Madame Bovary: Part 1

To begin I would be lying to myself horribly if I said that this text did not alienate me, Therefore in all efforts to be an honest person I'll put it out there bluntly: I could not relate to a majority of this text at all. However that being said it does not mean that I did not find Madame Bovary to be interesting. Personally I derived a unique form of entertainment from this first half of the book because I found myself so far removed from Emma that she became a novelty to me. Now Charles on the other hand I could find more to relate with from the mild frustration and distraction during his professional studies, to his almost naive approach to relationships. To put it simply Charles does not have an original bone in his body, and if he did he would not have the chutzpah to do anything with it. As a boy he is described as being ordinary with very few defining features except for one of his possessions: His hat, which to put it gently is something that I imagine to look like Parisian runway fashion crossed with a monster of Dr. Frankensteins, but to each his own. From the narrators point of view the hat seems to represent a misfit, something that was put together with the best of intentions but falls flat when it comes to a cohesive execution, somewhat like Emma herself. Even if it is a stretch of the imagination I saw a connection from that hideous hat to the staring attraction herself, consider the fact that her father sent her to be well schooled in a convent and that she was taught all of the skills a lady needed to possess in those times: reading, singing, playing the piano, painting, sewing, ect. However when the time came for all of those skills to be executed in such a manner that it might make her husband happy she falls short due to her own personal disinterest in Charles and eventual disdain for his presence. Emma is a complicated creature for the majority of the time she is incapacitated from doing much of anything useful due to her self invented boredom. By dreaming up lives of grandeur she progressively grows discontent with her normal lifestyle and fails to find anything of valuable interest unless it is a newly attentive male party. Her discontentment with normal life comes to a climax of sorts at the La Vaubyésssard ball, where she experiences her first real taste of "the good life".  The experience at the ball while told through her Vaseline lens whets her appetite and fuels her desire for an upper class existence that she may very well never obtain (I guess we'll just have to see how the second half goes). Although Emma feels as if she was born to live in that sect of high society I felt that while she has a certain stateliness about her she tries too hard, after all most high society ladies probably wouldn't dance with the same man twice in a row lest anyone start an unsavory rumor about the pair. A nice growing theme throughout the first half of this story is the excitement that she derives from new men in her life, in the beginning she got a certain amount of pleasure out of Charles but soon grew bored of him because he wasn't rich, good looking, or very interesting. Then she moved on to the Vicomte, a dashingly handsome fellow of high society but his attention only lasted an evening which she would fondly look back upon as if it were a pleasant dream. After the ball her attention becomes focused on the young Leon, who is also handsome but more importantly has the talent of engaging her attention for long periods of time which for Emma is something that can make her days go faster and her step feel lighter. However perhaps the most aggressive of all is Rodolphe, the new bachelor in town who refuses to take no for an answer, and maybe that is what irritated me the most? The fact that shes willing to ignore her husband for most of their marriage and to all together hate his presence for no good reason but when a man she barely knows forces his company on her she just takes it.