Emma Bovary Would Have Had a BookTok Account
Flaubert tried to warn us. We turned his warning into a genre.
I was sixteen when I first read Madame Bovary, and my reaction was essentially: oh, come ON.
Emma, pull yourself together. You have a house. You have a husband who adores you. He’s not exactly Brad Pitt, fine, but he’s also not setting fire to anything. Try a hobby. Learn to embroider. Take a walk. Good God, woman.
I was very wise at sixteen.
Then life happened. A few relationships that started like cinema and ended like a particularly bleak documentary. The specific heartbreak of watching something passionate slowly become comfortable, then routine, then — if you’re unlucky — invisible. The discovery that the feeling at the beginning, that slightly unhinged, can’t-eat, slightly-losing-your-mind feeling, is, in fact, a chemical high. And like all chemical highs, it ends. And like all chemical highs, once you know what it feels like, real life seems a little flat by comparison.
I reread Bovary in my late twenties. Emma, I owe you an apology.
For those who haven’t read it — and no judgment, it’s not exactly a beach read — here’s the situation. Emma Rouault is a French farmer’s daughter, raised on romantic novels, who marries a country doctor named Charles Bovary. Charles is gentle, devoted, and utterly, catastrophically ordinary. He loves her completely and expresses it in the least cinematic ways imaginable. Emma, who expected marriage to feel like her novels, finds that it feels like... Tuesday. Repeatedly.
She eventually has a daughter she feels little connection to — a detail Flaubert drops without drama, because he’s Flaubert and he doesn’t flinch. She takes lovers. She accumulates debts funding a lifestyle worthy of her fantasies. It ends badly. Very badly. This is 19th century French literature, not a Netflix special.
Now here is where Flaubert gets interesting.
He wasn’t writing a feminist manifesto. He wasn’t writing a condemnation of marriage, or of Charles, or of provincial French life. He was writing about something older and more universal: the danger of fiction.
A century before Bovary, Cervantes had already made the same diagnosis with Don Quixote — a man so saturated with chivalric romances that he could no longer distinguish a giant from a windmill. The mechanism is identical. Consume enough of a particular fantasy, and reality starts to look like a malfunction.
Flaubert just made his protagonist a woman, which made 19th century readers considerably more uncomfortable. A man tilting at windmills is absurd and comic. A woman wanting more than her life offers is a problem to be managed.
The condition even has a name: bovarysme. The tendency to see yourself as you wish to be rather than as you are, and to measure your actual life against an imagined ideal. Coined by a philosopher shortly after the novel was published. It entered the dictionary. We then proceeded to build entire industries around it.
Because here’s what Flaubert could not have anticipated: the romantic novel didn’t die. It evolved. Grew. Put on better cover art and figured out the algorithm.
The billionaire with the emotional range of a filing cabinet but the body of a Greek statue. The meet-cute that blossoms, without challenges or bad timing or the horrible intimacy of seeing someone eat soup for the first time, into something transcendent. The hero who knows exactly what to say, and says it at the exact right moment, usually at the airport. The ending that arrives like a perfectly timed punchline — not because the characters worked for it, but because the plot needed it to happen by chapter twenty-eight.
This isn’t a screed against romance. But I do think we underestimate how much this stuff gets into us. Into how we assess our partners. Our relationships. That quiet, faintly embarrassing feeling that your life should have more score behind it. That if he didn’t plan something extraordinary for your anniversary, maybe the feeling just isn’t there. That passion and longevity are supposed to somehow coexist indefinitely, because they do in every book you’ve ever read, so why not in your living room?
Important caveat: Emma’s social constraints were real — suffocating, by our standards — and the fact that her own story is named after her husband’s surname is no coincidence. But Emma also makes choices. Destructive ones, repeatedly. She is complicit in her own undoing. Flaubert was too honest a writer to let her off entirely, and too humane a one to condemn her entirely either.
Charles Bovary was, by any objective measure, a good man. Kind. Loyal. Genuinely in love with his wife until the end — past the end, actually, which is gutting if you think about it too long. In another story, he’s the reward. In Emma’s head, shaped by everything she’d ever read, he was the consolation prize.
That is the tragedy. Not that she wanted more. Wanting more is human and legitimate and, frankly, often correct. The tragedy is that she couldn’t see what she actually had, because she was too busy measuring it against something that was never real to begin with.
The question the book keeps asking, 170 years later, is simply this: do you know the difference between what you want and what you’ve been sold?
Not an easy question. The selling is very good now. Better than Flaubert could have imagined. It has a recommendation engine.
But the first step, probably, is taking an honest look at what you consume and ask yourself how realistic it is. And being honest about the answer.
Charles was fine, you know. Charles was genuinely fine.