![]() ![]() Later, it is his father who decides that he will study medicine and his mother who chooses for him a place to live. On the first day of class, the teacher has him copy out 20 times “I’m ridiculous.” The boy makes no complaint. He inspires neither trust nor tenderness. In the first pages of the novel, Flaubert describes him as a clumsy and timorous adolescent who can barely say his name in answer to the teacher’s question. The truth is that Charles Bovary lacks imagination. His rather stolid behavior is the fruit of a lackluster life drawn in black and white. Let me be clear: Monsieur Bovary exists so that Madame can fulfill her tragic destiny. Without him, Emma would have no meaning, she would never become a romantic heroine, she would never know passion or ecstatic bliss. Let us remember that Madame Bovary begins and ends with him, not with Emma. ![]() And yet, Monsieur Bovary is an absolutely necessary character. ![]() No one feels for him an all-consuming passion, no one imagines him climbing balconies at night or fighting a duel in a snow-covered glade. ![]() He is the one who leads an honest, regular, hard-working life, with no other ambition than that of quiet contentment, with no surprises. Of the two, he is the second fiddle, the more prosaic, the least impulsive, the one resigned to a decent state of anonymity, the one with whom Flaubert does not identify. He is the one who gives Emma an excuse for her infidelity, though he has never demanded that she be faithful to him. ![]()
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