Emma likes the type of pulp, romantic and sentimental fiction condemned by Nabokov, the 19th century version of Harlequin Romances. Emma is not an artist of prose like her creator, she is a consumer of written culture in a very literal as well as a metaphorical sense, just as she consumes all sorts of material goods in her futile quest for fulfillment, and dies by consuming poison at the end of the novel.
This is what makes Emma so fascinating as a character. She engages in the same project of interpretation and authorship as her reader, even if it is a failed project. "But what interests me most in Madame Bovary is the heroine's fondness for reading. She dies because she has attempted to make her life into a novel -- and it is the foolishness of that quest that Flaubert's clinical style mocks." (Jong, 1997) Emma essentially dies of a surfeit of prose, not of sensuality or poison.
The paradox of Flaubert's project of writing to satirize reading is clear, through Jong's interpretation of his most famous work. "A novelist mocking a heroine besotted by novels? Then this must be a writer mocking himself! And indeed, Flaubert memorably said that he had drawn Madame Bovary from life -- and after himself. 'I have dissected myself to the quick,' he wrote." (Jong, 1997) This acts as an important reminder that Flaubert did not merely carefully observe and record the mundane details of the world he saw around him, but also engaged in rigorous psychological self-scrutiny to produce a sense of realism within the pages of Bovary. Emma's interior life, however focused it may be centered on shallow objects and pursuits, is what makes her stand apart from the depicted heroines of pulp novels. Flaubert's prose is not merely descriptive and realistic. It also is psychologically full of nuance and more detailed than authors of sensationalist novels, whose heroines do not have a clear, discernable motivation for why they transgress sexual norms.
Emma does not seek a more useful life, Emma seeks "ecstasy and transcendence" that is in short supply in her rural French community. Jong's stress upon the spirituality of Emma's quest is an important reminder of the fact that Emma begins her education in a convent, and actually seems to show a superficial aptitude for the life of a nun. Emma later brings her fervor for gracious living to her life as a wife, then a mistress. Emma's inner life may seem to be centered around the pursuit of empty things, like beautiful home goods, dresses, and beautiful love affairs, but she is located squarely within a society that valorizes such objects and offers them as the only secular solution to ennui. "Emma's drama is the gap between illusion and reality, the distance between desire and its fulfillment." (Jong, 1997)
Jong says: "her search for ecstasy is ours," in short, Emma is a uniquely modern heroine, for we all seek transcendence, all of us who read, and life invariably falls short. This is the final paradox of Bovary -- a novel that critiques itself and a genre likely to be very dear to the heart of a reader is so successful, and still feels modern today. Although Jong's essay does not offer an extensive, deep interpretation of the entire novel, it acts as an important reminder of critical aspects of the work that may be overlooked, like the role of religion in the novel, and the importance of reading to Emma's interior life.
