Selfish?
How about average?
Emma represents not only the character of the average person who lived during her time and place —— Her husband wished he was more accomplished; Homais, the pharmacist, continuously infers awareness of high culture; Dupois, the legal clerk, reads from Homer during Emma’s pretentious ”salon;” Hippolyte, the gimp, expresses a desire to be dashing and attractive to women. Even the money lender, Lheureux, maintains a veneer of good taste and breeding in his dress and spoken manner. Pretending to be something more akin to a banker than engaging in usury. Finally, Boulanger, though quite well off with society connections, uses the fact that he has more money than the common folks in the village to seduce Emma, who, seeing herself as mired in poverty, regards him as rife with wealth. Extending further pretense with expensive gifts to appear a lady of means and worthy of his ‘class.’ Boulanger himself is not unrealistic about his own financial standing. His gifts to Emma are few and not extravagant. ——
Emma is the same as the average lower- middle- or upper-middle class person who is swept up with class consciousness and, due to that, attempts to live a bit beyond their immediate financial means.
Imagine a nation full of people accepting credit to purchase homes priced to cost far more than most of them can comfortably spend during the course of their lives, along with a large number of those remaining living basically from one paycheck to the next, and you might have an idea of just how many people conduct themselves more or less just as Emma Bovary does in the book.
So, Emma embraces an arrogance common not only among the middle-class of her time and place, but which is as easily found in middle-class America today.
1- A desire to be wealthy;
2- Desire to attain admirable social standing (if not full-blown fame). To be viewed as important in some way — professional standing, membership in a socially acceptable, or unacceptable group (either real or imagined), etc.;
3- A desire to be regarded as superior to some people while also being at least equivalent to others no matter how much more intellectually aware or accomplished either might be; (a sort of all men are created equal complex)
4- Young women and their parents praying the girl will wed a doctor or lawyer, or at least a man with a steady income, hopefully on the higher end of the scale in the area where they live and work… by comparison to their friends and neighbors.
Emma Bovary, as most people in developed societies, desired to be privy to as much wealth and leisure as she could attain by whatever means were available to her. However, this amounted to no more than her husband’s income and social standing. She’d imagined his being a doctor was sufficient to meet her desire. Overlooking his indication of not being very accomplished and leading a dull life himself. In those days doctors did not hold the same social standing they do now because the practice of medicine was still a good bit hit or miss. Most were little better than a witch doctor or old woman offering herbs and roots. They might be able to guide you through a fever and do a passable job of resetting a broken leg bone, but little more. But, as with Boulanger, Emma saw the doctor as inhabiting a higher station in life and deluded herself to believe that every station above her own was a station of wealth and excess.
So, to close, it makes little sense to find Emma detestable. She’s no different than your cousin Goober. Perhaps even a lot like you. At worst she is to be pitied. Her greatest sin lay in allowing her deluded perspectives to bring near and utter ruination to her friends and family.
If Emma Bovary is to be understood as stupid, she’s recognizable to be no more stupid than most people still are.
“Your thinking is untidy, like most so-called thinking today.” (Murder, My Sweet)
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