What if Madame Bovary had lived 50 years later?

So as I noted in yesterday's post there are some very unappealing aspects to Emma Bovary's personality, no matter how sympathetic we are to her as an oppressed woman with little opportunity to pursue her dreams or employ her talents - she's nasty to servants, cruel to her husband, and even abusive to her infant daughter, pushing her aside so hard that the child cut her cheek on a piece of furniture. Yet just as Flaubert is losing us, losing our sympathies, he widens the story out quite a bit with a terrific chapter in which Emma goes to the local priest, hoping not so much for a formal confession as for a sympathetic ear and for advice - today, she would go into counseling - and he rebuffs her, he barely even understands her or or her - or if he does understand he gives her the message that he does not want to get involved in a marital mess. She goes home in even greater despair (that's when she pushes Berthe aside so violently), and then she learns she is losing Leon, the law student who is totally smitten with her and who reads her romantic verses and so on - he's heading off to Paris to begin his life as a student in the capital - so much opportunity is available for him, and she's stuck here in this dull marriage, in this provincial rut. How can we help but feel pity for her, and forgive her her trespasses? Flaubert famously said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" - and I'm not sure that's true, but it's obvious that he loved his creation, that he lavished all his care and attention on her, everything to make us love her, too, and in a complex way. We certainly know from the very outset that she is a tragic figure - none of the other loves that she pursues would work out for her - in fact, it's their very impossibility that makes these relationships, these men, so alluring. Had she been able to ditch Charles and marry Leon or anyone else - in other words, had she been "born" 50 years later, had she been the heroine of The Custom of the Country, for example, her marriages would have been miserable and bitter affairs, entered into out of spite and self-interest. Perhaps she is better off mired in "provincial life." She's one of the loneliest characters in literature, but part of the loneliness is of her own doing: nothing, nobody in her world is good enough for her, or so she thinks.