Madame Bovary (2 page)

The novel is full of markers of the culture of Flaubert’s time that we in our time may not recognize as such: La Chaumière dance hall in Paris; Pompadour clocks and statuettes; the poet Béranger; the novelist Sir Walter Scott; fireworks; tourist attractions in Italy; a plethora of English importations, including horse racing and the casual use of English words and expressions. Flaubert is holding up a mirror to the middle- and lower-middle-class world of his day, with all its little habits, fashions, fads. French readers who belonged to that world would recognize themselves (or their parents) and either blush or laugh complicitly: they, or their parents, might play whist in the evening (as did the king
himself), or have a similar piece of coral on the mantelpiece or the same print on the parlor wall; perhaps it was their aunt who, like Emma, coveted a tilbury—that fashionable English carriage—or a mouth-rinsing
bowl on the dinner table; or perhaps a self-important uncle, like Homais, hoped to be awarded the cross.

It isn’t as clear to us, reading the novel in the twenty-first century, that these were not necessarily thoughtful individual choices but rather symptoms of a blind adherence to conventional—and often questionable—taste. But what Flaubert called stupidity was not limited to the bourgeoisie. Or rather, if he had a lifelong habit of watching for stupidity and relishing examples of it, he found it in “all of humanity”; all of humanity was bourgeois. He could not shave, for instance, without laughing at the stupidity of it.

In a letter written to Colet as he was composing the first meeting of Emma and Léon, he explains that what interests him is the grotesqueness of a supposedly lofty conversation between two sensitive, poetic individuals that is, in fact, wholly made up of clichéd ideas. He realizes early on that he has set himself a formidable task: to take this grotesqueness as his subject, to write a novel about shallow, unsympathetic people in a dreary setting, some of whom make bad choices and come to a horrific end. There will be no romanticizing the subject—in fact, the whole project is opposed to the romantic. The heroine, infatuated with romanticism, comes to grief because of it—because of her craving for impossible dreams, her refusal to accept the ordinariness of her life and its limited possibilities for happiness.

Nor is there any moralizing on the part of the author—one reason the novel was so vulnerable to attack by the government. The story contains no sermon to point out its moral; it has no “good” moral exemplar to offer in contrast to the “bad” woman that Emma is. The author does not condemn her behavior but, rather, may even have some sympathy for her; nor does he pass judgment on any of the other characters. The story is uncompromising: the heroine commits adultery and then suicide; her good husband dies, too; her innocent child is fated to have a hard life; the evil moneylender who has been the instrument of Emma’s downfall prospers; the conniving, hypocritical, and disloyal “friend,” Homais, is rewarded with a coveted medal.

Flaubert chose to create characters who are less than admirable and to treat them with ironic objectivity—he remarks in another letter, as he works on the scene between Emma and Léon, “This will be the first time, I think, that one will see a book that makes fun of its young leading lady and its young leading man.” Yet he goes on to say that “irony takes nothing away from pathos.” Which is echoed by Vladimir Nabokov in his lecture on the novel: “The ironic and the pathetic are beautifully intertwined.”

Flaubert wants his readers to be moved by the characters. He states explicitly, for instance, in the case of Charles’s grief, “I hope to cause tears to flow with the tears of this one man.” Again, in another letter: “In my third part, which will be full of comical things, I want people to cry.”

And although there is hardly a sympathetic character among them—some readers may feel that possible exceptions to this are Emma’s father; or the pharmacist’s assistant, Justin; or Charles himself—we do feel at least glimmers of sympathy or liking, at moments. It may be true that every one of Homais’s statements is a completely conventional “accepted idea,” yet it is hard not to enjoy his cunning, his enterprise, his intellectual explorations, and even to agree with him sometimes. One cannot help feeling some respect for Emma’s bravery at the end, her moment of true affection for Charles, her interest in her own dying: “She was observing herself curiously, to see if she was in pain. But no! Nothing yet. … ‘Ah! It’s a small thing, really—death!’ she thought; ‘I’ll fall asleep, and everything will be over!’” We are indeed moved, though perhaps not to
the extent Flaubert may have hoped—the prevailing irony may distance us too much from the story, even as it enhances its dramatic horror.

Nor is he himself unaffected by the characters. “I am in their skin,” he says—though he later qualifies that skin as “antipathetic.” We know that he sometimes found himself weeping as he wrote and that he so identified with Emma during her last days that he was physically ill.

Flaubert’s aim was to write the novel “objectively,” leaving the author out of it. Although
Madame Bovary
is filled with political and social detail reflecting Flaubert’s very strong views (his friend Émile Zola describes how Flaubert could not tolerate being contradicted in an argument), his technique is to present the material without comment, though occasionally a comment does slip in. To report the facts objectively, to give a
painstaking objective description—of a ridiculous object, for instance—should be comment enough. Flaubert remarks in another letter to Colet, of the scene in which Emma goes to the curé for help, “The episode is to have at most six or seven pages without a single reflection or explanation coming from the author (all in direct dialogue).”

In place of the author’s comment, then, the details of the scenes and the acute psychological portraits must convey everything—and, for Flaubert, direct dialogue, too, functioned to portray the characters more than to move the plot forward. Detailed description would bring the reader into the presence of the material. To be effective, the details must be closely observed, carefully chosen, precise, and vivid, as in the description of Emma’s bridal bouquet after she has thrown it into the fire: “The little cardboard berries burst open, the binding wire twisted, the braid melted; and the shriveled paper petals, hovering along the fireback like black butterflies, at last flew away up the chimney.”

If the novel is to move or interest a reader, Flaubert will have to transform what he sees as a sordid world, wholly through the power of his style, into a work of formal and stylistic beauty—all the while writing it in a manner against his own natural inclinations. He says outright many times that he is afraid he won’t pull it off: everything must depend on the style.

In keeping with his plain, almost clinical approach to the material, he schooled himself to be very sparing with his metaphors. Often enough, in his intensive revising, the version he cut out was more lyrical than the one he let stand. Marcel Proust, for one, writing more than sixty years after the publication of the novel, regretted the absence of metaphor, since he believed, as he said, that “only metaphor can give a sort of eternity to style.” But he admitted that there was more to style than metaphor alone.

Proust goes on to say that in all of Flaubert there is not a single beautiful metaphor. Yet here is another lovely comparison to a butterfly: after she has given herself to Léon for the first time, in the closed carriage that careens through Rouen, Emma tears up the note of rejection she had uselessly written him, and “a bare hand passed under the little blinds of yellow canvas and threw out some torn scraps of paper, which scattered in the wind and alighted, at a distance, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in bloom.”

If objective description was Flaubert’s literary method, that objectivity was always imbued with irony. To see and judge a thing with a cool eye was to judge it with the irony that had been a part of his nature since he was a child. His irony pervades the book, coloring each detail, each situation, each event, each character, the fate of each character, and the overarching story.

It is present in his choice of names: the old rattletrap of a coach called “Swallow”; the many character names, such as Bovary itself, that are variations of the French for “ox”; the evil moneylender Lheureux (“happy one”).

It is present in the words and phrases in the novel to which he gives special emphasis—in the manuscript he would have underlined them, of course, as he does similar language in his correspondence; in print they are italicized. They appear throughout the novel, starting on the first page with
new boy.
With this emphasis he is drawing attention to language that was commonly, and unthinkingly, used to express shared ideas that were also unquestioned. Some, such as
new boy
, are relatively innocuous; others may reveal a malevolent prejudice, such as the comment made by Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, to her maid (reported as indirect speech), when she learns that Emma has taken a walk alone with Léon: “
Madame Bovary was compromising herself.
”

Flaubert’s irony is present in the eloquent juxtapositions he creates between the “poetic” and the brutally commonplace, with an effect that is sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking, but that always draws us up short, breaks the “mood.” An exquisite passage—often a description of nature—will be undercut, as though here Flaubert is also undercutting his own lyrical impulse, by what immediately follows it, a banal, mundane comparison or action. There are numerous examples.

Emma, for instance, is lying on the ground in the woods, still tremulous from her first lovemaking with Rodolphe, in tune with the surrounding natural landscape, which is fully and sensuously described; the passage ends with the flat statement that Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, is mending a bridle. Much later in the story, in a boat with Léon, Emma feels a chill at the thought of Rodolphe with other women; the boatman, who has unknowingly upset her, spits into his palm and takes up his oars. Crushingly, pathetically, after Emma’s death, as she is being laid out, one of the women working over her admires her beauty in
rather glib terms—how alive she still looks; as if in rebuke, when the woman lifts Emma’s head to put on her wreath, black liquid runs out of her mouth. Flaubert the obdurate antiromantic could not be more clearly in evidence than at this moment.

As in the above examples, it is the incisive specificity of the poetic details and then the abruptness with which Flaubert “cuts” to the equally specific but disturbing or brutal details that jolts us so.

Some of these ironic juxtapositions produce not horror, or pathos, but humor.

For instance, during the scene at the agricultural fair, the poetic and romantic exchanges between Rodolphe and Emma, observing from above in the town hall, are punctuated (without authorial comment) by the sober announcements of awards for agricultural advancements in such areas as “manure” and “use of oilseed cakes.” Or the humor arises from a juxtaposition of disproportionate elements, as, for instance, in the case of the writings of Homais, who is a journalist as well as an apothecary: sometimes it is the grandiosity of his style that is out of keeping with the banality of his subject (cider); or, as he reports the festivities, it is the glorious colors in which he paints them in his article that have little relation to what we know of them in all their paltriness and insufficiency.

Or it is not in Homais’s writing but in his manner that the disproportion lies—between his pomposity, in a moment of embarrassment with the grieving Charles, and the obviousness of his statement: “Homais thought it appropriate to talk a little horticulture; plants needed humidity.”

Yet complicating our reactions to these moments is, in one instance, during the awards ceremony at the agricultural fair, some modicum of respect for the concerns of the proponents of advances in agriculture, and, in another, as Homais waters Charles’s plants after his tactless question about the funeral, some sympathetic understanding of the pharmacist in his moment of embarrassment. Our emotional responses to the incidents of the novel are never entirely unmixed, which is of course one of the sources of its power.

Because Homais is something of a writer, and a character obviously much enjoyed by Flaubert (who refers to him affectionately in his letters as “my pharmacist” and occasionally likes to use an expression Homais might have used), it is hard not to think that he must represent a comment on the role or the practice of the writer, or one aspect of it. In
fact, late in the novel, Flaubert the great reviser insinuates a moment of self-parody that would be comical if it weren’t subsumed by the drama of Emma’s final hours. As Emma lies gravely ill, Homais must send word by messenger to the two doctors who might be able to save her. He goes home and bends to his task, but although speed is of the essence, he is so agitated (and so particular about his prose style) that he requires no less than fifteen drafts to find the right wording.

Twice, at least, we are allowed to experience an event and then to read Homais’s written version of it. Homais’s material (like Flaubert’s) is mundane and subject to lapses into mediocrity—the fireworks at the conclusion of the agricultural fair are damp and they fizzle, a complete failure. But he transforms this material, inflates it, gives it importance and success, by a grandiloquent style that Flaubert, tongue in cheek, describes in a letter as “philosophic, poetic, and progressive”—and by his outright lies. A piece of writing, Flaubert seems to be demonstrating, may always be false: the writer has the power to transform reality as he wishes. Words, particularly in print, have the perfidious power to misrepresent and betray. And eloquence is especially dangerous: the better one can write, the more persuasively one can lie.

Though Homais is the only “professional” writer in the book, other styles of writing appear in the course of it: Emma’s father’s letters, the speeches of the officials, Rodolphe’s farewell note to Emma, Charles’s instructions for the coffining. Flaubert, entering fully, always, into his characters’ points of view, shifts gears convincingly as he moves in and out of these other styles, no less alien to him, perhaps, than the style of narration of the book as a whole. His own natural style, after all, he says in one letter, is that of
Saint Anthony:
what he wishes he could be writing are “grand turns of phrase, broad, full periods rolling along like rivers, a multiplicity of metaphors, great bursts of style.”