Madame Bovary: The Recipe Of A ‘Perfect’ Literary Character?

Emma Bovary, widely known as Madame Bovary, is perhaps one of the most popular literary characters created by French writer Gustave Flaubert in his novel of the same name. The novel was originally written in French and translated into English at least 19 times.

Madame Bovary has been adapted multiple times over decades of film history. If we examine the character of Madame Bovary, as sketched by Gustave Flaubert, she is a woman who looks enticing enough to get noticed by any film director. Madame Bovary aspired to rise beyond her monotonous life situation and socio-economic status. She lived in a fantasy world, wanted some passion in her life and marriage, wished to delve into the mysteries of life and hungered for novelty every single day. Gustave captures her sense of frustration and boredom in a ‘normal’ married life thus: “She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of litchen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, “Good heavens! Why did I marry?”

If we try to look at the larger picture, Madame Bovary’s sense of frustration was not just limited to Charles Bovary or her marriage. She was uncommon. She hated mediocrity or monotony or mundane day-to-day affairs. She always looked forward to an exciting life – full of unexpected adventures.

Unconventional literary characters like Madame Bovary make great heroines in movies. Perhaps, that is the reason why there are at least 15 faithful and loose adaptions of the novel. There are French, German, Italian, Argentine and Indian adaptations. Is it the character’s sensuousness or her dissatisfaction with the mundane and her aspiration to grow into someone extraordinary or is it simply her licentiousness that has captivated so many movie makers and people? What is the perfect recipe for an extremely popular literary character? More importantly, can there be one?

If we examine Bollywood director Ketan Mehta’s 1993 adaptation of Madame Bovary, Maya (based on Madame Bovary) made a tremendous impact on the Indian audience. The film won the National Award. The screenplay writers Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Ketan Mehta and dialogue writers Hriday Lani and Gulan Kriplani gave life to the character of Maya. She was dreamy, poetic, living out of her novels and examining the intensity of the affection of her gullible husband Charu time and again. Again, her tests were not limited to verbal interrogation. Inspired by the novels she read, Maya lets out a painful scream over a call to Charu. To test his love for her, she smears red colour over her body, spills some on the floor, throws all the books and artifacts on the floor and waits for her husband, pretending to be dead. Maya was an extreme attention-seeker. She imagines Charu will return and express his heart out on her seeing her dead; she aspired to hear all that at least in this way. Maya was hardly practical – she did not think even once about the importance or urgency of the profession of a doctor. She summoned her husband to her in an incredible fashion by a performance that would not occur ordinarily to me or you. In many ways, Maya was like a child, hankering for attention and going to the extremes if she did not get it.

Gustave describes her habit of attention-seeking like: “She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them around his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love.”

Mehta’s Maya literally drinks the ‘elixir of life’ that would grant her one secret wish. The character’s beauty lies in her complexity: no one knew what she wanted. She does drink that potion but dies. We presume Mehta wanted to portray Maya as someone who did not have a pure heart as that was a pre-condition to the secret wish being granted. Her immorality became a sin.

Perhaps, Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha (1960) was the first Indian adaptation of Madame Bovary with Leela Naidu in the title role. The film was based on a short story, which the writer Sachin Bhowmick had said was inspired by Madame Bovary, published in Bengali magazine Desh. There are many differences between Maya Memsaab and Anuradha though both are based on Gustave’s novel. Both are frustrated by their boring daily lives and domestic chores; however, Maya seeks to kill her boredom with Lalit and Rudra whereas Anuradha just for a fleeting moment digresses towards Deepak. Anuradha returns to her husband Nirmal but Maya faces a punishment of debt and ultimately dies, more similar to Gustave’s Madame Bovary.