Emma Bovary as Reader and Consumer: Jong's Feminist Lens
This paper examines Erica Jong's 1997 essay "Fashion Victim," in which the author of Fear of Flying offers a critical reading of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Rather than producing a straightforward feminist tract, Jong highlights Emma Bovary's role as an avid but misguided reader of sentimental fiction and as a compulsive consumer of material goods. The paper surveys Jong's overview of competing critical perspectives—including those of Nabokov and Marxist critics—before focusing on Jong's central argument: that Emma dies not from poison or sensuality, but from her failed attempt to transform her life into an erotic novel. The paper also notes Jong's attention to the role of religion in Emma's interior life and Flaubert's acknowledged self-scrutiny in crafting his heroine.
- Introduction: Jong and Madame Bovary: Jong's unexpected feminist choice of Flaubert's classic
- Critical Approaches to Madame Bovary: Nabokov, Marxist, and formalist readings surveyed
- Emma as Reader and Consumer of Culture: Emma's reading habits and material consumption analyzed
- Flaubert's Self-Scrutiny and Psychological Realism: Flaubert's self-dissection and Emma's interior depth
- Emma's Quest for Ecstasy and Transcendence: Emma's spiritual hunger and the illusion-reality gap
- Conclusion: The Modern Relevance of Bovary: Emma as universal modern heroine seeking transcendence
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper integrates direct quotations from Jong's essay effectively, using them to anchor each analytical claim rather than as decoration.
- It moves logically from a survey of competing critical perspectives to Jong's specific argument, showing awareness of the interpretive landscape before committing to one reading.
- The paper identifies a genuine paradox at the heart of the novel—a novelist satirizing a heroine besotted by novels—and uses it to illuminate both Flaubert's method and Jong's insight.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates source analysis: rather than simply summarizing Jong's essay, it evaluates Jong's critical moves, acknowledges the limitations of her reading ("does not offer an extensive, deep interpretation"), and situates her argument within a broader critical tradition that includes Nabokov and Marxist approaches. This multi-perspective framing is a hallmark of literary scholarship.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by contextualizing Jong as a second-wave feminist author, then surveys competing critical frameworks (formalist, historical, Marxist) before narrowing to Jong's core thesis about Emma as failed reader. Subsequent paragraphs develop the paradox of Flaubert satirizing reading through a novel, explore Emma's spiritual hunger, and close with Jong's claim that Emma's quest is universally modern. The conclusion briefly assesses the essay's strengths and limitations.
Introduction: Jong and Madame Bovary
When Erica Jong — the author of the second-wave feminist text 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 confines 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 provides 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 fully accept Jong's critical perspective, is useful in gleaning the various ways in which Emma has been interpreted through the eyes of different critics throughout the centuries.
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