Lessons on ingratitude from Madame Bovary

This week I read my very first classic French novel, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. The book had a pleasant fatness and pages browned by too many years floating unread between book sales. Almost unaware of myself, I sped through the first 200 pages with surprising inertia. “My goodness,” I thought, “Maybe I am learning to read again. Or maybe it’s just the book.”

Now, I don’t know whether you will like Madame Bovary as much I do. Its content could easily bore or disgust you, particularly if you’re looking for a lesson in good behavior. The tale, if no professorial presence ever compelled you to read it, follows Emma Bovary through a string of adulteries motivated by her discontentment with her kind husband Charles. It is, ultimately, a lesson in the consequences of selfishness. And since I had the pleasure of reading it without knowledge of the ending—a gruesome, creepy, even horrifying surprise—I will free you to enjoy the same circumstance. I will tell you only that the consequences of Madame Bovary’s sins do not affect her alone. The book, though dismal, has a robust conscience integral to its arc. Like sin in real life, Madame Bovary’s ripples out from its source and brings death to those around her.

It’s hard to explain why you like a book about immoral people who eventually get their comeuppance. Believe me, I’ve been trying to explain it all week. Isn’t it better to read a book with people you can like and emulate and—for goodness’ sake—talk about in polite conversation? At first, I wondered what was the matter with me. Why had I liked the book so much?

Like any confused millennial, I turned to Google. I looked up how other Bovary readers described their experiences with the book. I found the usual: people disparaging the characters for their baseness, judging them for their choices, and totally missing the point of a work that has earned its place in the canon of Western literature. But I also found a review written by a woman who read Bovary during her engagement, the season in which dreams, expectations, and demands can run so high they lead quickly to a crash into discontentment. The book, she said, had taught her to stop chasing the elusive mirage of happiness right over the next hill.

Madame Bovary thought she would be happy once she got married. Then she thought she would be happy once she had wealth. Then she needed a lover. Once abandoned, she demanded another. Madame Bovary missed the good life and the faithful husband that passed every day before her eyes. And before you, reader, run to condemn her, you must remember that all ingratitude is blindness to the good. And which of us has not been ungrateful?

The Apostle Paul learned the secret of being content in hunger or in plenty. By implication, we must learn the secret too. Madame Bovary, which outraged readers at its publication, leads to the same conclusion by another route. Have you placed “ingratitude” in the “not-so-serious” sin category? Madame Bovary will tell you it doesn’t belong there—in a way you will never forget.