The Strange Pathos of the Turkey in <em>Madame Bovary </em>
Literary portrayals of Thanksgiving Day—with all its good, bad, and stressful emotional stuffing—have varied over the years. They span from Louisa May Alcott’s sentimental 1882 New England story, “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving,” all the way to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s aggrieved childhood memories of it as a day of compulsory fasting and reflection in his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. Scattered between, there’s Philip Roth’s boisterous hosanna to the holiday’s secular roots in American Pastoral, the queasy scenes in Jonathan Franzen’s fictions, Saul Bellow’s hashish-stuffed turkey, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s fragrant cumin-and-garlic-smeared one. And while I’ve enjoyed all of the above, the book I associate most closely with this echt American festival is not an American one at all, but Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, Madame Bovary.
On its face, this may seem like a morbid choice. What does a 19th-century French tragedy, in which a provincial housewife kills herself as a result of her debts and affairs, not only prominently features the fowl, but also positions it as a token of thanksgiving, albeit in a personal rather than national context. And the reason this novel comes to mind on this gourmand Thursday has to do with one little passage that, more than any other in this bleak story, catches me on the raw.
