Worst Mom Ever

Madame Bovary and the making of a mother.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Emma Bovary, the anti-heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s classic Madame Bovary, is a bad mom. If you haven’t read it, it’s a story about an adulterous woman who wrecks her life following a misguided idea of passion and ends up killing herself. At one time or another, you’ve probably heard a story like it. When we meet Emma, she’s young and motherless and crushing on the country doctor, Charles Bovary, who’s come to treat her father. The feelings turn out to be mutual. They get married and move into his house in a nearby small town. But she soon finds her new life as a wife in provincial France lacks some of the excitement she’d been hoping for.

Motherhood, like everything else, becomes a string of disappointments for Emma. When she gets pregnant, she doesn’t have as much money as she’d like to spend for outfitting the nursery and layette, so she gets mad and doesn’t indulge herself in the pleasure of the little details at all. She and Charles both hope for a boy. When it’s a girl, Charles, like any normal parent in this situation, takes it in stride. A baby is a baby, after all. But Emma turns her head away and faints.

Then they send the baby away to be nursed and raised for the first two years of her life by a working-class woman. When the little girl does come home, Emma finds her annoying and ugly. (Yes, she calls her kid ugly!) In one scene, when the baby is trying to get her mother’s attention, Emma pushes her away so forcefully that the little girl falls and cuts her face on a piece of furniture. Emma is not necessarily abusive, but she’s indifferent and uninterested as a mother, which is only one aspect of her terrible personality. She’s also selfish, adulterous, indulgent, terrible with money, and snobby. Eventually, she starts cheating on her husband and spending way more money than they have, which inevitably spirals out of control. It all ends quite badly for Emma Bovary, and she wrecks the lives of her husband and daughter along with her own.

Emma Bovary is the kind of character that readers love to hate. I have a used copy of the book, and the previous owner’s annotations make clear exactly how they feel about Emma Bovary. Difficult as she is, I don’t hate her, and I don’t think Flaubert wanted us to hate her either.

The one aspect of her story that I always think back to is when she places the baby with the wet nurse. This certainly isn’t an unheard of practice for those days. The footnote on that part in my copy of the book states simply that placing new babies outside of the home for the first two years of life was common practice in middle- and upper-class families. There also seems to be some religious precedent because, adding to the list of Emma’s crimes, she doesn’t wait for the appropriate six weeks of the Virgin before going to visit her baby.

In the scene where we see this situation, Emma is struck by an urge to visit her newborn baby. On her way there, she encounters the man who will eventually become one of her lovers. He is a friend of the Bovarys, and Emma’s feeling faint, so he accompanies her to the wet nurse’s house outside of town. When they arrive, Flaubert describes the scene:

“Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all around were several indefinite rages, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered in scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country. ‘Go in,’ she said; ‘your little one is there asleep.’”

For any mother of multiple children, this description is basically a day in the life. They could have been stopping by my house about twelve years ago. It’s chaos. The scene is made worse by the fact that the wet nurse is poor and begging Emma for more money so she can buy coffee because she’s so tired from taking care of all these kids. Motherhood is presented as filthy and undignified in comparison to the life Emma lives and believes she should live. When they go inside the cottage, Emma’s gentleman friend finds it strange to see Emma, such a beautiful woman in her fancy dress, in the midst of so much poverty. There is no discussion or thought on either character’s part to bringing the baby home.

This scene can be read in so many ways. Is she, as the footnote suggests, hampered by societal expectations? Is she, a woman with so little control in a patriarchal system, exerting herself in some way by rejecting motherhood? (I’ve read that this practice of sending babies off for two years was falling out of favor, and by that time a more hands-on approach to parenting was becoming more fashionable (whatever that means). There is no on-page discussion of it in the Bovary house.) Or is she so absorbed in her own affairs that she doesn’t care? It is perhaps a combination of all three. The situation is further complicated by the presence of her future lover, with whom an emotional affair is already building in the story. Emma is essentially choosing sex over mothering. It’s a fascinating scene because it’s all these things, illustrating so much about the lives of women.

Flaubert was not unaware of the woman’s lot. A few pages earlier, when Emma was still pregnant, he writes: “She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, and overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains.”

I recently read Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Francis Steegmuller, which is a biography of Flaubert’s early life and how he came to write Emma Bovary. His father was a doctor, and his brother followed the same path, which helped fill out the character of Charles Bovary. Flaubert’s sister died a young mother, and her husband abandoned their baby girl to the care of Flaubert’s mother. Gustave lived with his mother and niece in primarily the family’s country house in provincial France. And though he never married or had children of his own, he carried on an on-and-off affair with a woman who was married and had a little girl. Like Emma, his lover became demanding and unreasonable toward the end of the affair. So Flaubert definitely had some raw material for the novel in his life.

But the idea for the story came from a bit of provincial gossip. There really was a woman a few towns over who cheated, ran up debts, and then killed herself. By this point, Flaubert had written other novels that weren’t published or particularly good. His most recent, which he’d hoped would be his masterpiece, bored his literary friends when he read it to them. With that disappointment, he went on a two-year-long tour of the Middle East. But when he came back, Flaubert was looking for his next idea. A friend of Flaubert’s, the one who told him the gossip about the adulterous woman, insisted it was the perfect idea for him to write because it could be written as a critique of the bourgeois class, which was one of Flaubert’s primary occupations in his literary endeavors.

Flaubert, who belonged to the bourgeois class himself, has been called many things for his portrayal of Madame Bovary—a misogynist, a moralist, a realist, a peddler of vulgarity. Based on his letters and biography, his primary concern during the writing was leaving all judgment off the page. He wanted to present her story without editorializing. But when read with the understanding of Flaubert’s preoccupation with class, the choice to send the baby away feels more like damage done to Emma’s mothering capabilities by societal expectations of motherhood and less about her own cruelty and indifference.

I can still remember taking a prenatal parenting class when I was pregnant the first time. Much was made about those early days and their importance. Nine months in and nine months out was how it was explained to me; human development, including sense of self and the world, relies not only on the months inside, but the early months outside as well.

The first time I read Madame Bovary, I felt like poor Emma was robbed of those new baby days. They make the child a person, but they also make the mom. Yes, keeping a small, unreasonable person fed and clean and alive is physically taxing and undignified. But these early days were some of my favorite as a mother. Not that it was fun or precious. New motherhood is all instinct and hormones and exhaustion—stuff that scrambles a brain. Not just the feeding, but the carrying around and looking at and talking to. I was reduced to the most animal version of myself, and I emerged from it something different than I ever had been before. That was the start of my relationship with each of my children. That was when I fell in love with each of my babies. Those days made us who we are. And I suppose I’ll always feel bad for Emma Bovary, terrible person that she was, that she missed that.

Thank you for reading, and happy Mother’s Day to all the moms!

Melinda

You’re reading Melinda’s Letter, a monthly email about books, culture, and life from essayist and historical romance author, Melinda Copp. I’m also on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky.