Looving and despising Emma Bovary

As I noted in an earlier post, Madame Bovary reaches a turning point or "pivot" with the botched operation on Hippolyte, the young stable boy with a club foot. Emma begins to feel some guilt and remorse about her mistreatment of Charles and makes a weak attempt to care for him and salvage their marriage. She, along with the obsequious and meddlesome pharmacist, Homais, encourage him to try an experimental surgery to correct the club foot - with dreams that this will establish his reputation as a doctor. Of course Bovary botches the operation and nearly kills the patient; eventually, they call in an expert who amputates the whole leg - in one of Flubert's great imaginative flourishes, Emma sits home listening to the howling of Hipployte suffering through the surgery. Hippolyte ever after limps through the village, and Charles, hearing the wooden leg clomp on the street, turns corners to avoid him. Emma, in her manner, returns to Rodolphe with even greater passion and persuades him, or thinks she does, to run away with her to a new life - but he keeps delaying. Meanwhile, swayed by the merchant Lheureux, among other things a nasty little anti-Semite (he lets her buy on credit - "After all, we're not Jews," he says) and she runs up a huge debt buying ridiculous things, including a riding crop for Rodolphe, which he doesn't need obviously - and in fact stealing Charles's receipts to pay for this crap. In other words, no matter how appealing, even seductive, Flaubert makes her, no matter how sympathetic we may be to her plight, frustrations, ill luck - she is at bottom a nasty creature, devoid of empathy, narcissistic and selfish, destructive. Friend WS mentioned yesterday, citing Leavis, that part of the greatness of Madame Bovary is Flaubert's own uncertainty about his attitude toward his own character - loving her, hating her, lavishing his most beautiful writing on her. That same uncertainty, of course, is ours, as I have noted in this and previous posts - a deeply unsettling novel. Also note that among the many extraordinary passages in Madame Bovary, this one among the best, paraphrasing, on the inability to express deepest feelings - human speech is a cracked kettle on which we beat a rhythm for bears to dance to when what we wanted to do was move the stars (to pity). Who hasn't felt that?