Flâneur bops and flops 1: Songs for when you gaslight so much, your husband girlbosses— a Madame Bovary playlist
Illustration: Anna Webb
Each instalment of Sarah Brady’s column takes a seminal novel of 19th century French literature and puts it to the titillating sounds of modern bops and flops. Have you ever wondered which Mitski song best encapsulates the psycho-sexual melodrama of Madame Bovary? If you answered yes then the author hates you, but you're welcome to read this column nonetheless - though, you're on thin ice.
The title of this article is something of a litmus test: if you’ve made it this far, you have bad taste. The worst, even. And you may or may not be familiar with the neon-lit recesses of YA fiction playlists available on Youtube and Spotify.
If you were so unfortunate as to haphazardly click on a ‘POV ur first summer at camp half-blood’ video, you will know that the Youtube algorithm immediately and indelibly brands you: your recommendations are now, and forever, ‘songs for when ur sad at 4am dreamcore’.
While infamously self-indulgent and a little too on the nose, if I’m ever in the mood to reminisce or romanticise, these playlists provide a finely aged cache of nostalgia.
Sometime during my undergrad, back when it was taking me an hour to dredge through some ten pages of a seminal text of French literature, an idea occurred to me. Intimidated by the sheer reputation and seriousness of these texts, I needed to find a way to enjoy them.
How do I enjoy French lit? Simple: I put it to Mitski music, close my eyes and imagine a hastily thrown-together animatic or AMV. Perfect. Amazing. Problem solved.
It was embarrassing on two fronts: how well this worked and how seamlessly trite indie bops could be applied to 19th cent French literature. Is it pretentious? Obviously. But I (and everyone else here) passed the pretentious threshold about a mile back when we agreed to attend Cambridge.
So, what follows is three instalments of highly acclaimed French 19th century literature put to hackneyed playlists – if only so that whenever you think of Flaubert’s masterpiece, his legacy will be forever cheapened by my having applied Fiona Apple to it.
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary features, without fail, on every Best Book list. It’s the Covid of being a French student – that is, there is no cure and it will get you sooner rather than later.
But why is it so popular? Is it because it engendered an innovative mode of modern narration? No. And don’t believe your professors when they tell you otherwise. The real, actual reason is because Flaubert, literary pioneer that he was, endeavoured to create a female protagonist who could embody both Mitski’s ‘Last Words of a Shooting Star’ and her ‘Townie’. The polar ends of the Mitski emotional turmoil spectrum.
In ‘Last Words’, Mitski sings: ‘You’d say you love me and look in my eyes | But I know through mine you were | Looking in yours.’ Now, Emma Bovary’s eyes seem to change colour like a cheap mood ring. That aside, they are most often black (p. 175 – yes, I have receipts). Though sometimes (and somehow) they are black and blue at once. This darkness and depth obscures her pupil in her iris, appearing to widen the aperture within which Charles, her husband, can see himself reflected: ‘Il s’y voyait en petit jusqu’aux épaules.’ (p. 45) So, it is truly just as Mitski decreed: Charles regards himself reflected in the eyes of his wife, revealing the inherent and repressed narcissism which thrives in the ideal of Western love.
To pour some oil on this tragic bin fire, Emma deeply covets this idealised concept of passionate, romantic love and recklessly pursues fleeting, jeopardizing affairs. When Mitski wrote ‘I want a love that falls as fast | as a body from the balcony,’ she was possessed by Flaubert who himself was possessed by Madame Bovary (let’s not get into his whole ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ thing.) Emma seeks out affairs which are doomed to fail, she covets the inevitable tragic ending, more so because fires that burn brightest also quickest. For Emma, the euphoria of the fall is made all the sweeter by the looming ground below. And Mitski knows this. She gets it.
By now you may be thinking, what is Madame Bovary but the entirety of Mitski’s discography? Well, let me tell you: it’s also Fiona Apple. Specifically, Fiona Apple’s ‘Left Alone’. Specifically, when Fiona says ‘I was still a dewy petal | rather than a moribund slut | My love wrecked you | You packed to twirl your skirt.’ Now: there are many things. So, so many. Number one. ‘Moribund slut’? Drag name. Also? Rename the book immediately. Secondly: ‘twirl your skirt’? This was obviously about Charles dressing up as Emma in his post-Emma era. Flaubert somehow plagiarised Fiona from all the way back in the 1800s. Iconic.
And you know what else? For good measure, we’re going to throw in Florence + the Machine’s ‘Hunger’. As Emma’s mood fluctuates, oscillating between manic and depressed, as does her appetite. It’s no coincidence that when she feels amorous, she imbibes or binge eats. The apogees of her romantic endeavours are punctuated by sickly liqueurs, strawberries and cream, or comically tall wedding cakes, decorated with everything but the kitchen sink. Indeed, the Venn diagram of her sexual and literal appetite is a circle. In the end, her disordered eating culminates in her swallowing arsenic and vomiting a blackish fluid. We can hear the conflation of starvation and loneliness Emma feels when Florence sings, ‘I thought love was a kind of emptiness […] I understood then the hunger I felt.’
If the goal of this playlist was to make reading Madame Bovary more enticing or enjoyable, I have, without question, failed. However, if you were to listen to Mitski, Fiona Apple and Florence while reading Madame Bovary, you may come close to experiencing the authentic psychological navel-gazing that Flaubert sought to depict in Emma, complete with all the emotional throes of having once been a twenty-something woman.