as both search for another life via mediated sources, yet he eventually partakes of his fantasy when he travels to
California, joins slutty Kay’s fan club, and announces his plans to leave
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his marriage and reside there permanently. In this, Richard apes Emma’s
lover Leon more so than he does Emma, for as in Emma’s time, men access mobility more easily than do women. ðWhen he calls Sarah from California to request a divorce, Richard magnanimously informs her that she
can stay in their home and continue serving as their daughter’s primary
caretaker.Þ Richard, Sarah, and Emma thereby share a naive belief in the
sexual and adventurous possibilities accessible through mediated, clichéd
fantasies. Their desire to combat the emptiness of their lives through imaginative endeavors suggests as well how Emma’s appearance serves as a metonym for the pursuit of fulfillment even in the face of incredible odds—notably, a favored mythology of the American imagination. In this context,
Emma stands in for those who remain unhappy despite having acquired the
accoutrements of the American dream: marriage, family, and home ownership. Yet because she is so flawed, Emma’s invocation in Little Children simultaneously accomplishes a textual distance from Sarah and Richard’s yearnings, revealing them as similarly trite and vulgar.
When Sarah finally does read Madame Bovary and discusses it at the
neighborhood book group, the exchange further accentuates the comparison
between Emma and Sarah, positioning them both as unfaithful women who
alternately solicit admiration and disdain. After Sarah’s nemesis Maryann, urmother of the suburban playground and the only other “little sister” present, scornfully dismisses Madame Bovary as a slut, Sarah patiently explains:
“I think I understand your feelings about this book. I used to feel the same
way myself. . . . When I read this book back in college, Madame Bovary just
seemed like a fool. She marries the wrong man, makes one stupid mistake
after another, and pretty much gets what she deserves. But when I read it
this time, I just fell in love with her. . . . My professors would kill me . . .
but I’m tempted to go as far as to say that, in her own strange way, Emma
Bovary is a feminist” ð173Þ. The question of whether partaking of a series of
sexual liaisons can be considered a mark of one’s feminism clearly inspires
Sarah’s commentary, since her own furtive meetings with Todd cast her in
a similar light. Hoping to find feminism not so much in her own adulterous
acts but in the yearnings to which they attest, Sarah defends the contention
by adding: “She’s trapped. She can either accept a life of misery or struggle
against it. She chooses to struggle. . . . She fails in the end. . . . But there’s
something beautiful and heroic in her rebellion” ð173Þ. In this, Sarah ascribes feminist sentiments to the act of rebellion alone, regardless of its failure, a contention she might have supported with examples of Emma’s gender transgression, such as her wearing of male clothing, her smoking of
cigars, and her role as a sexual aggressor in her affair with Leon. Yet when
Maryann prompts, “so now cheating on your husband makes you a feminist”
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ð173Þ, Sarah’s reply invokes the very American pursuit of happiness mantra:
“It’s not the cheating. It’s the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness” ð173Þ. Sarah’s earnest invocation of Emma’s feminism
willfully transitions Emma ðand hence herself Þ from marital victim to purposeful agent, and testifies to Sarah’s participation in postfeminism’s more
wide-scale valorization of neoliberal ideals of personal happiness and individual gain ðGill 2007; McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009Þ.
At the same time, the implied comparison between Emma and Sarah
undercuts the promise of adultery that Sarah insists upon, for Sarah, too,
is deluded. Maryann labels Emma “pathetic” ðPerrotta 2004, 173Þ for thinking that her lover would run away with her, and Sarah remembers how she
and Todd recently made plans to do precisely that. Yet, in the end, circumstances prove Maryann right: in a scene that loosely parallels Emma’s
attempt to abscond with her lover Rodolphe, wherein he aborts the plan
via a callous letter, Todd fails to arrive for his and Sarah’s scheduled escape and instead leaves Sarah and her daughter vulnerably waiting for him
at night in a playground where a child molester appears. Sarah’s heroic
Emma is, of course, a thinly veiled reading of herself, and Maryann’s pathetic one reveals Maryann’s estimation of Sarah, whose affair Maryann
suspects and somewhat envies. The twinning of these two ideas, however,
represents a fitting exegesis of postfeminism’s relationship to its female
audiences, since figures like Emma court simultaneous admiration and pity
and turn such emotions back on the desiring audience member herself. As
a stand-in for such audiences, Sarah too invites admiration and pity. Sarah
longs not so much for a lover but an elevated affective state, to afford her
mundane life a heightened emotional pitch. Yet she must claim that intensity through romance with a man—precisely, in fact, the activity her women’s studies classes warned her against. These romantic notions also inform her reading of Emma, whose problem, Sarah claims, is not that she
committed adultery but that she did so with “losers” and thus “never found
a partner worthy of her heroic passion” ð174Þ. This statement too exists
as a misreading, since Emma’s notion of passion derives from the recycled
language and generic plotlines of cookie-cutter romances, a tendency to
naı̈veté that makes her, in the words of feminist critic Rita Felski, “merely
the most visible and notorious example of a long list of foolish female
readers” ð2003, 29Þ. Sarah registers as similarly foolish, yet her own impassioned defense of Emma’s heroic passion testifies to her need for a sense
of community, one she paradoxically gleans not from other women but
from the reading of literature. In this, Sarah offers an estimation of Emma
akin to Emma’s perception of the women in her books, for Emma desper-
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ately wanted to join the “lyric legion” of adulterous women, “women who
sing in her memory with the voices of sisters that charmed her” ðFlaubert
½1857 2005, 131; emphasis addedÞ. Adultery permits Emma to see herself
ðat long lastÞ “among those lovers she had so envied” ð131Þ, a move that
suggests the refractory nature of female popular culture in which fictional
characters exist as exemplars. Sarah’s identification with Emma likewise duplicates Emma’s projected relationship with her fictionalized heroines, an
alliance that usefully dramatizes a peculiarly paradoxical aspect of contemporary postfeminism, which presents female audiences with identificatory
figures who are both pathetic and heroic, and asks them at once to align
themselves with and distance themselves from these figures.9
The pairing of yearning and implied degradation that characterizes postfeminist identificatory figures and, in turn, the related emotions they solicit
in female audiences reappear in Todd Field’s 2006 film version of Little
Children, where flashbacks of Sarah and her lover—here renamed Brad—
having sex bifurcate the aforementioned scene. When Maryann accuses
Emma of “degrading herself for nothing,” the scene cuts to Sarah ðKate
WinsletÞ asking Brad ðPatrick WilsonÞ if his wife is pretty, a question that
reveals her raging insecurity. While the scene villainizes Maryann for her
insensitive and unsophisticated pronouncements and features sympathetic
reaction shots of the other, older book club members when Sarah speaks,
its visual language juxtaposes sexual degradation and humiliation alongside Sarah’s proclamation of Emma’s feminism. Further reaffirming the
idea that Sarah’s self-doubt colors her affair and renders her unable to
read Flaubert’s novel objectively, the scene concludes with Maryann asking, “Did she really think a man like that was going to run away with her?”
to which Sarah replies with a wistful “possibly.” The camera lingers on
Sarah’s face, and the scene cuts to Brad finally admitting, postcoitus, that
his wife Kathy ðJennifer ConnellyÞ is a “knockout.” Less a triumph than a
willful denial of reality, Sarah’s characterization of Emma’s feminism instead confirms the delusions under which she and Emma suffer.10
9
The title of Charles Hatten’s 2007 article, “Bad Mommies and Boy-Men: Postfeminism and
Reactionary Masculinity in Tom Perrota’s Little Children,” suggests an argument similar to mine,
though he curiously never uses the term “postfeminism” in the piece. Instead, Hatten takes the
book’s criticism of feminism at face value, arguing that Sarah’s indifference to the other mothers
in her social circle and disregard for the harm she implicitly causes Todd’s wife “shows the limits
of feminism’s capacity to transform women’s lives” ð2007, 233Þ. Hatten does not consider the
authorial distance with which the novel treats Sarah, a strategy I see as crucial to its postfeminism.
10
The film features a dispassionate, omniscient male voice-over, a narrative strategy that
also distances audiences from Little Children’s central characters.
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Postfeminist media culture’s repeated reliance on Madame Bovary, I
have been arguing, often frames women readers as tragically misguided, a
perception routinely revealed through an unforgiving narrative or authorial voice. Similar distancing strategies are on display in the Desperate Housewives episode “Anything You Can Do,” wherein Madame Bovary appears
as the group’s book club selection.11 As suggested previously, the comparison between the two texts is overdetermined: the housewives share with
Emma a variety of surface similarities, including unchecked delusions of
grandeur, a fondness for luxury goods, and possession of libidinal urges frequently harnessed outside the matrimonial bed and unfettered by moralistic
qualms. ðBy the end of Desperate Housewives ’ eight-season run, all the
housewives had, in some capacity, been unfaithful.Þ The Desperate Housewives episode featuring Madame Bovary places particular emphasis on the
housewives’ selfishness, a judgment that manifests itself initially in their
state of distraction. Unlike Sarah, who finally trains her attention on the
novel, the housewives attend their respective book group having not adequately prepared at all: Lynette ðFelicity HuffmanÞ circles the room with a
baby carriage and declares that she found the character of Madame Bovary
“very inspirational” and then confesses, upon being questioned about how
suicide via arsenic could be inspirational, that she only read the first fifty
pages. In fact, none of the housewives have finished the book, the dark intrigues and blossoming romances of their own lives presumably constituting a far more appealing narrative than the tired nineteenth-century novel
that, as Susan ðTeri HatcherÞ says blithely, was a “really good” movie. The
housewives eventually even exile the one book member who has finished the
novel to another room so they can discuss the more pressing mystery of a
neighbor’s recent suicide. Yet, like the return of the repressed, Flaubert’s
novel repeatedly reappears in their lives. Lynette plunks it back on her bookshelf, consumed with daily domestic trials, yet the episode’s concern with
her addiction to a neighborhood child’s attention deficit disorder medication recalls Emma’s many addictive vices. Susan’s copy falls off her nightstand as she rushes to get ready for a date, but her daughter picks the book
off the floor and reminds her mother to take sexual precautions, again a potential reference to Emma’s more dangerous sexual proclivities. Two women
peruse the book after the group has already met. Bree Van De Camp ðMarcia
CrossÞ reads it in her son’s guidance counselor’s office prior to her callous
11
While we might expect literary fiction such as Perrotta’s to use allusions to classic literature like Madame Bovary to bolster its own status, popular television series, even seemingly
lowbrow entries such as Desperate Housewives or Gilmore Girls, routinely do the same, likely
as a way to reward educated viewers.
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husband’s sudden revelation that he plans to divorce her, and Juanita Solis
ðLupe OnteverosÞ holds the novel in order to mask her surveillance of her
philandering daughter-in-law Gabrielle. Yet, the female readers’ cavalier
treatment of Madame Bovary only underscores the need they have for it:
Madame Bovary is a book about, among other things, a woman who reads
to escape her domestic disappointments, and yet the episode depicts a community of women who, if they took the time to focus on the novel, might
find in their own situations the same dispiriting hypocrisies and falsehoods
that Emma finds in hers. The fact that they do not at least attempt to read
suggests the housewives’ imaginative failures and condemns them to a petty,
narrow, and literal world.
The housewives’ status as failed readers also has implications in the feminist lexicon; during the second wave in particular, the figure of the female
reader was believed to signal the potential for feminist change.12 As literary
critic Joanne S. Frye wrote, perhaps overly optimistically, in 1986, “The fullest participation of the novel in feminist change derives from the reader,
especially the woman reader. . . . As she learns from female characters new
ways to interpret her own and other women’s experiences, she helps to reshape the culture’s understanding of women and participates in the feminist alteration of human experience” ð1986, 191Þ. While Frye’s humanistic
cheeriness registers as somewhat naive today, juxtaposing it with Desperate
Housewives reminds us how far the women of Wisteria Lane are from becoming the sort of idealized female reader who was once a staple of the
feminist consciousness-raising group, or even from a reader like Ella Price,
who at least finds cause to reevaluate her own life after reading about Emma’s. The state of distraction with which the housewives approach the
novel suggests not simply a satirical comment on the availability of literature to aid in a renegotiation of their lives but rather a postfeminist reminder of the failures of female collectivity as feminist strategy, here encapsulated in the aborted book group. The episode chronicles, for instance,
Lynette’s struggles as an overburdened yet intellectually understimulated
stay-at-home mother, yet the handiest compensation on offer in this postfeminist dystopia comes in the form of medicated hyperproductivity. While
the stimulant she chooses, Ritalin, chemically inverts the famed 1950s depressant Valium, the reasons she needs it ðto support her husband’s career
by throwing an elaborate dinner party for his boss, to compete with the
other moms in the parent-teacher associationÞ hardly seem different.
Though Susan does attempt to reach out to Lynette, commenting that she
12
See Lisa Maria Hogeland’s Feminism and Its Fictions ð1998Þ for an investigation of the
promise of feminist literacy.
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looks tired, and subsequent episodes feature the women’s supportive
friendships, the episode “Anything You Can Do” organizes itself around
the notion of competition, commentary witnessed when, for instance, Bree
and Martha Huber ðChristine EstabrookÞ spar over who has a more perfect
lawn; Susan flaunts her date with Mike ð James DentonÞ to Edie ðNicollette
SheridanÞ before an unexpected and attractive female houseguest of his
arrives and spurs her own jealousy; Lynette upstages her husband at the
dinner party meant to bolster his career, and Gabrielle schemes to send
her teenage rival Danielle ð Joy LaurenÞ to a modeling camp so she will
have no competition for the affections of her underage lover. By showcasing both the need for, and the failures of, female community in such
ironic terms, Desperate Housewives mimics the authorial distance with
which Flaubert treated Emma, a separation assisted by the accompanying
voice-over of the now-dead Mary Alice ðBrenda StrongÞ, who looks down
at the characters with a sense of bemused alienation: “Since my death, my
friends had lost their interest in fiction,” she says, noting that “their own
problems had become absorbing enough.” This narration underlines the
gulf between the characters’ self-estimation and the show’s more biting
interest in revealing their pointless jealousies and blatant self-involvement,
problems for which it offers no real solutions.
My final example of Madame Bovary ’s fitness as a text that courts and
models postfeminist spectatorship comes from The Sopranos, which exhibits
a similar interest in the failure of literacy to induce feminist gain and the
most critical treatment yet of a fictional woman who shares various likenesses with Emma. Madame Bovary features in two episodes in season 5,
one titled “All Happy Families,” borrowing from the famous opening of
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and the other “Sentimental Education” a title of another of Flaubert’s novels. Both centralize a short-lived romance
between a newly separated Carmela Soprano and her feckless son A.J.’s college advisor Bob Wegler ðDavid StrathairnÞ and feature Madame Bovary
when Wegler recommends the novel to Carmela during their first date,
a suggestion that immediately foregrounds the difference between his
highbrow and her lowbrow sensibilities.13 Wegler introduces the novel immediately after describing his previous belief that his ðnow-failedÞ marriage
would allow him to rise above the “quotidian,” whereas Carmela’s befuddled face makes it clear that she does not understand the word. During
13
In Ella Price’s Journal, Ella’s teacher Dan, with whom she subsequently has an affair, also
suggests that she read Madame Bovary ðBryant ½1972 1997, 60Þ. In both these instances, a
male associated with education recommends Madame Bovary to a less learned woman he eventually beds.
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this conversation, Wegler encourages Carmela to notice the novel’s investigation of “bourgeois loneliness,” an affliction he clearly believes might
apply to her as well, and he in turn gifts her a Modern Library first edition
of the book during their second date, presumably to replace the copy she
bought at Borders, a now-defunct bookstore chain often accused of “McDonaldizing” the once-thriving independent bookstore industry ðRitzer
1993Þ. In this respect, Borders is a fitting metaphor for Carmela and Emma’s shared investment in mass-produced homogeneity.
For the elite viewer that The Sopranos self-consciously courts ðJaramillo
2002; Leverette, Ott, and Buckley 2008Þ, Madame Bovary’s appearance
serves as an indictment of rampant materialism and the crassness of the
nouveau riche, a point it makes quite clearly at Carmela’s expense. Incapable of recognizing Flaubert’s critique of mass consumption, or the way
her life has suffered because of her own greed, Carmela tells Wegler that
“the story is very slow, nothing really happens” and admonishes Flaubert
ð“I think he could have said what he has to say with a lot less words”Þ
after which the episode makes another rather cruel joke: when Wegler
attempts to correct Carmela and waxes poetic about how Emma experiences extremes of boredom and exhilaration, Carmela attempts to thank
him for the book by commenting, “and what a wonderful thing to have in
a den.” Another failed female reader in the postfeminist lexicon, Carmela’s
inability to recognize literature as anything other than a domestic showpiece emphasizes her vulgar superficiality.
The episode additionally borrows from Flaubert an insistence on the
solipsistic absurdity of the affair itself: though momentarily chastened by
her priest’s condemnation of the immorality of her extramarital relationship, Carmela has no moral qualms about coaxing Wegler to pressure A.J.’s
English teacher to assign her son a better, though thoroughly undeserved
grade, to the point where she refuses sex with Wegler because she is so
worried, and then returns with passion once the grade is secured. This final manipulation, followed by a conversation where Carmela suggests that
Wegler should pull strings to secure A.J.’s admission into Wegler’s alma
mater, prompts Wegler to accuse her of being a “user” and end the
relationship. Organized by the observation that Carmela routinely instrumentalizes others for personal gain, a vice that has allowed her to overlook
the fact that the lifestyle she enjoys is made possible solely as a result of
her marriage to a murderous mobster, The Sopranos draws attention to
Emma and Carmela’s shared incapacity for self-awareness. Much as Emma
casts herself into stock roles, Carmela sees herself as a martyr: after being
dumped, she lies prone on her bed and indulges in self-pity, complaining that
because she married a man like Tony, her motives will always be called into
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question. As Maraini writes of Emma, Carmela too seems “worthy of condemnation . . . for her vulgar nature, for her cold and self-centered pursuit
of a kind of pleasure not even she understands, for her stupid attachment to
the most inane of literary myths, for her dime-store sentimentalism” ð1998,
102Þ. The Sopranos’ self-conscious mimicry of Flaubert’s authorial strategy
encourages ironic detachment from Carmela, a sensibility that coheres with
a postfeminist strategy of showcasing female travails from the perspective
of a cold distance.
Madame Bovary’s repeated reappearance in contemporary popular culture aptly illustrates the workings of a key tenet of postfeminism, namely
its tendency to sell women’s insignificance and narcissism back to them
under the mantle of irony. Cultural texts that stress the unflattering likeness between Emma and her contemporary cohorts reveal the mechanics
of this operation and in turn invite spectators to view such women with
a sense of bemused detachment. This is an undeniably dangerous position because it evacuates the sort of gains brought about by feminist
sympathy, whereby female folly was apprehended less as a personal failing and more as a reason to agitate in favor of structural change. Moreover, unlike the authors, readers, and critics detailed in the first section
of this article, figures such as Sarah, Lynette, and Carmela fail to use Madame Bovary to reassess their domestic situations and, if anything, seem
at times more lost than Emma, who at least had an often boundless spirit
of possibility concerning her mediocre situation. The shortsightedness of
these contemporary characters is perhaps demonstrated by their inverse,
in the form of what I would consider the only truly successful readers of
Madame Bovary in the postfeminist landscape—the “big sisters” in Sarah
Pierce’s book club. Though Little Children is avowedly not their story,
these women model an interpretive community capable of empathizing
with Emma and with one another and in so doing offer a glimpse of how
Madame Bovary’s invocation could be beneficial to even twenty-firstcentury audiences. The women read together, attempting to clear up each
other’s misconceptions about the novel ðone explains to another, for instance, that a passage references “anal sex”Þ, and when Maryann vociferously derides Emma, one member counters that Emma simply desires a little romance in her life, while another states that she finds it refreshing to
read about a woman reclaiming her sexuality. Framing the discussion in a
way that neither uncritically celebrates nor unfairly condemns Emma, the
big sisters note that she cannot see that she is being used, label her as undone by a tragic flaw ðlanguage that was once reserved for male heroesÞ, and
accurately characterize her limited life options as being a wife or a nun. Such
a panoply of voices, all of whom actively attempt to understand how gen-
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dered power moves across the novel, stand in stark relief to Sarah’s optimism and Maryann’s didacticism, as well as to the interpretations offered
by the other failed readers catalogued here. Little Children suggests that
the big sisters continue to struggle with issues of marriage and companionship in their own lives ðone is recently widowed, the other saddled with
a husband who refuses to travelÞ in turn reminding us that an intellectually honest conversation of Madame Bovary can still do cultural and even
feminist work, once removed from the biting cattiness that has become, à
la the Real Housewives franchise, the preferred mode for American popular culture to represent female communities. As this scene illustrates, Madame Bovary is still quite capable of engendering germane discussion of
the vagaries of desire, intimacy, boredom, and disappointment, subjects
that are very much of interest to contemporary women—a far cry, indeed,
from the impoverished act of debating whether Emma Bovary is a slut or
a feminist.
Department of English
Simmons College
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