GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ( 1821-1880): MADAME BOVARY.
Hindi film version of this story: MAYA MEMSAB by Kedal Metha.
Flaubert’s aim in writing this novel was to examine the principles and emotions of romanticism which he had once considered valid, and to show the ruin of an empty headed woman who takes them seriously.
Rigorous psychological development, authenticity of detail, an impersonal narrative method, and a precise and harmonious style are characteristic of this novel.
On charge of being offensive to public morals, the book was tried but acquitted. This earned the book immediate popularity.
Bovarisme: ‘ domination by a romantic conception of the self” (Webster). This is the habitual practice of regarding, not the self, but the world as other than it is. It is an attempt to find in the world what is not there.
Flaubert does not judge his characters.
He is a clear sighted observer of folly.
Of course he had strong opinions about his characters. He has no love for Emma. But his attitude is complicated because there was a good deal of her in his own personality.
Homais represents everything he detests in the French middle class society – self-seeking, vulgar, pretentious and stupid.
Rouault is sympathetically treated.
The dull-witted Charles wins our pity, even respect, because he never pretends to be more than what he is.
Irony and Bathos: at the agricultural exhibition, the love dialogue between Emma and Rodolph is interwoven with the speeches of the chairman awarding prizes for pigs and manure.
Justine, weeping on Emma’s grave, is mistaken by the sexton for someone stealing potatoes.
Realism: every detail is grounded in fact. There was actually a Norman country doctor who died of despair over his wife’s infidelity. Many minor characters in the novel are real.
Death scene of Emma: Flaubert threw himself so intensely into writing this scene that he could almost taste arsenic in his mouth and he actually became ill.
Style: his search for the ‘mot juste’, the exactly right word.
Many chapters end with short understated sentences. They sting like whips.
Flaubert is the father of realism. Madame Bovary is the classic novel of the realist movement.
He was a romanticist who forced himself into a realist. By ‘romantic’ we mean his melancholy temperament, a taste for irony, dislike of the bourgeoise, love of exotic places like Egypt and Carthage etc. But his native romanticism is disciplined by his studied objectivity, by the ease with which he excluded his own personality from his writings, by the meticulous realism with which he recorded the minutiae of ordinary life. Even though ‘Madame Bovary’ is anti-romantic, there is a tension between romanticism and realism throughout.
When Flaubert is asked about the original of Emma, he used to answer: ‘Madame Bovary! C’est moi’. ( Madame Bovary, that is me).
It was Henry James who first called Flaubert ‘a novelist’s novelist’.
An author, according to Flaubert, should be in his work as God is in the physical universe, ‘everywhere present and nowhere visible’.
‘Madame Bovary’ is the first published work of Flaubert (1857). It is an experimental novel, not in plot, subject matter or characterization, but in restricting himself to the petty details of everyday life, avoiding high drama and grand moral dilemmas. What he wanted was to make an almost eventless narrative interesting. Once he wrote in a letter: ‘I undertook this novel in hatred of realism’. This should be understood as a reaction against a local variant of realism. He saw his own task as the aesthetic transformation of mundane and vulgar reality. He used to say that he wanted to write a novel about nothing. He wanted to give prose the rhythm of verse, without being flowery, fusing the vulgar with the poetic.
One of his major contributions was the suppression of the author as the source of reflections and judgements external to the narrative. He defined style in 1852 as ‘an absolute manner of seeing things’. His style – the aesthetic point of view – guarantees the moral autonomy of the novel.
His ‘book about nothing’ – that is, without plot (exciting adventures), character (interesting, life-like) and even theme (love, adultery, art) – anticipated the French ‘new novels’ of the 1950s and 1960s.
In his use of irony, he learned the method of mixing comedy and pathos from Cervantes. It ranges from mere caricature to a truly tragic sense of the discrepancy between Emma’s dreams and the real world. A fine balance between the world as false and petty and also as extraordinarily beautiful is achieved through his use of irony.
Charles’s medical incompetence also reflects his incompetence as a husband.
He presents sex in an indirect way. Much is left to the reader’s imagination. The erotic pleasure of Emma and Rudolph is conveyed through other sensations ( the sound of melted snow dripping from her parasol, the falling of ripe fruit and the scuttling of nocturnal beasts in the garden where she makes love with Rudolph). Similarly, sexual implications are present in non-erotic situations. Her desire for Charles’s fame as a surgeon arouses in her a sexual response. His failure finishes him off as a husband and she turns to her lover.
This novel is an exercise in literary criticism. The novel is fabricated from materials which are figures of the writer’s problems. Charles’s botched surgery is at the opposite end of Flaubert’s stitching together of sentences into a seamless text. Here the incompetent doctor is a reverse image for the competent artist. The failure of the character is an essential condition for the artist’s success. Imagination is a disease which will cripple one or kill unless one learns to immunize oneself against it. Emma’s kind of applying the imaginative sensibility on the real world can be productive only in the realm of art. Emma’s error is her attempt to live her life as if it were a novel.
Further, she fails to recognize that she is a character in a novel. But the writer and the readers know that she is. This provides the ultimate grounding for the novel’s ironic perspective.
The characters speak in double quotation marks. The dialogues are not instances of communication but as examples of the kind of thins people conventionally say.
Language is doubly inauthentic in that it both exceeds and falls short of reality.
Emma attaches to an accidentally discovered cigar case an imaginary narrative which gives it value and interest to her. Leon and Emma re-read their pasts to make them conform to their present desires. Charles, at last, interprets the whole story as the working of fate. Rudolph also mentions fate as the cause for canceling their fate. When he meets Charles at last, Charles reproduces it. “ And then, for the first and last time in his life, he uttered a deep thought”. This is ironic, because he is doing the most commonplace thing.
Charles has never interpreted anything correctly. His medical dictionary remains untouched. He proves totally incapable of reading Emma and the all too patent story of her adultery. When he discovers her letters, he explains the story for himself – which is the most banal of all interpretations.
Emma’s reading at the convent determines her misreading of life. Her fantasies of elopement with Rudolph are episodes from an imaginary novel. At the opera where she renews her relationship with Leon, she becomes conscious of that essential confusion between the real and the fictional from which she suffers.
Emma sets out to discover what it was that people meant by ‘bliss’, ‘passion’ etc. – words which she had thought so fine when she read them in books. The outcome is that she discovers in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.
Emma is a bad reader. Though she reads first-rate writers like Scott and Hugo, she reads books in a shallow manner.
Madame Bovary, one of the great nineteenth century novels of adultery, is also a scrupulous examination of the detailed texture of northern French provincial life and its constraints. Thick with realist detail, the novel nonetheless played a key role in promoting a recognizably modern form of impersonal narration, and in raising the status of the genre to the highest level. The novel also raises the issue of female identity. The way in which Emma is constructed sheds light on both the the art of the novelist in the nineteenth century, and on the ways in which novels connect with prevailing beliefs, manners and social structures. The specific instability of female identity as revealed by this novel leads to further questions about the coherence of the self: the ways in which fiction represented a growing sense of the difficulty of imagining a unified and coherent subject.
There were several nineteenth century novels which concerned themselves with the construction of the female psyche. This concern was not only the preserve of the female writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot. There were several novels by men where there was an element of self-identification with the central female figure, as Flaubert allegedly announced, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”. Why should these male writers try to inhabit women? Was there something about the predicament of women at the time that made this seem a worthwhile ambition? Or did they feel the pressure of demand from a female readership to explore the choices confronting women? Or were there darker motives for this perhaps surprising choice of perspective? Hovering behind these heroines’ struggles for fulfillment are death, madness and despair. Could no better end be imagined, in terms of the realities of the time? Recent feminist studies had examined the ways in which women had been represented by male writers in books. These studies often focus on the subversive impact of adultery and other forms of transgression.
One of the most distinctive features of what the Russian critic Bakhtin refers to as the ‘novelistic zone’ is the closeness between text and reader. As he says, ‘in place of our tedious lives’ many novels offer us ‘a surrogate’; true, but it is the surrogate of a fascinating and brilliant life. Such novels almost become a substitute for our own lives. Yet this special experience brings a special danger: we might substitute for our own life an obsessive reading of novels, or dreams based on novelistic models; in short, Bovaryism becomes possible.
Bovaryism is the ultimately fatal disease that overtakes Emma; she identifies closely with the characters and settings of what she obsessively reads and enjoys but she also tries to bring her own life into line with her novelistic models. It is not just that as a fifteen year old in a convent Emma makes a cult of Mary Stuart or has admiration for the ill fated women of Scott; but as a married woman, she prefers to stay in her room reading rather than attend to her domestic duties.
Flaubert has written a novel which takes novel reading itself as a central theme. It is not the first novel in which the nature of fiction is a key element – Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy were more concerned with questioning themselves. Nor is it new in the realist tradition of the nineteenth century to find a fiction raising issues to do with fictional conventions. But not only did this novel bring a new self consciousness about the art of fiction with it, it also brought a story which, unlike so many novels up until then, marriage did not conclude the narrative; rather, the disturbing results of marriage concluded it. Flaubert took the domestic life of the middle-classes – the main subject of nineteenth century fiction – and pursued it with a clinical thoroughness that undermined the whole enterprise, preparing the way for a kind of novel writing that was more interested in aesthetic pattern than in conveying ‘life’ in all its untidiness. Flaubert’s mould-breaking achievement had far reaching effects upon both the theory and practice of the novel in Europe.
A novel about nothing:
On 16 January 1852, Flaubert wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet, describing his ambition to write a book ‘about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style . . . a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible’. Yet the almost invisible subject matter was so shocking that when the novel was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856, Flaubert was prosecuted for offense to public and religious morality.
Le mot juste: (the right word). Flaubert was obsessively concerned with the precision of language, with the choice of ‘le mot juste’. His legendary perfectionism meant that each piece took months, even years, to complete. The novel took five years to complete, and so much cutting, rewriting and yet more cutting took place that the novel has been called ‘an exercise in amputation’. His difficulties were particularly acute as a result of his deeply felt disgust for the pettiness of his characters and the banal world of provincial Tostes and Yonville they inhabited. How can one produce well written dialogue about trivialities, he asks. Flaubert none the less saw his novel as experimental because it set up a completely new relation between high literary style and low provincial life. He was trying to write a prose which would transform the novel as a genre from being simply a vehicle for conveying flatly moral notions into a vibrant and challenging self-referential aesthetic object that would have a far more profound moral effect.
His fierce concentration on the details of everyday life had marked him for his contemporaries as the High Priest of a new realism, heir to Balzac. Baudelaire held that the new realism was a combination of imaginary penetration and realistic precision. What the artist was aiming at was the aesthetic transfiguration of banal realities.
One way he turned the ordinary into the aesthetic was a characteristic passionate attentiveness to material reality, a reality composed of a delicate insistence upon the time of year, or on precise geographical detail, and most especially on the multifariousness of things. Another technique was the way he teased a narrative out of nothing very much happening, making an elaborate drama of slow and tiny changes in consciousness, represented through minute description of things, people or the commonplaces of conversation. The attempt to transmute the mundane into pure aesthetic object, pure style, together with Flaubert’s belief that the author should show rather than tell, leaving the readers to arbitrate for themselves between moral possibilities, mandated a novel of unusually elusive narratorial presence. As the critic Saint Beuve pointed out, Flaubert’s distinctive contribution to the development of the novel was a pervasive ‘styling’ of reality. Here style approximates to Flaubert’s own definition: ‘an absolute manner of seeing things’. The author, according to him, must be ‘like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere’.
Cliché:
Flaubert’s command of cliché is staggering. There is hardly a single oral utterance in the novel which is not banal or inauthentic. The novel is in part a stitching together of the various discourses of the bourgeoise, from the farmer to the gentry. Emma’s father’s letter mimics the writing of someone of his class: colloquial, slangy and full of spelling mistakes. Emma’s letters to Rodolphe are faked up from shreds of romantic novels. Other discourses include the political speechifying at the agricultural show by the visiting dignitaries, the threadbare religious dogma of the priest, the provincial journalism, and so on.
Emma is at first represented as inhabiting cliché naively. She is naïve because although she draws her protocols from her romantic reading, she has never rehearsed them in her own life before. Unlike the more experienced Rodolphe, she does not know that these protocols have a long-standing conventional status in real life adultery. Importing these clichés fresh, she embarrasses Rodolphe with her ignorance of the decorums of adultery. His dismay at her gifts is an example of where she breaches the rules of mistresshood as understood in the world. Later she no longer inhabits cliché but uses it in a thoroughly Flaubertian way to seduce the also corrupted Leon. The difference is that while Emma is reduced to a mass-produced automaton in Rodolphe’s eyes because she speaks in the same old linguistic cliché which devalues emotion, she now operates language like a machine to produce and then to amplify emotion.
Cliché is always second hand; it has always been circulated before. It is characteristic of bourgeois commodity culture. One of the problems the novel as a whole both struggles with and dramatizes is the discrepancy between lived, passionate subjectivity and the second hand, already read, already written, already spoken forms in which it is obliged to express itself. With a characteristic perversity, the novel tries to make language new by attending scrupulously to the very threadbareness of its resources.
Irony:
It is interesting to see how a style can achieve moral force without an overtly moralizing narrator. In ‘Madame Bovary’ this sort of moral styling can be located most pervasively in his extensive use of irony. Flauber’s irony is not like Jane Austen’s, which is located principally within the authorial voice; rather, it works, by and large, by juxtaposition and repetition. One example would be the little scene near the end of the novel when the apprentice Justin kneels weeping on Emma’s grave. The irony is made when this is juxtaposed with the sexton’s voice who thinks that he has found out the potato thief. Another would be the scene depicting the Bovarys in bed, in which Charles indulges a waking dream of the future that includes a happy marriage for his daughter, while Emma envisages escape into a heavily exoticised and romanticized with her lover Rodolphe. Here the language of domestic idyll is undone by that of romantic idyll. Another way irony works is when two situations or discourses may be interlocked so that they mutually ironize each other, as at Rodolphe’s flirtation with Emma at the agricultural show. One of the effects is to underscore the nature of seduction as rhetoric. More importantly, while the text seems to point up Emma’s hopeless folly and Rodolphe’s habits of predation, it also underlines all the time the intractably earthy and sheerly animal quality of local life, the existence she is trying to escape, ‘domestic service’. Another technique is the irony committed by things. Things comment secretly upon the action. They also have a disconcerting habit of multiplying – there are no fewer than three riding whips in this novel, all of them connected with seductions. Ironies breed out of the circulation of things, like Leon’s violets, which Charles takes up to cool his eyes swollen from weeping for his father, or Rodolphe’s farewell letter, which Charles comes across after Emma’s death. The ironies are none the less painful for going unnoticed by their victims – almost without exception. The exception is, increasingly, Emma, and that begins to mark her out as Flaubert’s double.
Ennui:
One way of describing Emma’s predicament after her marriage to Charles is to say that she is suffering from a complex and intractable boredom – in French, ennui. Emma feels her ennui as an elusive malaise. It seems to derive from her radical dissatisfaction with her provincial life, expressed in part as a fantasy about metropolitan Paris. In tandem with this fantasy, her ennui realizes itself as sexual revulsion. Unlike George Eliot’s Dorothea or Henry James’s Isabel, she is not successfully prescribed the sedative of high moral ideals; although she always retains a longing memory of a sense of devotional, orgasmic wholeness that pervaded her convent girlhood. She chooses instead the analgesics of sex, shopping and eventually, suicide.
As Tony Tanner puts it, ‘what would or could or might genuinely cure what Emma suffers from is the real problem posed by the book’. In fact, marriage was conventionally prescribed for ennui and other psychological complaints in young women, but marriage, the mainspring of the plot of women’s lives, the moment when a woman’s identity is successfully transferred from being determined by her father to being determined by her husband, is from Emma’s point of view, disappointing sexually, and constricting socially. It fails to cure a boredom that she is already experiencing well before marriage. And marriage as a solution goes up in flames with her wedding bouquet. So she tries out another conventional cure: motherhood. But neither motherhood nor a change of place, nor a romantic friendship with Leon, nor even a full blown adultery wth Rodolphe, provides the escape she longs for. Part 3 of the novel postulates the possibility that another lover, Leon, might provide a more artistic experience, discards this possibility, gives Emma up to the debts resulting from her mad voracity for material things to assuage the void, conducts her through an agonizing suicide and finally performs a series of post-mortems upon her body and belongings. Finally we return to the tragedy of Charles, the tragedy of betrayed romantic love, in which as the good bourgeoisie, we should have been interested, had we not been so seduced by the aspirational, glamorous Emma. The whole novel is a study of bourgeois desire, its modes, mechanisms, excitements and disappointments. But above all, it is a study of adultery.
In Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression, Tony Tanner (1979) discusses the role played by adultery in fiction. The major nineteenth century novels are concerned with the centrality of marriage and with establishing property rights. In the novels of Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, the impetus of the novels seems to be inclined towards marriage and appropriate resolutions that promote the idea of the family, settlement, social cohesion, and so on. They represent that which threatens these formations as errant female desire. Consequently the plot of adultery becomes the basis for some of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century. According to Tanner, the unfaithful wife is, in social terms, a self-cancelling figure, one from whom society would prefer to withhold recognition so that it would be possible to say that socially and categorically the adulterous woman does not exist. It is this trajectory towards ‘non-existence’ that Emma will describe over the course of the novel.
The nausea of repetition poisons all bourgeois experience. If marriage downgrades love into habit – Charles’s sexual eagerness had turned into ‘a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner’ – the luscious transgressions of adultery eventually become just as monotonous. Adultery gives up its ability to ironize marriage; it becomes just the same. The despair Emma eventually suffers from stems not from remorse (as would have been conventional in the novel of the day) but, as Tanner remarks, from the discovery that there is finally no difference in these two regions of experience. Emma ‘discovers in adultery the platitudes of marriage’.
Deepening this sense of repetition and sameness, Flaubert introduces metaphors of ‘circling’ and ‘turning’ to emphasize Emma’s entrapment within the daily round. Emma’s adulterous cab ride with Leon goes round and round as it circles Rouen, continually passing the same scenes, mimicking the repetition of the sexual act, predicting satiation. Even these adulterous and adventurous turnings, repeated, sooner or later give up their exciting novelty and subside again under the tides of Emma’s ennui.
The heroine as novelist:
Emma eventually begins to fill the place of real ‘authentic’ experience with aesthetics, with ‘art’. She becomes in the process the most important and troubling surrogate for Flaubert himself in the novel. Engaged, like him, in crafting a ‘novel’ centred upon a romantic subjectivity out of the unpromising materials she has to hand, she occasionally manages to overcome the perpetual inadequacy of the object of desire by an act of the imagination. If the heroine is another in the long tradition of representing woman as a reader of letters, she also stages herself as a writer of letters. She will find two lovers to write letters to. But even these two lovers would be more satisfactory written to and dreamt about rather than dealt with in the flesh. In her imaginings about the Viscount and his cigar case, she breeds an imaginary narrative about his mistress, about his social life in Paris and about the metropolis as the site of pleasure. The cigar case enables her to support her imaginary existence on material evidence. In the same way, her lovers are more satisfactory and more desirable in their absence, because their absence allows for the transforming operation of the imagination. And Emma reverses the real and the imaginary and finds reality to be inferior. She enacts this predicament by attempting to apply to the real world an imaginative sensibility which can only be productive, according to Flaubert’s logic, in the realm of art. Hence her second adventure with Leon also dwindles in actuality into all the platitudes of marriage; yet, by continuing to play by the rules of illicit love – ‘a woman should always write to her lover’ – she manages to maintain a state of pleasurable desire.
In a sense, the bundles of letters she leaves behind for the unhappy Charles to read are her ‘novel’, that other novel in a debased novelistic language that shadows Flaubert’s own. He identifies himself with his heroine. Flaubert threw himself so intensely into writing this scene that he could almost taste arsenic in his mouth and he actually became ill. In the novel, the taste of arsenic is described as ‘inky’, suggesting that somehow his writing and his heroine’s arsenic eating were similar enterprises.
Construction of identity by Emma:
Emma starts her fictional life as a daughter and then moves through a bewildering variety of incarnations after her marriage. As a mother, she adopts the role in public but repudiates in private. Emma plays a pretty wife, warming her husband’s slippers, sewing buttons on his shirts, and so on, but only when she has the script of Hugo’s Notre Dame of Paris to play to, and a besotted Leon in addition to her husband as appreciative audience. She is also capable of acting the pious matron, dedicating herself to works of charity. All these roles are modeled after her reading. Her most persistent construction of herself in the beginning is as a heroine waiting for something to happen., a heroine in need of a story.
Emma’s efforts to invent herself as a romantic heroine realize themselves eventually in adultery. The exaltation of her illicit love making transports her back to the feelings aroused by her similarly illicit novel reading. Crossing the bourgeois boundary of conformity is like entering a world of romance she had read about. Rachel M. Brownstein suggests that Emma’s transports in Rodolph’s arms are attempts to replicate those feelings of being lifted outside ‘real’ life that came to her when she secretly read the romances forbidden in the convent. She is no longer Emma, but a member of a genre of adulteresses. Joined in the company of the unchaste, she becomes a generalization.
The ways in which Emma’s identities are generated and played out could be said to be the subject of Flaubert’s novel. Tony Tanner has argued that the price of Emma’s experimentation is the slow disintegration of what he calls the heroine’s ‘Emma-ness’.
The most striking thing about Emma is perhaps her conspicuous uselessness. She is a luxury item. Her father is glad enough to be rid of her, because she is no good at housework or work around the farm. With her marriage to Charles, she moves out of a land-based economy, in which women were expected to provide and breed manual labour, and enters a consumer economy, in which her principal function seems to be class display – a display of refinement in her body, her clothes, her accomplishments. Her uselessness is refined into bouts of nervous illness, and at the last into suicide. After all, she could have saved herself and her household by prostituting herself. Her refusal to earn in this way is interesting. Is it a last whisper of her virtue? Is it her last self indulgence as romantic heroine? Or is it a final Flaubertian refusal to be ‘useful’ in any way at all? She chooses in the end to ‘spend’ herself in suicide. In Emma Bovary, we have an analysis of a new type, the nineteenth century middle class woman with no occupation but love and shopping.
Suicide:
In the nineteenth century, suicide had two contradictory images. In the first place, it was seen as a terrible and shameful act. In Catholic France, it was held to lead to damnation. Homais’ hastily concocted story, that she had mistaken arsenic for sugar, was devised in part to shield himself from blame, in part to maintain a veil of respectability over the incident. Yet suicide had also its romantic aspects, even a fashionable side. Goethe’s bestseller, The Sorrows of Young Werther, sponsored a fashion for suicide. Flaubert himself had confessed that as a youth he dreamed of suicide. The 1830s even boasted Suicide Clubs in France. The romantic suicide was a repudiation of the inadequacies of modern life by a sensitive soul. So many modern critics have found the suicide of Emma as celebratory. At first, death seems a romantic consummation. She runs to the pharmacy ‘in a rapture of heroism’. It is her last effort to transform her life by using her reading as a model and a last effort to live romance by dying a romantic death. Her death is doubled in the novel: the first death corresponds to her imagined romantic notion of death. Soon after taking arsenic, she exclaims: oh, death is really nothing very much! I am going to fall asleep and it will all be over. The actual non-romantic death soon follows. Flaubert chooses one of the most distressing ways for his heroine to die. He depicts it with unsparing physical detail. Her grotesque death may be seen as an ironic comment on her idea of romantic suicide.
