For those of you who read Madame Bovary

I guess the books on file project was good for something--I've gotten to revisit one of my favorite books. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray and liked it so-so; I also read A Streetcar Named Desire and thought it amazing. But when I read Madame Bovary I thought, "wow, is Flaubert making fun of me?" It appealed to my sense of irony, that an author could build up a character such as Emma Bovary only to ridicule her. And also that he included those subtle references to sex that Foster mentions in How to Read Literature Like a Professor. You have to understand, Madame Bovary was marked as pornography and banned in France in the 1850's. It's just funny. Flaubert describes the first time Leon and Emma have "encounters," is this not amazing? --"bourgeois stared in wonder at this thing unheard of in the provinces: a cab with all blinds drawn that reappeared incessantly, more tightly sealed than a tomb and tossed around like a ship on the waves." I think it's clever. I think Flaubert is clever and most interesting. One of those guys who dropped law practice to write and also decided he was too good for life, so he instead became a steadfast observer.

It is refreshing to see an author reject Romanticism in favor of Realism, especially concerning a novel of a romantic nature (I am really tired of "long sighs" and "gasps for breath"). Funny how Flaubert succeeds in taking out the passion and instead inserting disdain--you begin to realize that Madame Bovary is neither a drama nor an analysis, it is more of a social experiment with Emma as the subject--all in effort to poke fun at the banality of middle-class life. On a lighter note, Fascination (the French version of Twilight) is picking up. Really, learning is a great excuse to do something you don't want people to know that you have wanted to do. Defining vocab is addicting. So is Edward.

This week's theme for my mythology directed study was love stories. I read a really riveting one about the marriage between psyche and cupid. Love and soul. It had to do with fidelity more than anything, and then a trip to the Underworld. Good stuff.

And this week I realized that Weird Science was based off of Pygmalean. I'm sorry Ms. Marcy, I love movies! Forgive me XD

"Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ~Gustave Flaubert