In 1857, prosecutors in France brought charges of obscenity against Gustave Flaubert after he published his novel Madame Bovary. After he was acquitted, his novel became a best seller, of course. The best thing an author can do to promote his book is to get it banned somewhere.

It is strange that the title is Madame Bovary.  If you didn’t know better, you might think the story was going to be about Charles Bovary’s mother.  Then you might think it was going to be about his first wife Héloïse.  By the time you get to his second wife Emma, you might think, “I hope this one is it!” This confusion could have been avoided had the title been Emma Bovary, but I guess “Madame” was used to emphasize the fact that Emma is a married woman.

There have been many movies or television series based on this novel, only three of which I have been able to see.  In comparing the 1949 version with the 1975 television series and with the 2014 movie, the most striking difference is the faces. Hollywood sure knew how to pick actors with star power in those days: Jennifer Jones as Emma, Van Heflin as Charles, and Louis Jordan as Rodolphe. The 1975 and 2014 versions are full of ordinary faces, so unremarkable that one might easily forget who’s who.  For this reason alone, the 1949 version is the most enjoyable to watch and easiest to remember. Strictly speaking, the 1949 version is actually about the trial of Flaubert, played by James Mason, where he tells us how we are supposed to understand his novel, so that we won’t think it obscene.

An important difference between the 1949 version and the novel is the way the former improves the character of Charles Bovary.  In the novel, his first wife is much older than he is, and she is described as being “ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds.” He marries her because she has money.  The novel says something about her being the woman his mother picked out for him, which is a little creepy right there.  But it also says, “Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money.”  All right, so it doesn’t work out the way he planned, this wife being something of a termagant, but his intention remains the same, that of marrying for money rather than for love.

The 1949 version leaves out this first marriage, as does the 2014 version. Perhaps the constraint of time was a factor, since the longer 1975 version includes it.  What every version of this novel must include, however, is the part about Hippolyte, played by Henry Morgan in the 1949 version (another interesting face).  In the novel, Emma pressures Charles to perform an operation on Hippolyte, who has a clubfoot. She figures that if the operation is a success, she will rise in society as the wife of the brilliant surgeon who performed it.  However, the operation is a failure, and the leg ends up having to be amputated.  As a result, Emma feels disgraced and becomes even more contemptuous of Charles than ever before. Such is the case in the 1975 and 2014 versions.

In the 1949 version, however, Charles realizes his limitations at the last minute and refuses to perform the operation.  The difference is that while Emma still feels contempt for her husband, in this case for what she regards as his failure of nerve, we admire him for doing the right thing.  So, just as this movie avoids having Charles be a mama’s boy and a second-rate fortune hunter, so too does it avoid having him be an incompetent surgeon who should have known better.

This change in the story cannot be attributed to any need to conform to the Production Code, which does say that surgical operations should be treated within the careful limits of good taste.  But if that had been enough to change the story of this novel, the movie King’s Row (1942) could never have been made, since that is the movie where a malicious doctor amputates both of Ronald Reagan’s legs. No, this movie simply wants us to like Charles Bovary. But even with the omissions and modifications, he still comes across as someone whose wife will cheat on him.

And cheat she does, for the story is about an adulteress who ends up committing suicide.  You would think that her suicide would have satisfied the prosecutors, the novel having punished Emma for her misdeeds.  We can only wonder what would have happened had she run off with Rodolphe as she had wanted, the two of them living happily ever after.  Flaubert would probably have been drawn and quartered.

Actually, it is not the adultery per se that brings about Emma’s downfall, but her willingness to go into debt to buy herself beautiful clothes and to furnish her house with fashionable finery.  It doesn’t cost much for a woman to have an affair, and Charles was enough of a cuckold that she could have gone from one lover to the next with impunity.  On the other hand, had she been completely faithful to Charles but still spent extravagantly to satisfy her vanity, her ruination and his would have been the same.

In any event, it might be that the prosecutors were upset that while Emma was punished in this world, Flaubert allowed her to escape punishment in the next. After Emma consumes arsenic at the chemist’s shop, she goes home to die. Charles tries to save her but eventually calls for a priest, who administers the sacrament of extreme unction.  The novel tells us that “her face had an expression of serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.”  Moreover:

The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to despair, he thought.

Maybe this is what offended the prosecutors.  Emma had been absolved of her sins through divine intervention, and who would dare to question the will of God? Flaubert is assuring us that instead of burning forever in the fires of Hell, Emma is now in Heaven, smiling sweetly as she looks down on those she left behind.

About twenty years later, Leo Tolstoy published Anna Karenina, in which another adulteress ends up committing suicide.  Like Emma, she also has a child that she is willing to abandon to be with her lover, which makes her adultery especially reprehensible.  And like Emma, she escapes eternal damnation by way of last-minute repentance.  Just as Anna throws herself beneath the wheels of a train, she regrets having done so, saying, “Lord, forgive me all,” after which she is sliced in two.

Of course, there are those who would say that God did not intervene to prolong the lives of Emma and Anna, giving them enough time to repent, that it was just good luck on their part that they managed to slip through that Christian loophole at the last minute, causing God to shake his head in exasperation, saying, “Once again, a sinner gets off on a technicality!”