Jong, Erica. \"Fashion Victim.\" Salon.com.

Jong, Erica. "Fashion Victim." Salon.com. September 15, 1997. 1 Oct 2006. http://www.salon.com/sept97/bovary970915.html

Madame Bovary is not a feminist text, but 1970's feminist author Jong and author of Fear of Flying suggest that Emma dies because she has attempted to make her life into an erotic novel. Focuses mainly on the circumstances leading up to Emma's suicide and how her inner "erotic novel" led to her death. Jong cites key passages and examples from the text. Jong suggest that Emma dies because she has attempted to make her life into an erotic novel. Focuses mainly on the circumstances leading up to Emma's suicide and how her inner "erotic novel" led to her death. Jong cites key passages and examples from the text.

When 1970's feminist author Erica Jong, the author of the 'Second Wave' Women's movement text entitled Fear of Flying was asked to write an essay about her favorite literary classic she selected Madame Bovary. Her selection may strike the reader as initially unsurprising. After all, is not Emma Bovary a frustrated but materially spoiled middle-class housewife who seeks to escape the confiners of her existence by engaging in erotic transgressions, much like many of Jong's own heroines? Emma might seem like a ripe case study for the 1970s women's movement. However, Jong's critical reading of the novel is not a doctrinaire feminist tract, rather it brings to light unexpected aspects of the Flaubert novel, such as the heroine's role as a consumer of written as well as material culture.

Jong begins her 1997 essay "Fashion Victim" with a historical overview of previous criticism that is useful introductory material for any new reader of Bovary. She examines the reasons behind Madame Bovary's durability as a work of fiction, quoting the Russian author and critic Vladimir Nabokov's comment upon the text: "A book [like Bovary] lives longer than a girl [like Emma]." (Jong, 1997) Thus, Jong's essay "Fashion Victim," even if one does not accept Jong's own critical perspective, is useful in gleaning the various ways in which Emma has been interpreted through the gaze of different critics throughout the centuries. Nabokov, for example, saw Gustave Flaubert as a master craftsman of intricate prose description. What could have been pulp fiction became instead a condemnation of bourgeois life in mid-19th century France simply because Flaubert was so skilled in his manipulation and observation of detail. Nabokov suggested that it is not what the work is about, but how it transforms the relatively ordinary conflicts and details of a mundane, even trivial woman's life, that makes Madame Bovary a literary classic.

Thus, Jong concedes there are a number of approaches to take with Madame Bovary beyond her reading, or a feminist reading. One method is to stress the construction of the novel, and to de-emphasize the central figure as merely an imaginative creation of Flaubert. As such, the novel is not a social commentary at all, but merely a sublime vehicle for Flaubert's artistry and obsessions -- even the most personal of the author's fixations like his foot fetishism. Another competing perspective is to examine the work from a historical perspective in the history of the European novel and 19th century middle class culture. The novel is realistic in its detail, rather than fantastic, and had seismic effects upon how 'good prose' was supposed to function in a novel's narrative. A Marxist critic might note how the novel both satirizes the bourgeois, even while reading novels for leisure was a bourgeois cultural institution. The novel examines "consumption as an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual." (Jong, 1997)

But Jong points out that women readers very much like Emma would read novels like Madame Bovary, to see themselves reflected within its pages, as well as critiqued. This aspect of Madame Bovary is what interests Jong the most, specifically, the fact that Emma is a reader, not just a heroine, and a bad reader as well as a morally bad heroine. Emma likes the type of pulp, romantic and sentimental fiction condemned by Nabokov, the 19th century version of Harlequin Romances. Emma is not an artist of prose like her creator, she is a consumer of written culture in a very literal as well as a metaphorical sense, just as she consumes all sorts of material goods in her futile quest for fulfillment, and dies by consuming poison at the end of the novel.

This is what makes Emma so fascinating as a character. She engages in the same project of interpretation and authorship as her reader, even if it is a failed project. "But what interests me most in Madame Bovary is the heroine's fondness for reading. She dies because she has attempted to make her life into a novel -- and it is the foolishness of that quest that Flaubert's clinical style mocks." (Jong, 1997) Emma essentially dies of a surfeit of prose, not of sensuality or poison.

The paradox of Flaubert's project of writing to satirize reading is clear, through Jong's interpretation of his most famous work. "A novelist mocking a heroine besotted by novels? Then this must be a writer mocking himself! And indeed, Flaubert memorably said that he had drawn Madame Bovary from life -- and after himself. 'I have dissected myself to the quick,' he wrote." (Jong, 1997) This acts as an important reminder that Flaubert did not merely carefully observe and record the mundane details of the world he saw around him, but also engaged in rigorous psychological self-scrutiny to produce a sense of realism within the pages of Bovary. Emma's interior life, however focused it may be centered on shallow objects and pursuits, is what makes her stand apart from the depicted heroines of pulp novels. Flaubert's prose is not merely descriptive and realistic. It also is psychologically full of nuance and more detailed than authors of sensationalist novels, whose heroines do not have a clear, discernable motivation for why they transgress sexual norms.