MADAME BOVARY
TITLE
This is as good a point as any in the
course to consider the important matters
of titles and character names. Good
writers know that they can't afford to
choose their characters' names
randomly from a telephone directory.
Names have meanings.
Bovary is far from a common French
name. Flaubert had once met a man
whose name was Bouvaret, and he
deliberately modify the spelling and
pronunciation to Bovary. Look at that
name. Can you imagine any reason for
Flaubert to use it in this modified form?
Bovary 2
Like the English word "bovine," the
French word bovin means "relating to
cattle." Indeed, a Latin form is
bovarium.
On page 33, we read that Charles
"would ride along ruminating his
happiness, like those who, after
dinner, still savored the taste of the
truffles they are digesting."
"The use of cattle as a derogatory
metaphor for passive and dull
people is long and securely
established." (Nelles)
Then there's the matter of the book title.
Consider the crucial importance of titles.
Catch-22 story
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Flaubert could have called the book
any number of things. Why did he,
for instance, not call his novel Emma
Bovary, as in, for example, the
recently published English novels
Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa Harlowe,
Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy?
What does Madame Bovary give him
that other titles would not give him?
CHARACTER
The functions of most of the novel’s
main characters—Emma, Charles, Léon,
Rodolphe, Lheureux—are quite clear.
The function of Monsieur Homais, I
think, is less so. Though he seems
almost dispensable in terms of the plot,
Flaubert must have considered him to
be extremely important for the novel,
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giving him not only a huge amount of
space, but also the book’s closing
sentences. Just what is he here for?
He allows us to understand Emma’s
frustration with provincial bourgeois
life, even if we don’t approve of her
reaction to it.
Don’t forget that he indirectly
supplies the agent of Emma’s
suicide.
STRUCTURE (Keith Rinehart)
What is the fundamental structure of
this novel?
Three numbered parts
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Why?
Beginning-middle-end
The three parts of Madame Bovary
are separated from each other by
a change in scene. Part I gets the
novel under way and shows the
early married life of Charles and
Emma in Tostes. Part II gives the
middle years of their marriage in
Yonville-L’Abbaye. Part III, the
final years of the marriage, shows
Emma mainly in Rouen, though
she resides with Charles at
Yonville.
The central Part II is yet another
pyramid within the larger pyramid of
the novel.” The early chapters show her
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platonic liaison with Léon, the central
chapters show her adulterous liaison
with Rodolphe, and the closing chapters
show her alone and despairing.
Why is the title character not introduced
in the first chapter? Why is the reader
given a rapid review of Charles’ life and
introduced to two other Madame
Bovarys—Charles’ mother and the first
wife—before meeting Emma Bovary
and beginning the action of the novel?
The structural significance of the first
chapter is to explain Charles’ early life,
chiefly the influence of women in his
life, an influence that does so much to
explain his subsequent relationship with
Emma. The first chapter is the first part
of a ‘framing device’ within which the
action of the novel—Emma Bovary’s
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action—is contained, but the ‘framing’
nature of the first chapter is seen only in
retrospect from the last chapter of the
novel. By itself, the first chapter may
seem to be a weak opening, having a
mild interest of its own but nothing of
the strength that a plunge into the main
action would have. The use of a
‘complete frame’ is unusual in novels,
even those employing what may be
called a ‘framing device.’
Although Emma dies two chapters
earlier, she is not buried until the next to
the last chapter. The novel’s first and
last chapters are equal in length. Before
Emma, after Emma: Charles is shown in
prospect and retrospect, a secure
foundation for the main action and its
significance.
This tripartite structure—the full
body of the novel framed by its opening
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and closing chapters, mirrors the
explicitly tripartite structure of the body
of the novel.
SYMBOLISM
One critic, William Nelles, has
insightfully and persuasively argued
that the novel's three parts cluster
"around three distinct symbolic centers:
part one around cattle, part to around
horses, and part three around water."
You recall, for example, the ruminating,
bovine Charles of Part One. We
encounter literal cows from p. 45 to Part
One’s closing paragraphs on p. 65.
Even beyond the pages of Part One, the
bourgeois life associated with Charles is
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all about cows. As Part Two begins, we
read on page 68 that the bourgeois
village of Yonville, to which Charles
takes Emma, and which she will find so
stifling, "reminds one of a cowherd."
The mayor is even named Tuvache:
"you cow!" At the agricultural fair, on
page 142, Monsieur Lieuvain's pompous
speech is juxtaposed with the lowing of
the cattle. Ultimately, Léon, who proved
to be too bourgeois for Emma, winds up
marrying another cow: one
Mademoiselle Leboeuf (“the ox” or “the
beef”).
For millennia, in any number of works
of literature and art, the horse has been
a symbol of passion. In the book of
Jeremiah in the Bible, for example, the
lustful sinners are described “as fed
horses in the morning: every one
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neighed after his neighbour's wife.”
(KJV)
This is even true in non-literary
language and thought, as when we refer
to passion as "unbridled," or when
Sigmund Freud wrote that the civilizing
ego "in its relation to the primitive id is
like a man on horseback, who has to
hold in check the superior strength of
the horse."
Writers have frequently showed the
taming of passionate horses to be the
responsibility of reasonable, civilized
man. To take just one contemporary
example, ten years before Madame
Bovary Charlotte Brontë wrote the
following passages in Jane Eyre: "reasons
sits firm and holds the rein," and
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his chest heaved once, as if his large
heart, weary of despotic constriction,
had expanded, despite the will, and
made a vigorous bound for the
attainment of liberty. But he curbed
it, I think, as a resolute rider would
curb a rearing steed.
Horse symbolism begins to appear in a
negative form in Part One. On page 12,
as Charles approaches and does home
for the first time, his horse begins "to
slip on the wet grass." On page 40,
Emma finds that Charles is "unable to
tell her the meaning of a riding term she
had come across in a novel. But
shouldn't a man know everything, excel
in all sorts of activities, initiate you into
the turbulence of passion?"
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In the central chapter of Part Two,
Emma goes to the agricultural fair and
engages in a flirtation with Rodolphe.
Meanwhile,
cows with their legs folded under
them were lying on the grass, slowly
chewing their cud and blinking their
heavy eyelids at the gnats buzzing
around them. Bare-armed teamsters
gripped the halters of stallions that
kept rearing and neighing loudly in
the direction of the mares.
The contrast between the placid cattle
and aroused horses could hardly be
more conspicuous. "Chewing their cud"
reminds us of the ruminant Charles of
Part One.
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Emma and Rodolphe "begin their liaison
ostensibly because of their shared
interest in riding, and Monsieur
Homais' warning before their first ride
together, on page 153, is ironically
prophetic: 'Be careful! Your horses may
be high-spirited!'" After the affair and
us, and no longer wants a horse. On
page 208, "she insisted that her horse be
sold; things she had once liked now
displeased her." "Her former interest in
horses, a symbol of the flesh, is replaced
for the moment by an interest in
religion, a symbol of the spirit."
"The name Hippolyte means 'unyoker of
horses,' emblematic of the course the
affair between the two lovers (as
symbolic horses) will take. To operate
on Hippolyte's foot, we are told on page
171, Charles 'had to determine which
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kind of clubfoot he had. The foot was an
equinus [literally, that of a horse]
mingled with a little varus, or perhaps a
slight varus with a strong admixture of
equinus. His equinus -- which actually
was as wide as a horse's hoof, with a
rough skin, hard tendons and huge toes
whose black nails were like the nails of a
horseshoe. The failure of the operation
foreshadows the point that Emma's own
'tendency to equinus,' her passionate
nature, cannot be excised, even by her
brief religious fervor, and will reappear
when she meets Leon again."
Just before Emma's first actual act of
adultery, on page 155, Rodolphe ties
their horses. At the bottom of the next
page, "she tilted back her head and her
white throat swelled in a sigh. She
suddenly felt weak and a long tremor
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ran through her body; weeping and
hiding her face, she abandoned herself."
A few lines later, we find Rodolphe
"mending a broken bridle." It doesn't
take much to imagine what symbolically
broke this bridle. It's worth noting "only
one bridle breaks; Rodolphe is by no
means carried away to the extent that
Emma is, as his later callous behavior
establishes."
Finally, for obvious enough reasons,
water, and especially flowing water, has
been for millennia a potent symbol of
instability. The pre-Socratic philosopher
Heraclitus famously said that "you can't
step into the same stream twice." Others
have added that, in fact, you can't step
into the same stream once. The frequent
river imagery in Part Three fits the
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profound instability of Emma's later life
and mind.
TENSE
Nearly all stories are told in the past
tense, all the way to the end, as in the
movement from “Once upon a time” to
“And they lived happily ever after.”
Madame Bovary is highly unusual in that
99.95% of the novel is written in the past
tense, while the last four sentences
suddenly leap across the divide of time
into the present tense. When you think
about it, this is even more unusual than
it might at first appear to be, for a
couple of reasons.
First, the protagonists are already dead
at this point, so the narrative seems to
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merely be tying up loose ends when it
makes this startling move. Second, the
shift to the present tense is not merely
technical: rather, it moves the action into
our world. The narrator asks us to
contemplate the lives of Charles and
Emma over a definitive gap in time
which separates them from us. We are
told, however, that Berthe’s work in the
cotton mill and Homais’ success are
happening now, in an immediate world
which we share with these characters.
What do you make of this extraordinary
narrative device?
For example, it implies that we are
living in a world where injustice is the
norm: where an innocent young girl
who already has lost both of her parents
is condemned to a life of hardship,
while a pompous, ignorant, vain, and
Bovary 18
unscrupulous man prospers. The
grammatical device is thus a tool of
social criticism.
It also suggests that the book’s entire
narrative was not a fairy tale from some
other realm, entirely cut off from us, as
in “and they lived happily ever after,”
but rather something that happened in
our own world just yesterday, separated
from us only by the momentary
movement from “was” to “is,” as in
“The traffic light was red, but now it is
green.” This, too, helps to make the
novel work as a social critique, rather
than just a storytelling game.
PERSPECTIVE
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Just as most novels stay in the past
tense, so too, most novels, both before
and since, feature one consistent
narrator throughout. Most often, this
has been a nameless voice who is
omniscient. What does that mean?
In other cases, the narrator may be one
of the characters: "Call me Ishmael."
There are, of course, variations, such as
less-than-omniscient narrators. There
have even been one or two experimental
novels with no narrator at all. William
Gaddis' JR, a very long and complex
novel with many characters and
settings, consists entirely of dialogue,
without even so much as a "he said." As
you can imagine, it's a challenge to read,
leaving us to continually deduce, from
the speech itself, who is speaking to
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whom, but its rewards make its
challenges quite worthwhile.
In Madame Bovary, the narrator shifts,
sometimes explicitly and sometimes
implicitly. For example, who narrates
the opening pages?
This first-person-plural narrator quickly
disappears, and the narration is
subsequently given in third-person
form. The identity of this third-person
narrator, however, seems to shift. We
first see Emma, on pages 13-15, through
Charles' eyes: for example, "Her eyes
were her best feature; they were brown,
although they seemed black because of
her eyelashes, and they looked straight
at you with naïve boldness." We soon
lose Charles' perspective, as well, as it is
succeeded by numerous others. “At
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times the narrative voice sounds
omniscient and at times it does not. In
some passages it seems to emanate from
a mere unidentified observer; in others,
it resembles that of an historian; in
others still, it approximates that of a
social philosopher given to
generalizations." This is an early step
toward what Bakhtin would call the
"polyphonic novel."
The most interesting aspect of this,
however, is not the mere succession of
voices, but rather the blending of them.
While other novelists might be best
known for their skills with, say, plotting
or characterization, Flaubert was, above
all and quite deliberately, a stylist.
Specifically, he is best known for his
masterly use of what he called le style
Bovary 22
indirect libre, known in English as free
indirect style, or free indirect discourse.
Does anyone know, from another
literature course, what this is?
It’s a concept which literature
students should learn.
Direct discourse, using the
character’s quoted words or
thoughts, would be: “He said: ‘It’s
true.’” or “He thought: ‘It’s true.’”
Indirect discourse, using a narrative
voice, would be: “He thought that it
was true.”
Free indirect discourse is a kind of
narration which can move freely and
almost imperceptibly between the
perspective of a narrator outside of
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the plot and the perspective of a
character.
The English novelist Jane Austen is
credited by many critics as the first
writer to make thorough and
effective use of this narrative
approach. Before Austen, readers of
fiction were rarely in doubt as to
who was thinking. There was
normally one consistent voice, unless
the text clearly indicated otherwise.
We can see free indirect discourse,
for example, in this passage from
Austen’s novel Emma, in which we
move from the point of view of the
narrator to that of Emma
Woodhouse, the protagonist:
Bovary 24
Harriet Smith was the natural
daughter of somebody.
Somebody had placed her,
several years back, at
Mrs. Goddard’s school, and
somebody had lately raised her
from the condition of scholar to
that of parlour-boarder. This was
all that was generally known of
her history. She had no visible
friends but what had been
acquired at Highbury, and was
now just returned from a long
visit in the country to some
young ladies who had been at
school there with her.
She was a very pretty girl, and
her beauty happened to be of a
sort which Emma particularly
admired. She was short, plump,
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and fair, with a fine bloom, blue
eyes, light hair, regular features,
and a look of great sweetness,
and, before the end of the
evening, Emma was as much
pleased with her manners as her
person, and quite determined to
continue the acquaintance.
She was not struck by anything
remarkably clever in Miss
Smith’s conversation, but she
found her altogether very
engaging -- not inconveniently
shy, not unwilling to talk - and
yet so far from pushing, shewing
so proper and becoming a
deference, seeming so pleasantly
grateful for being admitted to
Hartfield, and so artlessly
impressed by the appearance of
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every thing in so superior a style
to what she had been used to,
that she must have good sense,
and deserve encouragement.
Encouragement should be given.
Those soft blue eyes, and all
those natural graces, should not
be wasted on the inferior society
of Highbury and its connexions.
The acquaintances she had
already formed were unworthy
of her. The friends from whom
she had just parted, though very
good sort of people, must be
doing her harm.
The built-in ambiguity of free
indirect discourse, combining the
advantages of first-person and thirdperson narrative, allows for certain
subtleties not otherwise available.
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Flaubert is usually cited as the
greatest master of free indirect
discourse, especially in Madame
Bovary. He particularly exploited the
style’s possibilities for irony. “Every
value judgment in the novel seems to
be made from the point of view of
one of his characters.”
On p. 158, for example, as Emma
contemplates her life with Rodolphe,
the novel’s text, without quotation
marks, says: “At last she was going
to possess the joys of love, that fever
of happiness she had despaired of
ever knowing. She was entering a
marvelous realm in which
everything would be passion, ecstasy
and rapture....” Without being told,
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the reader recognizes the fatal flaws
in Emma’s perspective.
In a letter which he wrote while
working on Madame Bovary,
appearing on page 362 of your book,
Flaubert wrote that “the author, in
his book, must be like God in the
universe, everywhere present and
nowhere visible.” Free indirect
discourse gave him a tool which
facilitated this.
Free indirect discourse has become so
pervasive in subsequent fiction that it is
difficult for us to notice it. It’s a bit like
this cartoon (Romeo and Juliet). Its use
here, however, makes Madame Bovary a
landmark in the history of the novel,
and a major step toward the Modernist
novel.
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LITERATURE
Like a number of characters in novels
from Don Quixote to Joyce’s Ulysses,
Emma is led astray, specifically and
paradoxically, by reading novels.
At first, she was captivated by historical
women whose stories were heavily
romanticized in the books which she
must have read. On p. 36, we read that
she worshiped Mary Queen of Scots
and venerated other illustrious or illstarred women. For her, Joan of Arc,
Héloïse, Agnès Sorel, La Belle
Ferronnière and Clémence Isaure
stood out like comets against the
vast darkness of history....
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She soon moves on to unequivocal
fiction. Charles’ mother says that Emma
spends her time
“reading novels and other bad books
that are against religion and make
fun of priests with quotations from
Voltaire! It can lead to all kinds of
things, my son — a person who isn’t
religious always comes to a bad
end.”
It was therefore decided to keep
Emma from reading novels. It would
probably not be an easy thing to do.
[Charles’ mother] agreed to take care
of it herself: she would go to see the
owner of the lending library when
she passed through Rouen and tell
him Emma was canceling her
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subscription. And wouldn’t they
have a right to go to the police if he
refused to stop spreading his
poison? —123
“She remembered the heroines of novels
she read, and the lyrical legion of those
adulterous women began to sing in her
memory with sisterly voices that
enchanted her. It was as though she
herself were becoming part of that
imaginary world, as though she were
making the long dream of her youth
come true by placing herself in the
category of those amorous women she
had envied so much.” —158
Of Charles’ mother: “there were many
other things that displeased her: first of
all, Charles had not followed her advice
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about forbidding Emma to read
novels....” –188
The priest “was not even scandalized
one day when the pharmacist advised
Charles to give his wife a pleasant
diversion by taking her to the opera.
Homais was surprised by his silence
and asked his opinion; the priest
declared that he regarded music as less
dangerous to morals than literature.” –
214
In that same conversation, Homais tells
the priest that even “‘the Bible has more
than one ... spicy passage, you know;
some of the things in it are really ... quite
strong! I’m sure you’ll agree it’s not a
book to give to a young girl!’
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‘But we’re not the ones who
recommend the Bible!’ cried the priest
impatiently. ‘It’s the Protestants!’” – 215
Enchanted by the opera, which was
based on a Walter Scott novel, “Emma
found herself back in the books she had
read as a girl, immersed in the world of
Sir Walter Scott. [When Lucia]
complained of the sufferings of love and
asked for we us, Emma, too, known to
flee from life, to fly away in an embrace.
Suddenly Edgar Lagardy appeared.”
Emma, of course, seduced by Scott’s
fiction and Donizetti’s music, falls for
him. – 219
A mad idea came over her: he was
looking at her now, she was sure of
it! She longed to rush into his arms,
to take refuge in his strength as in
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the incarnation of love itself, to say
to him, cry out to him, “Carry me
off, take me with you, far away! All
my passion and all my dreams are
yours, yours alone!”—222
Twenty-six years before the
publication of the novel, the
passionate and highly suggestible
French Romantic composer Hector
Berlioz had seen a British actress,
Harriet Smithson, performing in
Romeo and Juliet. Though they were
wholly unsuited to each other,
Berlioz, captivated by her beauty,
tenaciously pursued her for years
until she gave in, resulting in a
marriage miserable on both sides.
Watching Lucia’s wedding in the opera,
“Emma thought of her wedding day
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and saw herself walking to the church
along the narrow path between the
wheatfields. Why had she not resisted
and supplicated, like Lucia? But she had
actually been joyful, unaware of the
abyss into which she was plunging
herself....” – 221
"How peaceful her life had been in those
days! How she had longed for the
ineffable sentiments of love which she
had tried to imagine from her books!"—
279
As her situation worsens, so does the
fiction she reads and the effects it has on
her: “She would stay up all night
reading lurid novels full of orgiastic
scenes. Often, seized with terror, she
would utter a cry.” — 284
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“She went on writing him [Léon] love
letters nevertheless, on the principle that
a woman must always write to her
lover. But, as she wrote, she saw another
man, a phantom composed of her most
urgent memories, her strongest desires
and the most beautiful things she had
read. He finally became so real, so
accessible, that she was thrilled and
amazed....” – 286
Even after Emma’s death, “the owner of
the lending library demanded three
years’ subscription fees.” — 336
The novel acknowledges the connection
between the literary and lying elements
of fiction. Emma, the reader/liar, is
captivated by both:
Bovary 37
From then on her whole life was a
tissue of lies which she wrapped
around her love like a veil, to hide it.
Lying became a need, a mania, a
pleasure; so much so that if she said
she had walked down the right side
of a street the day before, it was
almost certain she had walked down
the left. — 266
NOTHING
The English critic Walter Pater, a
contemporary and admirer of Flaubert,
wrote that “all art constantly aspires
towards the condition of music.” What
do you suppose he meant by that?
In the mid-19th century, the content
of art works was being devalued in
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favor of the style. A good example is
Whistler’s White Girl, which we
discussed in our first class. He
painted this five years just after the
publication of Madame Bovary.
A little earlier, Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, had published his poem
“Mariana,” a static description of a
woman who simply waits and waits
for her lover, who never arrives.
Art ostensibly about nothing has
continued ever since, through
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
through television’s Seinfeld. In
Godot, a two-act play, the characters
wait through both acts and Godot
never comes in either of them. A
perceptive critic at the premiere
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wrote: “Waiting for Godot is a play in
which nothing happens — twice!”
Around the same time that Pater,
Whistler, and Tennyson were working,
Flaubert was working on Madame
Bovary, and he wrote, in a letter which is
printed on p. 357 of your book: “What
seems beautiful to me, what I would like
to write, is a book about nothing, a book
without any external support, which
would be held together only by the
inner strength of its style, the way the
Earth hangs suspended in space, a book
which would have almost no subject, or
at least in which the subject would be
almost invisible, if that is possible. The
most beautiful works are those in which
there is the least matter; the closer the
expression comes to the thought, the
more perfectly the language clings to
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the idea and disappears, the more
beautiful the style. I believe that the
future of Art lies in this direction. I see
art, as it has developed over the years,
becoming more and more ethereal.”
This is very close to Pater’s view,
but, in this form, it is only an
aspiration and prediction on
Flaubert’s part. Did he, to any
degree, actually achieve this in
Madame Bovary? Is it, in any sense, “a
book about nothing”? If so, how so?
BOREDOM
This issue is related to a problem
which Flaubert, like many writers
before and since, faced. The novel
requires that Emma find her
Bovary 41
domestic life intolerably boring.
Flaubert must show this to us, but he
can’t afford to be boring while
depicting a boring life.
Again, Waiting for Godot is another
good example.
You may, perhaps, have found the
novel to be boring, and think that
Flaubert failed. If, however, you
think, like most readers, that he
succeeded, how did he pull it off?
How does he make material boring
to a character, yet interesting to a
reader?
Style
Flaubert himself recognized the
problem and was acutely
Bovary 42
troubled by it. In a letter printed
on pp. 364-65 of your book, he
wrote: "What torments me in my
book is the comic element, which
is mediocre." This seems to me to
be an unfortunate translation.
Flaubert actually wrote: "Ce qui
me tourmente dans mon livre c'est
l'element amusant...." "Amusant,"
obviously cognate with
"amusing," can mean "comic," but
in this context the more relevant
sense is "entertaining." Thus, he
wrote the equivalent of
What torments me in my book
is the entertaining element,
which is mediocre. There is a
lack of event. I myself hold
that ideas are events. It is
more difficult to make ideas
Bovary 43
interesting, I know, but then
the style is to blame. I now
have fifty consecutive pages
in which there is not a single
event. It is a sustained portrait
of a bourgeois life and an
inactive love; a love which is
all the more difficult to
describe because it is both
timid and profound, but alas!
without inner turmoil,
because my gentleman is of a
quiet nature. I have already
had something similar in the
first part: my husband loves
his wife in somewhat the
same way as my lover. There
are two mediocrities in the
same milieu and must,
however, be differentiated. If I
succeed in doing this it will, I
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think, be very strong, for it
means laying one color over
another that is very close to it,
which is not easy. But I am
afraid that all these subtleties
will be tiresome and that the
reader would just as soon see
more action. Well, one must
be true to one's original
conception. If I try to
introduce action to it, I would
be following a program and I
would spoil everything. One
must sing in one's own voice
and mine will never be
dramatic or arresting. Besides,
I am convinced that
everything is a matter of style,
or rather of shape, the
outward appearance of
sentences.
Bovary 45
The critic Harry Levin, in a
famous essay which is
reproduced in your book, wrote:
“What is literally boring he
renders metaphorically
interesting. The river quarter of
Rouen, at first sight, is ‘a small,
ignoble Venice.’ Similes,
ironically beautiful, frequently
serve to underline ugly realities:
thus the pimples on the face of
his first wife, on page 10, were
‘blossoming on her face like buds
in springtime.’“
TRIAL
Upon the original serial publication of
Madame Bovary in a magazine, Flaubert
Bovary 46
and his publisher were put on trial by
the French government for “grossly
offending against public morality,
religion, and decency.” The prosecutor
argued that the novel made adultery
appear attractive, and would encourage
women to have affairs. Just a few
months later, also in Paris, the poet
Charles Baudelaire was put on trial on
very similar charges.
Do these charges against Madame
Bovary surprise you? What points, do
you imagine, might be argued for or
against the novel?
The defense argued that the
sinner gets her just desserts and
then some. Adultery was not,
after all, a criminal offense, and
while one might have been
Bovary 47
imprisoned for debt, one was not
executed for it. Emma not only
dies, but she dies a particularly
long and agonizing death.
Indeed, one of Flaubert’s literary
contemporaries (Lamartine)
argued that he had punished
Emma too severely. “Why need
Flaubert have been so much less
merciful than Jesus was toward
the woman taken in adultery?
Harry Levin argued that this
was “partly because he was
not, regardless of the
courtroom argument, actually
trying to exemplify justice,
but mainly because her
adultery was just an
incidental expression of an
Bovary 48
all-pervasive state of mind:
what has since come to be
called Bovarism.”
If the novel were a
straightforward moral
condemnation of Emma, showing
the justice in her payment for her
sins, what are we to make of the
terrible sufferings of the innocent
Charles and Berthe, and the
triumph of the odious Homais?
Further, what are we to make of
Flaubert’s famous statement:
“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”—
”that’s me.”
This also gets us back to the issue
we considered before of the
possible pernicious effects of
Bovary 49
reading romantic fiction. Señor
Quijano and Emma Bovary were
led into folly by the books which
they read. Can you imagine a real
reader being led into folly by this
book?
Flaubert was acquitted, and, as has so
often been the case, the trial brought
huge attention to the novel, contributing
greatly to its sales in book form the
following year. The acquittal was not a
foregone conclusion, as is evident from
the fact that Baudelaire was convicted
six months later.
Lest we think that such trials are quaint
examples of bygone, 19th-century
morality, we might consider the similar
legal cases brought, in the 20th century
and in the United States, against such
Bovary 50
novels as James Joyce’s Ulysses, D.H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
TRAGEDY
The legal arguments draw our attention
to a literary issue. Some critics have
described Madame Bovary as a tragedy,
while others have denied this.
What is a tragedy?
Does this novel qualify?
EPILEPSY (John C. Lapp)
We usually assume that great artists and
writers differ from us with respect to
Bovary 51
their greater levels of insight,
intelligence, and skill. All of this is
certainly true, but it overlooks
physiological differences which may
also affect the artist's work. This is easier
to see in the visual arts than it is in
literature.
For example, most viewers probably
assume that the blurriness of
Impressionist paintings derives
exclusively from an aesthetic decision. I
don't mean to discount that, but
consider the fact that Claude Monet
suffered from cataracts which gradually
worsened. Here are three Monet
paintings of the same bridge, painted in
1899, then a year later, and then 23 years
later.
Bovary 52
Again, Edvard Munch, who painted The
Scream, developed an opacity -- a blind
spot -- in one eye late in his life. He thus
saw a black spot in the middle of
whatever he looked at. His mind tried to
make sense of this spot, much as we
might see a man in the moon or a
meaningful shape in a cloud or a stain.
The black spot looked like a black bird
to Munch, and he placed that bird in a
number of late drawings, such as these.
It is, of course, not the disease or
condition itself which contributes to the
art in such cases, but rather the ways in
which the artist responds to it. The
overwhelming majority of people
suffering from these conditions can't
make art from them. Munch's
imagination led him to interpret the
essentially formless spot as a bird, and
Bovary 53
his skill allowed him to incorporate that
bird in evocative pictures. Still, the
condition plays its role.
Flaubert suffered from epilepsy, and his
seizures were sometimes accompanied
by hallucinations. Some critics have
argued that this condition, while not
accounting for his genius or making his
artistry possible, made its contribution.
They have pointed, for instance, to the
extreme richness of imagery in Madame
Bovary, as well as the descriptions of
extraordinary states of mind.
Consider, for example, Flaubert's
description of his own hallucinations:
Suddenly, like lightning, there is an
invasion or rather an instantaneous
irruption of the memory, for a true
Bovary 54
hallucination is exactly that -- for me,
at least. It is an illness of the
memory, a loosening of what it
contains. You feel the images
escaping from you like spurts of
blood. It seems as though everything
you had in your head were bursting
like the thousands of bits of a
fireworks display, and you don't
have time to look at all these internal
images which pass madly by. In
other cases, it begins with a single
image which grows larger, fills out,
and ends by covering objective
reality completely, for instance a
spark which flutters about and then
becomes a great flaming fire. In this
latter case, you can perfectly well
think of other things at the same time;
and it is almost like what is called
having spots before your eyes, those
Bovary 55
little, round, satin spots that some
people see floating in the air, when
the sky is leaden and their eyes are
tired.
Compare the description of Emma's
profoundly disturbed state of mind just
before she goes to get the arsenic, on
pages 308-09.
Flaubert told a friend that, in his
hallucinations, "you can perfectly well
see an unreal image with one eye and
real objects with the other, and again:
you can perfectly well think of other
things, at the same time." We see this
simultaneity not only in Emma's
dramatic hallucination, which we just
read, but even in Charles' more
mundane visions, as on p. 12, where
Charles sinks
Bovary 56
into a drowsiness in which recent
sensations were confused with more
distant memories; he saw a double
image of himself as both a student
and a married man, lying in bed as
he had been a short time before, and
walking through a surgical ward as
he had done in the past. A warm
smell of poultices was mingled with
the fresh smell of dew; he heard the
clatter of curtain rings sliding along
the metal rods of hospital beds, and
the sound of his wife's breathing as
she slept.
Emma's visionary moments often seem
hallucinatory, and frequently share the
specific characteristics of Flaubert's
hallucinations. At the top of p. 157, for
example, we read this: "Here and there,
Bovary 57
all around her, among the leaves and on
the ground, were shimmering patches of
light, as though hummingbirds had
scattered their feathers in flight."
Again, on p. 143, as she smells
Rodolphe's hairdressing,
she suddenly felt languid; she
recalled the viscount who had
waltzed with her at La Vaubyessard
and whose beard had given off the
same odor of vanilla and lemon as
Rodolphe's hair; and unconsciously
she half closed her eyes so that she
could smell it better. But as she did
so she leaned back in her chair saw
in the distance, on the furthest
horizon, the old stagecoach, the
Hirondelle, slowly coming down the
Les Leux Hill, trailing a long plume
Bovary 58
of dust behind it. It was in that
yellow carriage that Leon had so
often come back to her, and it was
along that road that he had left her
forever! For a moment she thought
she saw him at his window on the
other side of the square, then
everything became confused and
clouds passed before her eyes; it
seemed to her that she was again
whirling in the waltz, beneath the
blazing chandeliers, in the viscount's
arms . . . and yet she could still smell
Rodolphe's hair beside her. The
sweetness of the sensation
permeated her past desires, and, like
grains of sand in a gust of wind, they
swirled in the cloud of subtle
fragrance that was spreading
through her soul.
Bovary 59
Those Romantic heroines we found
Emma worshipping on p. 36 “stood out
like comets against the vast darkness of
history.”
When Flaubert wrote about his own
hallucinations being like “having spots
before your eyes, those little, round,
satin spots that some people see floating
in the air,” he used a French idiom for
such spots: “papillons noirs”: “black
butterflies.”
On page 66, Emma throws her bridal
bouquet into the fire. “She watched
it burn. The little cardboard berries
burst open, the brass wire twisted,
the braid melted; and the shriveled
paper petals hovered along the back
of the fireplace like black butterflies,
then finally flew up the chimney.”
Bovary 60
Later, at the agricultural fair, at the
bottom of page 145, Emma feels a
gust of wind, looks out the window
into the square, and sees "the big
bonnets of the peasant women
[rising] like fluttering white butterfly
wings."
Later still, Emma tears up a note and
throws out of a cab window the
"torn scraps of paper which scattered
in the wind and fluttered down
further on, like white butterflies, in a
field of flowering red clover."
Flaubert also said that his epileptic
hallucinations were characterized by
whirling sensations: "There was a
whirlwind of ideas and images in my
poor brain which made it seem as
Bovary 61
though my consciousness, my self, was
sinking like a ship in a tempest." This is
echoed in Emma's many whirling
sensations. On page 107, "she felt limp
and abandoned, like a wisp of bird
down being whirled along in a storm...."
On page 143, she smells Rodolphe's
hair, and "the sweetness of the sensation
permeated her past desires, and, like
grains of sand in a gust of wind, they
swirled in the cloud of subtle fragrance
spreading through her soul." On page
263, the voice of the blind man
"descended into the depths of her soul,
like a whirlwind in an abyss, and swept
her into realms of boundless
melancholy." On page 303, she is "swept
along in her memories as in a seething
torrent."
Bovary 62
In Flaubert's hallucinations, his sense of
hearing was abnormally intensified. On
page 308, Emma hears "the throbbing of
her [own] arteries ... as deafening music
filling the whole countryside."
"Rodoplphe's letter chronicling in her
hand crackles like sheet-metal."
Shortly after completing Madame Bovary,
Flaubert said that he had finally rid
himself of his epileptic hallucinations. In
a letter to a friend, he wrote:
You asked me how I got over the
nervous hallucinations which I used
to have? In two ways: 1) by studying
them scientifically, that is by trying
to understand them, and 2) by will
power. I often felt madness coming.
There was a whirlwind of ideas and
images in my poor brain which
Bovary 63
made it seem as though my
consciousness, my self, was sinking
like a ship in a tempest. But I held
fast to my reason. Even battered and
besieged it dominated everything.
On other occasions I tried inducing
these horrible sufferings artificially
by a deliberate act of imagining.... I
conquered the ailment by wrestling
with it.
Perhaps the writing of this novel was, in
effect, part of his therapy, part of his
successful attempt to rid himself of his
illness "by endowing the world of this
novel with its sensations and visions...."
LITERARY RESPONSES
Bovary 64
Like so many great novels, Madame
Bovary has inspired not only great
masses of critical commentary, but also
numerous responses themselves in
literary form. There is an additional
layer of irony here in that Emma, led to
destruction by fiction itself, has been
herself immortalized in more fiction.
The Nobel Prize winner Nadine
Gordimer, for example, wrote a 1957
story called “Our Bovary,” resetting
Emma’s tale in modern South Africa.
In one of Woody Allen’s cleverest
stories, the 1977 “The Kugelmass
Episode,” Kugelmass, an unhappily
married New York professor tormented
by Bovaryesque adulterous longings, is
transported by a miraculous machine
Bovary 65
into Flaubert’s novel. Upon returning,
he thinks:
I am in love, I am the possessor of a
wonderful secret. What he didn’t
realize was that at this very moment
students in various classroom across
the country were saying to their
teachers, “Who is this character on
page 100? A bald Jew is kissing
Madame Bovary?” A teacher in
Sious Falls, South Dakota, sighed
and thought, Jesus, these kids with
their pot and acid. What goes
through their minds!
After numerous visits to 19th-century
Yonville, Kugelmass manages to bring
Emma to 1977 New York, where they
stay at the Plaza Hotel.
Bovary 66
“I cannot get my mind around this,”
a Stanford professor said. “First a
strange character named Kugelmass,
and now she’s gone from the book.
Well, I guess the mark of a classic is
that you can reread it a thousand
times and always find something
new.”
Meanwhile, Kugelmass says that a
Literature professor “who has always
been jealous of me, has identified me as
the sporadically appearing character in
the Flaubert book. He’s threatened to go
to my wife.”
Kugelmass finally sends Emma back to
Yonville once and for all, but then tries
for another literary love affair. This
time, however, the machine
malfunctions and Kugelmass finds that
Bovary 67
he had been projected into an old
textbook, “Remedial Spanish,” and
was running for his life over a
barren, rocky terrain as the word
“tener” (“to have”)—a large and
hairy irregular verb—raced after him
on its spindly legs.
In the most recent example I know,
Cathleen Schine’s 2003 novel She Is Me,
another New York professor, Elizabeth
Bernard—initials E.B.—is lured to
Hollywood to write the screenplay for
an update of Madame Bovary called
Mrs. B., placing her in what the
producer calls “the Age of Ikea.” While
the producer rejects her scripts because
they lack “cutting-edge banality,”
Elizabeth feels the kinds of temptations
which destroyed her subject.
Bovary 68
The most interesting example of all is
Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel
Textermination. Jane Austen’s novel
about Emma Woodhouse was published
in England in 1816, and Flaubert’s novel
about Emma Bovary was published
forty years later. In 1992 Brooke-Rose,
an English-born writer long resident in
France, published her very clever novel
in which the two nineteenth-century
Emmas, English and French, meet,
interact, and are continually confused
with one another. Brooke-Rose plays
with the issues of perspective, irony,
and free indirect style pioneered in the
earlier novels. I recommend
Textermination.