Emma’s perception of time and space
in Madame Bovary
CHRISTINE KODAMA
Time and space are man made useful concepts for the
organisation of our life but these concepts present two aspects. On
one hand they are purely objective external measurements of our
physical world; on the other hand, they are completely subjective
notions depending mostly on our mental condition. In Madame
Bovary, hailed as a model by the young writers of the Naturalist
School, Flaubert limited the first purely objective aspect of time and
space in order to develop the second one, to a kind of extreme, with
a purpose that needs to be elucidated.
1 Objective time and space:
Flaubert intentionally blurred the chronology inside his novel
which was far more precise in his numerous drafts. Scholars have
nevertheless made tremendous efforts to re-establish this
chronology, pointing out some mistakes or discrepancies in the
final version. These attempts are based on the few dates given in
the text. At the beginning of the book1), we are told that Charles
Bovary’s father:
...a former assistant army surgeon, implicated, around the
year 1812, in a conscription scandal, and forced, about that
time, to leave the service, had subsequently made the most
of his personal talents to lay hold of a dowry of sixty
thousand francs, in the person of the daughter of a textile
merchant.
p.3.
1）Madame Bovary translated by Geoffrey Wall. Penguin Classics, 1992.
〔15〕
16
And at the beginning of the second part of the book, the narrator
tells us that:
Until 1835, there was no passable road into Yonville; but at
around this time...
p.55.
According to Jacques Seebacher 2), the most useful date provided
in the novel is Monday, September 4, 1843, even if 1843 does not
appear in the text:
It is precisely this central date, this unique precision in the
entire book, which allows us a step by step, season to
season location.
It is the date chosen by Emma to elope with her lover:
After these delays, they resolved that it would irrevocably
p.159.
be on the 4th of September, a Monday.
But Rodolphe, who never had the intention to elope with Emma,
abandons her and leaves Yonville, causing Emma’s despair to the
point that she almost commits suicide before falling seriously ill.
Finally, since the last sentences of the novel are in the present
tense, it is assumed that they are written at the time of publication,
in 1856, after the death of Emma and Charles, when Berthe — their
daughter now living with her aunt — has become a worker:
She is poor and she sends the girl to earn her living in a
cotton-mill.
p.286.
Thus the novel tells us the story of the fall of doctor Bovary and
his family and of the rise of Homais, the pharmacist of Yonville
practising medicine illegally in his shop, since the closing sentence
of the novel, like a last drop of sober and bitter irony, is:
He has just received the Legion of Honour.
p.286.
2）Jacques Seebacher ≪Chiffres,dates,écritures, inscriptions dans Madame
Bovary≫ in La Production du sens chez Flaubert, colloque de Cerisy, 1975 p.291.
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
17
With these four dates, a first chronology was established by
Seebacher and his team of researchers and presented in 1973, before
a slightly different one was established and presented by another
team.
Seebacher also made interesting parallels between real events of
private interest and fictional events. He demonstrates for example
that Charles’s entrance into school does not coincide with
Flaubert’s own entrance as the “we” would suggest in one of the
most famous incipit of world literature:
We were at prep, when the Head came in, followed by a
new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big
desk.
p.1.
According to Seebacher’s chronology, this date corresponds to
the entrance into school of Achille, Gustave Flaubert’s elder
brother. Seebacher also notices that the day chosen by Emma to
elope with Rodolphe is the very same day Victor Hugo’s daughter,
Leopoldine, drowned herself. Even more interesting is the fact that
the day of Emma’s death coincides with the day of the death of
Flaubert’s cherished young sister, Caroline.
Another French scholar, Pierre Barberis 3) deplores the lack of
referential chronology in Madame Bovary, the fact that Flaubert
made no allusion to the political events of his time. Important
events such as the establishment of the July Monarchy after the fall
of Napoléon I and of the second Empire after the 1848 Revolution
occurred at the time this novel is supposed to have taken place and
at the time it was written, but Barberis writes:
Flaubert has systematically brought his text outside the
sphere of politics; he rubbed out all too explicit references,
he systematically unlocated it, making up a kind of
novelistic counter-chronology parallel to the other
3）Pierre Barbéris, Le Prince et le marchand, Fayard, 1980, pp.411-412.
18
chronology...Far from being supported by real chronology,
the chronology of Madame Bovary builds itself against it, at
its expense and empties it gradually from any meaning
and reality.
However interesting and valuable they may be, these types of
comments on the chronology of Flaubert’s novel are oddly similar
to the claim of some villages in Normandy to be Yonville itself.
Tostes, the first village where Emma lives after her marriage, is
not described as precisely as Yonville where she spends the rest of
her life until her suicide. Albert Thibaudet, in his book on Flaubert 4)
published in 1935, explains that the first village is a kind of roughplan for the second one. Yonville is like a detailed drawing of Tostes
because the two villages are similar to each other, Yonville being
simply a bigger Normandy village than Tostes. Flaubert drew a map
of Yonville when he described the village at the beginning of Part
Two. But when one of his readers, Miss Leroyer de Chantepie,
wrote to him that she thought he had used her as a model for
Emma, he assured her that there was nothing true in Madame Bovary
and that the story was totally invented. We have no reason not to
believe him, although two existing villages of Normandy are still
competing fiercely, claiming that they are the village of Yonville
described in Flaubert’s novel in order to attract visitors.
Indications of seasons, months and time of the day are numerous
in Madame Bovary, just as the location of a village or a house is very
precisely indicated. Pierre Ajac 5) stresses the fact that:
If one rereads carefully the description of the Tostes
garden, one will see that it consists almost entirely in a
series of main landmarks. Not only does Flaubert have a
keen interest for precise topology but, on top of that, he
applies himself to the task of establishing proportions and
4）Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert, Tel, Gallimard, 1992, pp.97-98.
5）Pierre Ajac, Madame Bovary, Introduction,GF Flammarion 1986 p.25.
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
19
symmetries.
In other words, it can be said that the objective chronology and
topology, internal to the work itself, is almost unrelated to the real
world except by the fact that action takes place in Normandy in the
middle of the 19th century. Far from being a flaw, this is a sign of
modernity. Flaubert does not copy reality but he invents it and his
novel is like an art object sufficient in itself. This modernity
becomes even more obvious when we study of the second type of
chronology and topology.
2 Subjective time and space:
The emphasis will be on the perceptions of Emma herself as
Thibaudet 6) pointed out that she incarnates a double illusion ‘in
time’ and ‘in space’, but a new reading of Madame Bovary may give
rise to a strange impression which is perhaps worth mentioning. A
man with a letter wakes Charles Bovary and his first wife up, in the
middle of the night:
This letter, sealed with a little seal of blue wax, begged
Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to Les Berteaux, to
set a broken leg.
p.9.
This in fact is the first sign of the presence of Emma in the novel,
recognizable by the blue colour — her colour and the colour of the
Virgin Mary — since wax used for sealing was usually red or
yellow. Charles arrives early in the morning at the farm of Emma’s
father, depicted as a very wealthy farm:
It had the look of a substantial farm. You could see in the
stables, over the tops of the open doors, great ploughhorses eating tranquilly from new racks. Stretching right
along by the outhouses there was a large dunghill, with
steam rising from it, and, in among the hens and the
turkeys, five or six peacocks, the ornaments of every Caux
6）Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert, Tel, Gallimard, 1992, p.103.
20
farmyard, were pecking around up on top. The sheepfold
was long, the barn was high, with walls as smooth as glass.
In the shed there were two big carts and four ploughs, with
their whips, their collars, their full harness, with blue
fleeces soiled by the fine dust that drifted down from the
lofts above. The yard sloped upwards, planted with trees
symmetrically spaced, and there was a lively cackling from
a flock of geese near the pond.
p10.
This is a very good example of the precision of Flaubert’s
descriptions mentioned by Pierre Ajac but the size of the farm is
also striking.
After bandaging the patient, Emma’s father who has broken one
of his legs, Charles goes downstairs into the parlour:
Two places, with silver goblets, were set on a little table, at
the foot of a big four-poster bed, its cotton canopy printed
with pictures of Turks. There was an odour of orris-root
and damp sheets, which came from the tall oakwood chest,
facing the window. On the floor, in the corners, propped
up, there were sacks of wheat. It was the overflow from the
granary next door, just up the three stone steps.
p.11.
All these details can be interpreted as mere indications of the
wealth of a Normandy farmer but the reader may also get the
impression that this is the setting for a fairy tale: a beautiful
princess not having much fun in her father’s castle is waiting for
her Charming Prince. The unusual elegance of Emma becomes
more understandable:
A young woman, in a blue merino-wool dress with three
flounces, came to the door of the house to welcome
Monsieur Bovary.
p.10
Her nails are surprisingly white, her eyes are beautiful, her hairstyle is elaborated and, as she sews, she keeps ‘pricking her fingers’
and putting them to her lips to suck them as if in an erotic version
of Sleeping Beauty.
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
21
In this part of the text which usually passes almost unnoticed we
may find the origin of Emma’s taste for luxury and grandeur, as
well as the origin of her boredom and longing for an elsewhere.
The famous chapter VI in Part 1, about Emma’s readings, can also
be analysed from a new perspective. These readings are not only
responsible for Emma’s dreams of love, as Don Quixote’s readings
of Chivalry romances were responsible for his foolish exploits.
They are also her first experiences of another time and another
place than the time and place in which she is situated. She seems to
have read Paul et Virginie, the famous novel by Bernardin de SaintPierre, when she was still a child living at the farm of her father:
She had read Paul et Virginie and dreamed of the bamboo
hut, Domingo the nigger, Faithful the dog, and especially
of the sweet friendship of a dear little brother, who goes to
fetch red fruit for you from great trees taller than steeples,
or runs barefoot along the sand to bring you a bird’s nest.
p.27.
No reading could bring this young girl living in a Normandy
farm farther from her present conditions. ‘Bamboo hut’; ‘nigger’; ‘a
dear little brother’, when she is a lonely child whose elder brother
died at an early age. ‘Red fruit’ from tall trees, when mainly apples
grow in Normandy. ‘Running barefoot along the sand’, when
Emma has never seen and will never see the sea. All these elements
belong to another world with its own time and space in which we
can be sure that Emma spent many long hours during her
childhood.
When her father takes her, at the age of thirteen, to a convent in
Rouen where she is going to be educated, they stop at an inn where
they eat out of painted plates. These painted plates give her a first
insight of ‘the subtleties of the heart and the splendours of the
court’. Looking at the plates depicting the story of Mademoiselle de
la Vallière, King Louis XIV’s mistress, Emma forgets completely her
present surroundings: the noisy Normandy inn and even the
22
apprehension or the excitement of the new life about to begin at the
convent. Each of Emma’s further readings there, the permitted
religious ones, as well as the books she reads in secret -provided by
an old maid mending the linen who lends romantic love novels and
historical novels by Walter Scott to the young girls- achieves the
same purpose. The death of her mother and the consolation she
finds in the romantic poems of Lamartine increase her melancholy
and boredom with life. As long as Emma’s religious zeal lasted, she
enjoyed life at the convent which becomes a boring place
afterwards. She is quite happy to leave it when her father takes her
back to Les Bertaux where she cannot find happiness because, at
the age of around twenty:
She considered herself utterly disillusioned, with nothing
more to learn, nothing more to feel.
p.30.
Which means that, in fact, she is full of illusions and craves for
experiences and sensations that Charles Bovary, the country doctor,
is completely unable to provide for her. This she realises, as soon as
she has married him.
Emma’s marriage marks the entrance in more mediocre
surroundings than the ones she was accustomed to. It also marks
the beginning of complete inactivity since no work is expected from
her, whereas she had the responsibility of her father’s farm
although she did not enjoy living in the country (p.12). She does her
best however to give a romantic touch to her house and even tries
‘to rouse herself to love’ but it is of no avail with Charles who is
completely unromantic and fully satisfied with his new wife and
his new life. Emma becomes unable to feel her husband genuine
passion for her. She can’t even enjoy her walks in the countryside
with her little dog. She starts dreaming more and more of another
life with another man in a different place:
She wondered whether, if her chances had been different,
she might have met a different man; and she tried to
imagine what it would have been like, the things that
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
23
hadn’t happened, the different life, the husband she hadn’t
met. They were certainly not all like this one of hers. He
could have been handsome, witty, distinguished,
attractive, as they were no doubt, the men her old
schoolfriends had married. What were they doing now? In
the city, amid the noise of streets, the buzzing theatres and
the bright lights of the ballroom, theirs was the kind of life
that opens up the heart, that brings the senses to bloom.
But this, this life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks
north; and boredom, quiet as a spider, was spinning its
web in the shadowy places of her heart...
p.34.
Emma’s evocations of the life of her friends in the city and of
their marital bliss are as concrete as her dreams when she was
reading Paul et Virginie. The strength of her evocation of another
life or of her previous life once she is married is remarkable. Emma
has the capacity to transport herself in imagination to another
place, at another time, a capacity which adults tend to lose but
which she shares with her creator Gustave Flaubert.
Her first dreams of love were directly inspired by her readings of
historical novels when she fancied herself in her convent as a
chatelaine in some old manor-house (p.28). She was also able to
dream very concretely of life in Paris doing imaginary shopping in
the capital with the help of a map and visualizing higher society in
distinct tableaus (p.45). And she dreams of the Country of Love. In
Part 1, she imagines life in a tranquil chateau with silk-curtained
deep-carpeted boudoir, with lavish vases of flowers and a bed on a
little platform (p.46). In Part 2 there is another description of this
imaginary land of love and happiness when Emma is getting ready
to elope with Rodolphe:
Emma was not asleep, she was pretending to be asleep;
and, while he was dozing off beside her, she was roused by
other dreams.
Behind four galloping horses, she had been carried seven
days into a new land, whence they would never return. On
they go, on they go, close-embracing, wordlessly. Often,
24
from a mountain-top, they suddenly glimpsed some
splendid city of domes, bridges, ships, groves of lemontrees and cathedrals of white marble, their elegant spires
topped with the nests of storks. They moved at a walking
pace, over the great flagstones, and on the ground there
were bouquets of flowers, offered by women dressed in
red bodices. You could hear bells, mules braying, with the
murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose
drifting spray cooled piles of fruit, arranged in pyramids at
the foot of pale statues, that smiled beneath dancing
waters. And they came, one evening, to a fishing-village,
where brown nets were drying in the wind, along the cliff
by the huts. It was there they would settle down for all
time: they would live in a low house with a flat roof, in the
shade of a palm-tree, at the head of a gulf, on the edge of
the sea. They would cruise in a gondola, they would swing
in a hammock; and their existence would be easy and free
like their silken garments, warm and starry as the soft
nights they would contemplate. And yet, in the immensity
of this future that she conjured for herself, nothing specific
stood out: the days, each one magnificent, were as near
alike as waves are; and the vision balanced on the infinite
horizon, harmonious, blue-hazed, and bathed in sunlight.
But the child began to cough in her cradle, or else Bovary
snored more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep until
morning...
pp.158-159.
Emma is not asleep, she dreams while awake. Space in this
Country of love is like a pot-pourri of her readings and her dreams
and of Flaubert’s own memories of his trips to Italy and the Orient.
Time is repetitive, just as in Emma’s everyday life, but boring
bourgeois marital life in Normandy turns into easy, free, warm and
starry life with her lover, set in a kind of eternity of bliss.
Emma’s first and last experience of real luxury is at La
Vaubyessard when the Bovary couple is invited to the annual ball
of the Marquis. Just like Emma’s father’s farm, the chateau is
described as very big and beautiful. When dinner is served, Emma
is especially fascinated with the Marquis’s father-in-law, the old
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
25
Duc de Laverdière. The old man with ‘drops of gravy dribbling
from his lips’ as the narrator describes him, is for her a
representative of life at the Court of Marie-Antoinette before the
French Revolution. She sees him not as a senile old rather
disgusting man but as one of the heroes of her historical novels and
Emma’s fascination with those surroundings will last long after she
comes back to her house in Tostes:
Iced champagne was served. Emma shivered from head to
foot when she felt the cold taste in her mouth. She had
never seen pomegranates before, never eaten a pineapple.
Even the powered sugar looked whiter and finer than
elsewhere.
p.38.
Emma seems to be really tasting ‘the red fruit’ she had only
tasted in imagination when she was reading Paul et Virginie in her
childhood and she hears conversations and sees love-affairs around
her like the ones she read about in her books at the convent. The
function of the episode of the ball at La Vaubyessard is to confirm
Emma in her belief that a world like the one she read about in
novels really exists. Back home at Tostes she keeps hidden in a
cupboard, the green silk cigar-case picked up by Charles on the
road just after several horsemen had rode by, among whom she
thought she had recognized the Viscount with whom she had
danced at the ball.
This dance is described twice in the novel. The actual dance with
the Viscount at the ball at the chateau, which takes place only once
in Emma’s life, is described first:
They began slowly, and went faster. They were turning:
everything was turning around them, the lamps, the
furniture, the panelling, the parquet floor, like a disk on a
spindle.
p.41.
As if put into abyss, almost the same scene appears again in the
next chapter describing Emma’s boredom at Tostes after the ball at
26
La Vaubyessard, but this time the scene is miniaturised. A man
sometimes comes in the street and plays an organ:
Immediately a waltz started up, and, on top of the organ,
in a little salon, dancers the size of your finger, women in
pink turbans, Tyrolean peasants in their jackets, monkeys
in frock-coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, they went
round and round, in among the armchairs, the sofas, the
console tables, mirrored in bits of glass held together at
their edges by strip of gold paper.
p.50.
Emma looks many times at this scene from her widow. During
one full year after the ball she lived in the expectation of another
invitation to La Vaubyessard, doing her best to imagine the life of
the Viscount in Paris. No invitation comes and Emma sinks into
complete boredom. The tunes played on the portable organ are the
only echoes from the world which reach her now in Tostes. At first,
she associates those tunes with far away places like theatres and
salons but finally it is as if space and time were abolished. One of
these tunes plays endlessly in her mind in which her thoughts
become the dancers:
A never-ending saraband was unwinding in her head, and,
like an Indian dancing-girl on a flower-patterned carpet,
her thoughts were leaping to the music, swinging from
dream to dream, from sorrow to sorrow.
Once all hope for another invitation to La Vaubyessard is lost,
time begins to stretch again:
After the annoyance of this disappointment, a blankness
once more filled her heart, and now the days began their
same old procession again.
One after another, along they came, always the same,
never-ending, bringing nothing. Other people’s lives,
however drab they might be, were at least subject to
chance. A single incident could bring about endless twists
of fate, and the scene would shift. But, in her life, nothing
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
27
was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future
was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was
bolted.
p.49.
No incident in her life: no twist of fate, no shift of scene. Time
does not flow, space does not change, as they do so often in lovestories or historical novels. Time and space without any promise of
excitement, adventure and happiness merge into one single image:
a dark corridor with a bolted door at its far end.
When Emma is sick with boredom space shrinks, the big
ballroom at La Vaubyessard is reduced to the size of the top of a
portable organ and her future is as bleak and without any
expectation as a prison corridor. It is as if space and time were
almost reduced to nothing.
The same emptiness is described for example after the departure
of Léon for Rouen. Emma and Léon have just parted, too
inexperienced, both of them, to start an affair. (This will only come
in Part III when they meet again by chance at the opera in Rouen.)
The carriage of Maître Guillaumin taking Léon to Rouen has gone,
Emma is at her window on to the garden, watching the clouds:
They were massing in the western sky towards Rouen, a
fast-uncoiling blackness, its edges trimmed with great
strands of sunlight, like golden arrows on a display trophy,
while the rest of the empty sky was white as porcelain. But
a gust of wind curved the poplars, and now rain was
falling; it spluttered over the green leaves. Then the sun
came out, the hens clucked, sparrows shook out their
wings in the damp bushes, and as the pools of rain on the
gravel ebbed away they took the pink flowers fallen from
an acacia.
— He must be so far away already! She thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half past six, during
dinner.
p.96.
Emma seems lost in the contemplation of the sky and of nature.
We do not know how much time has elapsed between the
28
beginning and the end of her reverie. Sense of time and space seem
to be lost and what is felt here is an absence of being as if Emma
had ceased to exist.
Another of these moments of almost non-existence is described
when Emma experiences her first temptation of death when
Rodolphe has betrayed her. She has fled to the attic to read
Rodolphe’s farewell letter, which came hidden in a basket of
apricots, and she is attracted by the emptiness beneath her:
The ray of light coming up directly from below was
tugging the weight of her body towards the abyss. It was
just as if the swaying surface of the village-square flowed
up into the walls and the floor tilted on its end, rather like
a ship pitching about. She was standing right on the edge,
almost hanging, swinging in empty space. The blue of the
sky invaded her, air was circling in her skull, she had only
to let go, to give in; and the snoring of the lathe went on
and on, like a voice furiously calling to her.
p.166.
Emma’s perceptions are distorted. She has the feeling of standing
at the edge of a ship swinging above the sea. Time and space no
longer exist for her since Emma is invaded by the sky and only
stopped from jumping by the voice of Charles anxiously calling his
wife.
A similar but completely opposite experience with time and
space occurs when Emma is happy. At such moments, emptiness is
replaced by fulfilment and instead of disappearing Emma seems to
expand around herself in a kind of moment of eternity.
This analysis of the variation of the perception of time and space
by Emma according to her mental condition is close to the analysis
of the two kinds of duration in Flaubert’s novel described by
George Poulet 7). The first duration is the duration of Emma’s
boredom when time slows down and the second is the duration of
7）George Poulet ≪Flaubert≫ in Etudes sur le temps humain, Plon, pp.323313.
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
29
the perfect moment of fulfilment. Poulet analyses the scene in the
forest when Emma gives herself to Rodolphe. First, he quotes from
the novel:
Silence everywhere; strange tenderness coming
from the trees; she felt her heart, as it began to beat
again, and the blood flowing in her body like a
river of milk. And she heard in the distance,
beyond the wood, on the far hills, a vague and
lingering cry, a murmuring voice, and she listened
to it in silence, melting like music into the fading
last vibrations of her tingling nerves.
(pp.129-130.)
In this passage, Flaubert manages to give to the moment a
spatial and temporal density so special that it seems (and
this is probably the effect Flaubert wanted to achieve) that
this moment belongs to a duration different from the
duration of ordinary days, a duration where the tempo of
things becomes softer, slower and consequently more
perceptible; a duration that spreads. It is as if time, just as a
passing breeze, could be felt in the beats of the heart which
starts again, in the blood which flows like a river of milk. It
is no longer the bitter consciousness of a gap which
deepens, there is no more gap, there is only a general
sliding of things and of the perceptive being, with the
feeling of an absolute homogeneity between the different
components of this moments. The perceptive being and its
body, and the landscape, and nature, and life, everything
participates at the same moment to the same becoming.
Poulet is talking here about the very special perception of time
and space of the ultra-perceptive and fulfilled subject that Emma
has become at that moment. Time and space are felt from within, as
an expansion of her whole being. This is the description of a perfect
moment of bliss when Emma feels part of the world, one with the
world, instead of feeling separated and excluded from it, secluded
in boredom.
In Part III Chapter 5 we find another example of this expansion
30
or dilatation of Emma into space for what looks like a moment of
eternity. She has managed to convince her husband that she needs
to take a piano lesson every Thursday in Rouen where she meets
Léon who has become her lover after her first affair with Rodolphe.
The old carriage Hirondelle (Swallow) of the Golden Lion, one of the
two inns of Yonville, takes her far too slowly to Rouen. She knows
every tree and every house on the road but each time the town
appears she seems to experience the same feeling of exaltation:
From that dense-packed humanity she inhaled
something vertiginous, and it gorged her heart, as though
the hundred and twenty thousand souls pulsing down
there had discharged all together the fumes of the passions
she imagined theirs. Her love unfurled across vast space,
dilated to a chaos by the vague murmur rising from below.
She rained it down again, on the squares, on the parks, on
the streets, and the old Norman city seemed spread before
her like some great metropolis, like Babylon unveiled for
her.
pp.213-214.
Rouen appears to Emma as some great metropolis contemplated
from an elevated position. She succeeds here, by the power of her
imagination and desire, to change the old Norman city into
something completely different. The space around her is pervaded
by her love, and turned into something similar to the ideal and
imaginary Country of Love of her dreams.
When she begins to be disappointed with her second lover Léon,
just as she had been disappointed with her first lover Rodolphe, she
finds herself dreaming once more about the perfect lover, admitting
now that it is an impossibility. Sitting on a bench near the walls of
her former convent she remembers her past, and even her present
with Leon appears to her in a past perspective, as if no present time
or space existed any more for her. The clock of the convent brings
her back to reality:
Four o’clock! And she felt as though she had been there,
on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
31
be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
p.231.
There will be no traditional flash-back at the moment of Emma’s
death but a second one takes place when she comes back from a
visit to her former lover Rodolphe in a last desperate attempt to
find the money which could have saved her from ruin and shame.
Her perceptions of space and time are once again completely
modified as she is on the verge of collapsing:
She stood there bewildered, quite oblivious, but for the
sound of the blood pounding along her arteries, which she
thought she could hear seeping out of her, like a trumpetcall echoing everywhere. The earth beneath her feet was
undulating gently, and the furrows looked like enormous
brown waves, pounding the beach. Everything in her head,
all her reminiscences, all her ideas, poured out at once, in a
single spasm, like a thousand fireworks exploding. She
saw her father, Lheureux in his office, their room in town,
a different landscape. Terrified, she felt the touch of
madness and managed to take hold of herself again, in
some confusion...
pp.255-256.
This scene, which is said to have been written out of Flaubert’s
own experience when he had his first stroke of epilepsy, depicts the
explosion of mental inner space and time into an outer space which
has become strangely unfamiliar. Emma will never regain a sound
perception of space and time. Inner time and space are lost, outer
space and time offer no shelter or hope. Emma has no choice but
death now. She steals arsenic from Homais’ laboratory with the
help of Justin, Homais’ apprentice who adores her in silence, and
she commits suicide.
After her death, Charles comes to say goodbye to her as her
corpse dressed in her wedding gown is laying on the bed, and he
has the feeling that she expands into the surrounding space:
Ripples were washing over the satin dress, as pale as
32
moonlight. Emma was disappearing into its whiteness; and
to him it was just as if, flowing out of herself, she were
passing darkly into the things around her, into the silence,
into the night, into the passing breeze and the damp smell
rising from the earth.
pp.272-273.
Charles loves his wife even more passionately after her death.
Flaubert writes that: ‘She was corrupting him from beyond the
grave’(p.280). In his attempt to remain surrounded with her
presence Charles adopts her predilections and ideas and he dies
peacefully in his garden on a beautiful summer day ‘choking like
an adolescent from the vague amorous yearnings that swelled up in
his aching heart.’p.286. It is as if he dissolved in the atmosphere
Emma has left around him even after her death.
3 A book about nothing:
Madame Bovary is not, in spite of its Balzacian sub-title:
‘Provincial lives’, just a traditional novel the heroine of which,
presented at first as a beautiful demoiselle in a farm, a romantic
young girl who read too many novels in her convent, ends up as a
woman destroyed by her attempts to fulfil her dreams of love and
luxury. It can also be read as an extraordinary attempt to depict the
modifications of the perception of time and space by a character.
In the chapter ‘Madame Bovary or the book about nothing’ of his
book Form and Signification 8), Jean Rousset quotes Flaubert’s famous
letter in which the writer explains to his lover Louise Colet what
type of novel he would like to write:
What I find beautiful, what I’d like to do, is a book about
nothing, a book with no external attachment, which would
hold together by the internal strength of its style, as the
earth floats in the air unsupported, a book that would have
almost no subject at all or at least one in which the subject
would be almost invisible, if that were possible. The most
8）Jean Rousset Forme et Signification, Corti 1962.
Emma’s perception of time and space in Madame Bovary
33
beautiful works are those with the least matter; the more
expression coincides with thought, the closer the word
adheres to it and vanishes into it, the more beautiful it is. 9)
Rousset considers that Flaubert achieved his goal with Madame
Bovary and he underlines Flaubert’s modernity:
Flaubert’s research is always with us; he comes first as one
of the non-figurative writers of the modern novel. 10)
At the end of this chapter, Rousset adds:
It is in the Flaubertian genius to prefer the reflection of the
event in the consciousness to the actual event; the dream of
passion to passion; to substitute the absence of action to
action and emptiness to any presence. And it is here that
Flaubert’s art triumphs; the most beautiful aspect in his
novel is what does not resemble the usual novelistic
literature; it is the vacant spaces. 11)
The scrutiny of the changes of the inner perception of time and
space of Emma may have allowed us to catch those ‘vacant spaces’.
We understand now why Flaubert paid far less attention, in
Madame Bovary, to objective temporality and topology, mostly
limited to indications of season and time of the day and precise
descriptions of places, than to subjective time and space. It is at this
level that he could reach his goal of writing a ‘book about nothing’,
without subject, which modern writers, like Virginia Woolf and
Nathalie Sarraute for example, were to attempt again after him,
conscious of their debt towards the old master.
9）Gustave Flaubert, Selected Letters, Penguin Books, 1997,p.170.
10）Jean Rousset Forme et Signification, Corti 1962, p. 111.
11）idem, p,133.