The story of Emma Bovary, Flaubert’s most popular fictional character, is well known: a girl sick with reading tries to make real life fit the parameters of the romantic novel.
In half plus one of the novels with which he contracted his illness, the happy ending is an ending with a wedding. So Emma marries the first man who is more or less worthy of her happy ending aspirations.
As the leading man turns out to be a mediocre and boring lover, without imagination or semantic tools for love, Emma decides to look for the solution to her problem in half but one of the romantic novels she has read: to be a tragic heroine with conflicted loves.
It also goes wrong: the lovers are hicks with more talk than the husband, but equally mediocre and cowardly.
In the end, she is trapped in a spiral of despair that leads her to suicide. Not because of lovesickness, but because lovers cost money and women, even if they live in a more or less well-off house, are always poor. You know, money management, wherever that money comes from, is a matter for husbands, fathers, brothers, in-laws.
That is the story, the argument. Although Madame Bovary did not pass the test of time because of the plot, which as we see is quite simple, but because of the decisive innovations that Flaubert bequeathed to the modern novel; the truth is that Emma is one of the most famous protagonists of our culture. So much so that it has become an adjective to name that melancholic ailment of those who unsuccessfully try to adjust reality to literary fiction: bovarism.
But what if Emma wasn’t sick with bad reading? Because she had clandestinely read dozens of romance novels in the convent where she had been educated, but not all women are or were readers of romance novels. Why do they also dream of marriage then?
Madame Bovary is on the limit between the transaction between men and the marriage “for love”. Charles Bovary enjoys the company of Emma, daughter of a patient for whom he healed a broken leg, for months after being widowed by his first wife. Slow lunches in which he is spoiled for being in mourning and lazy afternoons in which he converses with Monsieur Rouault’s only daughter. Charles would have wanted his life to go on like this, cared for by servants in his house, sleeping soundly in his bed, and spending his days off in the fields. But suddenly it crosses his mind that Emma could get married and he is afraid that the placid comfort he inhabits will end. Emma’s father is not convinced that a quasi-doctor is the best match, the truth is that he is waiting for a candidate who gives him the possibility of a better alliance, one that allows him to enlarge the farm, but the girl is getting big and it is clear that he has no talent for field administration. So the two men come to an agreement. Charles makes the proposal, Monsieur Rouault delightedly accepts. However, the father does not want to give up his daughter without her consent. We do not know what her father said to her, nor what she responded, because that conversation was wisely suppressed by Flaubert, but we can imagine that they will have evaluated pros and cons, and that the pros will have seemed more important to him than the cons. However, Emma does not go to the altar loaded only with arguments about the convenience of that union. She also arrives loaded with illusions. She infuses the simple mediocrity of her future husband with all the fairy dust that books and traditions had to offer: preparations full of pink rococo roses, a full-blown wedding and the gestures of romantic love were the perfect gears of her domination machine.
But, going back, Emma is not an exceptional case. Emma is all the girls of her time, although not all of them had the courage to take her illusions that far. From her time and ours. Because, although marriage and the family are being questioned through feminism, the dream of “having a family” seems to continue to be the highest in the ranking of female dreams.
Didn’t women who dream of marriage know that a lifetime of forced, unpaid and never recognized labor awaited them? Didn’t they know that if they wanted to back down it would be impossible or at a very high cost? Don’t women now know that romantic love, full of “I want you to be mine”, “I want to be your whole world” implies a ceding of autonomy? Don’t they know that “having a family” entails, even when the children have gone to “form their own homes” that as long as there is a husband, the kitchen continues to be the territory most frequented by them? If anything can be said of the modern Western world, it is that women are not forced to marry. Women marry of their own free will. And not only that, but they actively participate in organizing a celebration destined to be “the most important day” of their lives. Not all women, of course. Not all men destroy the autonomy of women, in case it is necessary to clarify it. But all the statistics tell us that married men have much more freedom and enjoy much greater autonomy than married women. It is enough to go to a family reunion in any school and do the count of how many men there are and how many women are present.
Over these days we have heard phrases of astonishment, indignation, anguish and terror over and over again. How can it be that people choose, of their own free will, to sign a blank check to those who say out loud that they intend to take away rights and impose greater civil, economic, and cultural restrictions. How can it be that young people choose those who are friends of the repression. How can teachers vote for those who want to close the public school. Why health professionals choose to be governed by those who want to eliminate the Ministry of Health.
Perhaps we could start by asking ourselves why it seems normal to us that women (many women, too many women) dream of a white dress, a bouquet of roses and a father carrying them down a red carpet into the arms of a man. Why does it seem so natural to us that the goal of every decent person is to start a family, live in a house (with a dog or a cat, but always with a garden), have offspring and a “decent job” that involves at least eight hours of each day and that the time to do what makes us happy is called “free time”. That it seems admirable that someone becomes a millionaire at the expense of the work of a lot of people. And that a lot of people voluntarily give their workforce. Out there, if patriarchy and capitalism stop seeming natural to us, we could find some answers. Who knows.
