Ruth Franklin in The New Republic:

Why Is Emma Bovary So Maligned and Misunderstood?

Emma Bovary is one of the most abused heroines of the modern novel. It’s not enough for her to lose her mind in love for an unworthy man; to squander her fortune and suffer the terror of mounting debt; and, finally, to die in a prolonged, painful suicide by arsenic. No, she must also be cruelly misunderstood by Kathryn Harrison in a weird piece in The New York Times Book Review that has generated a steady seething of online dissent. Harrison and the Book Review have been jointly taken to task for the piece’s failure adequately to assess the novel’s boutique new translation by Lydia Davis. But equally hard to understand is Harrison’s pitiless condemnation of its protagonist.

Okaaay . . . let’s go to the text of Kathryn Harrison’s Times review:

Desperate Housewife

Poor Emma Bovary. She will never escape the tyranny of her desires, never avoid the anguish into which her romantic conceits deliver her, never claim the oblivion she sought from what is perhaps the most excruciating slow suicide ever written. Her place in the literary canon is assured; she cannot be eclipsed by another tragic heroine.

But what kind of tragic heroine is the issue at hand. Here’s Harrison’s take:

Readers cannot like Emma Bovary, and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks, whether literal or metaphorical. How can a covetous, small-minded woman, incapable of love and (as she feels no true connection to anyone) terminally bored by her life, fascinate us as she succumbs to one venal impulse after the next?

But wait! There’s more!

Emma forces us to confront the human capacity for existential, and therefore insatiable, emptiness. Fatally self-absorbed, insensible to the suffering of others, Emma can’t see beyond the romantic stereotypes she serves, eternally looking for what she expects will be happiness . . .

Emma doesn’t have character flaws so much as she lacks character itself. She’s a vacuum, albeit a sensitive and sensual one, sucking up every ready-made conceit.

Back to TNR’s Ruth Franklin:

Emma Bovary, “incapable of love”? This is truly a bizarre interpretation of perhaps the most famous adulteress in Western fiction . . .

If Emma Bovary were truly just a shallow woman who comes to a bad end, she could never have become the subject of what is arguably the greatest French novel of the nineteenth century, the novel that set the course for realism forever after.

Franklin’s conclusion: Harrison’s review is “a missed opportunity for the Times: an exercise in ego-stroking rather than a genuine intellectual contribution.”

Our conclusion: If a 19th century French novel can create this kind of a rumpus, there may be hope yet for Western civilization.