Madame Bovary

For Advanced French, my class is reading Monique Proulx's Les Aurores Montreales, which is a collection of short stories that document the lives of ordinary people in Montreal.

Makes me wonder if I am the way I am in order to perceive myself as beautiful and acceptable through others' eyes, or because I am who I am.  It's one of those cycles of reflexivity that is neverending and completely pointless to engage in.  One has to be confident and to simply not give a shit.  One thing that becoming relatively fluent in French has really made me want to do is speak in the 3rd person.

I just finished reading the nouvelle entitled Madame Bovary, after the novel of the same name by Flaubert.  In short, it is about the young housewife of an unexciting businessman who spends her days living quietly after a young adulthood of brilliance and creativity.  She waits every day for her two children to arrive home from school and her quiet, banal husband to return to soliloquize to the empty air about the details of his day.  Each morning with a dainty cup of black coffee, she reads the column of a journalist who writes brilliant, dark and cruelly stark pieces about ordinary people.  She reads every book he recommends, even though her husband dismisses him as "marxist."  One day, this journalist invites his readers, the ordinary people, to invite him into their homes.  Diane (the housewife) does so.  Anyway, long story short, her end goal is to seduce him, for he has liberated her with his words, made her aware of the depressing obscurity of her existence, opened her eyes, given her the information she needs in order to be sentient.  He comes over and she is completely herself for the first time in her life, describing her wildest dreams - and she is completely certain that she has tantalized him.  He leaves, but she is positive that he will return to consummate "their" outrageous desires.

The next day, he writes only a few lines in his column.  He is tired, he is through, he is convinced that his idea to write about the lives of ordinary people was a terrible one.  His folly was brought home by him by who he describes as a young suburban madam searching for her soul between astrology and pastries, a Madame Bovary far more disgusting and empty than she of the famous novel.  He will not write anymore.

It takes Diane a few reads to realize that this passage is about her.  She races to the bookstore to buy Madame Bovary and devours it voraciously.  She is unable to perceive the sense of the analogy, how she resembles at all the heroine of this novel.  She despises herself.  She knows that she must live, absolutely live, and dreams fondly of the taste of arsenic, soft and warm like black coffee.