Madame Bovary and the Perils of Media Consumption
Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary’s search for “something more." The wife of a doctor in a small French town, Emma becomes dissatisfied with her husband and her life, finding that “deep in her soul…she was waiting for something to happen.” When she pursues that “something,” Emma finds fleeting happiness—but every step toward adventure is also a step toward destruction. In its examination of Emma’s desires, Flaubert’s classic speaks not only to the social conditions of 19th century France, but also to the consumerist and media-stimulated dissatisfaction we face in the 21st century.
Illustration by Charles Léandre of Madame Bovary, engraved by Eugène Decisy
Brought up in a convent, Emma develops expectations about the outside world from novels. When she meets a young doctor who attends to her father, she thinks she is falling in love. Soon after she marries, she realizes that her husband is actually a tremendous bore: “Charles’s conversation was as flat as a sidewalk.” Unlike the characters in her novels, Charles “did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day, a riding term she had come upon in a novel.” Her ideal is shattered: “shouldn’t a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries?”
Emma’s frustrations reach a fever pitch after she attends a party thrown by social superiors. She becomes enchanted by the world beyond her village and a life beyond her means. She begins to subscribe to magazines, and
she devoured all the reports of first nights, horse races, and soirées, took an interest in the debut of a singer, the opening of a shop. She knew the latest fashions, the addresses of the good tailors, the days for going to the Bois and the Opéra. In Eugène Sue, she studied descriptions of furnishings; she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them the imagined satisfaction of her own desire.
While she fantasizes about Paris, her own life becomes impossible to bear:
The closer things were to her, anyway, the more her thoughts shrank from them. Everything that immediately surrounded her—the tiresome countryside, the idiotic petits bourgeois, the mediocrity of life—seemed to her an exception in the world, a particular happenstance in which she was caught, while beyond, as far as the eye could see, extended the immense land of felicity and passion.
Soon Emma begins an affair and starts spending money she does not have.
The parallels between Emma’s reading material and our media are remarkable. Emma’s novels made her husband unappealing. In our own time, social media usage has been linked to increased dissatisfaction in relationships. We follow celebrities more closely than Emma ever could. Gwyneth Paltrow recently “confessed” that she is eating bread and cheese again, which we know because numerous news organizations reported it. Of course, Gwyneth Paltrow is also the force behind Goop, a lifestyle and wellness brand and company, often criticized and parodied for some of its prices and products, which it sells to chiefly to women, many of whom seem to be pursuing aspirational lifestyles. Not only do people today continue to set their expectations based on media, those platforms now help us buy directly what we see celebrities wearing and shows featuring, with sometimes seamless integration. Amazon has a “Shop the Show” feature, which allows you to easily purchase items from the shows you watch on their streaming platform.
Emma is addicted to her novels, much like we are addicted to our screens. Emma’s mother-in-law realizes novels are a source of Emma’s dissatisfaction and considers the bookseller a “purveyor of poison.” But Emma can no more be parted from her books than we can from our phones, despite all the dire warnings. She brings her books to the table at dinner and reads away. She would rather have her books than her husband: “So as not to have that man lying there next to her at night asleep, she managed, by the unpleasant faces she made, to relegate him to the third floor; and till morning she would read lurid books full of orgies and scenes of bloodshed.” Emma prefers the unreal to the real, much like many people struggle in relationships today because they prefer pornography to partnered sex.
In Emma’s time and our own, media fuels unrealistic expectations but the omnipresence of markets and opportunity for consumption allows our dissatisfaction to lead us down a dark path. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the consumer economy was just coming to towns in France. Emma could access not only the magazines, but some of the material goods she craved. Middle-class consumers today can learn about and reach for unprecedented things. Ordinary people can purchase almost anything from anywhere and have it shipped to our homes. Companies like Goldbelly exist to make available gourmet foods that are prepared and sold fresh, far away from where we live. Emma was extended credit by a local merchant, but most people now can get credit more easily than Emma could. At present, Americans have over $1 trillion in credit card debt.
In Madame Bovary, Emma’s satisfactions are all fleeting. Décor does not satisfy. She and her lover Léon grow bored with each other. Even when she indulges to an extreme degree, Emma cannot find happiness. Flaubert writes:
It didn’t matter. She was not happy and never had been. Why was life so inadequate, why did the things she depended on turn immediately to dust?... Nothing, anyway, was worth looking for; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every pleasure its own disgust, and the sweetest kisses left on your lips no more than a vain longing for a more sublime pleasure.
Americans today have also chased excess. We have so much stuff that we repurchase items because we cannot find them. We are fueling a self-storage boom. We have enjoyed ourselves into remarkable rates of obesity. We happily indulge, but we have increasing rates of anxiety and depression, much of that credibly linked to social media and certainly not aided by financial debt.
As Emma chases after what she does not have, she brings destruction on those around her. She spends more time chasing lovers than loving her husband or daughter. She spends all her family’s money. In our time, parents’ screentime adversely affects children. Americans chase big wins on sports betting; we have wagered $450 billion since 2018 and gambling-related bankruptcy is on the rise. We want to wear designer clothes, vacation every year, and always have a new car. But we are behind on car payments at a record level.
Emma Bovary is selfish and silly, but Flaubert writes that “every bourgeois has believed, if only for a day, for a minute, that he is capable of boundless passions, lofty enterprises. The most halfhearted libertine has dreamed of sultans’ wives; every notary carries within him the debris of a poet.” Once those “boundless passions” are linked to people and products which we have the ability to pursue, but not the ability to attain, we are destined for trouble. When credit and goods and are available, and that bourgeois is aspirational and inspired, he may chase what will eventually catch and eat him.
Emma Bovary’s ambitions and adventures make her ridiculous. The same thing could happen to anyone. We spend hours a week on social media exposing ourselves to influencers whose looks and lives are beyond our means. Every media platform we encounter is attempting to sell us something. All of us have opportunity to observe the gap between ideal and reality. If we are bored in our relationships, we can swipe through the dating apps and ponder alternatives. Nearly all of us have access to credit with which we can pursue our aspirational goals. Emma Bovary was a pioneer of middle-class yearning and the unrealistic pursuit of something more inspired by media. She offers us not only a cautionary tale, but, unfortunately, a familiar one.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She has a book about World War I, Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War, and she has written for various publications, including Front Porch Republic, Comment, and Inside Higher Ed. She is editor in chief of Orange Blossom Ordinary.