On Gemma Bovery, Flaubert, and the dangers of living inside a story

Dear Wanderer,

This week I watched Gemma Bovery, a French film where literature itself becomes a character — a shadow bending a woman’s destiny. I adore literature; I have lived inside those characters all my life. I’ve always believed that stories shape not only our thinking but also our lives. Yet this film left me with an unsettling question: can books, those companions I trust so deeply, sometimes mislead us? Can we be so enchanted by a story that we begin to live it — even to our ruin?

In this film, as in Flaubert’s novel, the heroine is trapped by an imaginary world. Literature, instead of being a refuge, becomes a gilded cage. Martin, Gemma’s neighbor, knows the story of Madame Bovary by heart. He notices the similarities between Gemma and Emma: her marriage, her lovers, her desires. It is like a modern reincarnation of Emma Bovary. At the end of the film, Gemma dies ironically not by consuming arsenic, but by choking on a piece of bread prepared by Martin, the very man who feared her tragic fate. The entire story rests on this tension between reality and fiction, between lived life and imagined life.

Thus, literature gives breath to the soul, but some stories can deceive the mind, making it difficult to distinguish reality from fiction. It also means that the writer has done an extraordinary job with his characters. No wonder Flaubert was a genius. But is not literature also a subtle trap, capable of imprisoning us in destinies that are not our own?

From wanderer to wanderer,
D. Orlando