Entrapment in Madame Bovary and Revolutionary Road

While reading Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, I was surprised to come across a reference to Emma Bovary, the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, Madame Bovary. This prompted me to pick up Flaubert’s novel yet again (it is one of those books I read at least once every decade) and see what similarities I could find between the two novels.

Madame Bovary, a harsh critique of bourgeois life in mid-nineteenth-century France, focuses on the story of Emma Rouault, a passionate, beautiful young woman who feels trapped by the circumstances of her life. She marries the first man who asks for her hand, a man by the name of Charles Bovary, who is set up from the very beginning as a dullard. He is not a bad man by any means, but he is a plodding, boring  man, which might be even worse in Emma's eyes. Flaubert writes of him: “Charles’s conversation was as flat as any pavement” (31), and the reader frequently watches him nodding off after dinner and falling right to sleep when getting into bed with Emma. He is soporific–basically the opposite of what Emma wants, which is passion and excitement. 

Poor Emma. We frequently find her “standing at the window, her forehead against the glass” (12), peering out pensively. In fact, this may be the most memorable, persistent image of her in the novel (I found instances of her looking out through windows on pages 12, 29, 42, 48, 87, 95, 101, 227, and 235--let me know if I missed any). Emma longs to go out into the world and experience everything that life has to offer, but she is cruelly trapped by her stultifying marriage, her status as a woman, and the moral conventions of 1850s bourgeois life. Basically, she is stuck and has no choice but to wait “for something to happen” (49) to her. At the end of Part I, we are told that Emma is pregnant, which will only further shackle her to Charles and a life of banal domesticity. 

In Part II, Monsieur and Madame Bovary move to Yonville, which, unfortunately for Emma, is yet another place where nothing happens. The only difference is that Emma finds a kindred spirit in a young clerk named Leon, who, like Emma, is bored out of his mind in Yonville. The two develop a “mutual sympathy” (67), quietly discussing books, art, and Paris, and Leon falls madly in love with Emma. At this point in the novel, though, Emma isn’t ready to buck the conventions of the time and become a mistress; she distances herself from the young man and ultimately he leaves for Paris, leaving her to once again stare out the window, depressed and wishing that she was the one who had been able to escape. 

When the dashing, wealthy womanizer Rodolphe Boulanger shows up in Yonville, Emma doesn’t have a chance. He immediately sizes up Charles and Emma’s situation and describes it in his typically crude manner:  

“While he [Charles] trots off after his patients, she [Emma] sits darning socks. And we are bored. We want to live in town, dance the polka every night. Poor little thing! Grasping for love, just like a carp on the kitchen-table wants to be in water. Three words of gallantry and she’d adore you, I’m sure of it. She would be tender, charming . . . Yes, but how do we get rid of her afterwards?” (104).

The sad thing is that Rodophe’s description of Emma is completely on point; her desperation for love and passion makes her an easy mark for this experienced womanizer. She throws herself into the adulterous affair with complete abandon--"I have a lover! A lover!" (131)--sometimes running across meadows in the early morning after Charles has left to surprise Rodolphe at his chateau. She literally becomes a “fool in love,” and grows increasingly demanding of Rodolphe, which he doesn’t like one bit. It comes as no surprise that, after a four-year love affair and plans to run away together, the lout callously abandons her, sending her a breakup letter and hightailing it out of Yonville. 

As you can imagine, Emma’s despair returns. . . . in a bad way.  

I don’t want to reveal the rest of what happens in the novel, for those of you who haven’t had the deep pleasure of reading it yet, but I will tell you (only because I think it’s obvious) that Emma’s life ends in tragedy. She is never able to attain the happiness that she so desperately longs for. 

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In his article “Like Men Betrayed,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2008, James Wood calls Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road “the decade’s great, terrifying indictment of suburban surrender” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/like-men-betrayed). (It has since been made into a film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.)

Frank and April Wheeler are a married couple who live with their two kids in a house in suburban Connecticut, right at the end of a street called "Revolutionary Road." The novel is told from Frank’s point of view, which is perhaps one reason that I didn’t make the connection to Madame Bovary when I first read it. Looking at April through the lens of Madame Bovary, however, reveals many similarities. Like Emma, April loathes her life in the suburbs. While her husband gets to go to New York to work every day, and (unbeknownst to her) have an affair with a secretary, she is stuck at home watching the kids and completing her household duties. She is just as trapped in her Connecticut home as Emma is in Yonville.

Out of desperation, she persuades Frank that what they need to do is make a big change and move to Europe “for good.” She’s already planned the whole thing: She will get a job once there, which will allow them to live comfortably and allow Frank to “find himself” (114) and decide what it is that he’d really like to do in the future. Frank goes along with her plan, mainly because it brings some harmony to their otherwise fraught relationship, but he has huge reservations about the move, so when April discovers that she is pregnant, he is finally given a reason to cancel, or at least postpone, their move.

The pregnancy gives Frank an easy out, but for April it proves fatal. It means the end of her dreams of escape and of liberation from the ennui of her life. She considers getting an abortion so that they can go ahead with their plan, but Frank guilt-trips and bullies her into submission. 

While Emma, in Madame Bovary, is entrapped by marriage, her powerless status as a woman, and the conventions of the time, April is ultimately entrapped by motherhood and by a husband who likes the safety of suburban life more than he lets on. Unable to bear having another child, April tries to abort the baby herself in the bathtub and ends up killing both herself and the baby and leaving her two other children motherless.  

Both of these novels have bold, beautiful heroines who are LARGER than the small lives that try to contain them. While their ultimate endings were tragic–even horrific!--perhaps living out the lives that were expected of them would have been even more torturesome for them. I’m thinking of Laura Brown in the film The Hours, who, when asked whether she regretted abandoning her husband and child, replied:

“What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It’s what you can bear. There it is. No one’s going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.”

What do you think? Please leave a comment. And if you enjoyed what you read, please consider sharing it with others.  :o)