Writing on the Wall (12 page)

Mass culture in
Madame Bovary
means the circulating library and the
Fanal de Rouen
and the cactus plants Léon and Emma tend at opposite windows, having read about them in a novel that has made cactuses all the rage. It means poor Charles’ phrenological head—a thoughtful attention paid him by Léon—and the pious reading matter the curé gives Emma as a substitute for “bad” books. It means the neo-classic town hall, with its peristyle, and the tax collector at his lathe, an early form of do-it-yourself. One of the last visions Emma has of the world she is leaving is the tax collector in his garret pursuing his senseless hobby, turning out little wooden imitations of ivory curios, themselves no doubt imitations produced in series in the Orient for export. She has run to Binet’s attic from the notary’s dining-room, which has simulated-oak wallpaper, stained-glass insets in the windowpanes, a huge cactus, a “niche,” and reproductions of Steuben’s “Esmeralda” and Schopin’s “Potiphar.” Alas, it is like Emma to stop, in her last hours of life, to
envy
the notary. “That’s the dining-room I ought to have,” she says to herself. To her, this horrible room is the height of good taste, but the blunder does not just prove she had
bad
taste. If the notary had had reproductions of the “Sistine Madonna” and the “Mona Lisa,” she would have been smitten with envy too. And she would have been right not to distinguish, for in the notary’s interior any reproduction would have the same value, that of a trophy, like a stuffed stag’s head. This is the achievement of mass-produced and mass-marketed culture.

In Emma’s day, mass-produced culture had not yet reached the masses; it was still a bourgeois affair and mixed up, characteristically, with a notion of taste and discrimination—a notion that persists in advertising. Rodolphe in his château would be a perfect photographic model for whiskey or tobacco. Emma’s “tragedy” from her own point of view is her lack of purchasing power, and a critical observer might say that the notary’s dining-room simply spelled out the word “money” to her. Yet it is not as simple as that; if it were, Emma’s head would be set straighter on her shoulders. What has happened to her and her spiritual sisters is that simulated-oak wallpaper has become itself a kind of money inexpressible in terms of its actual cost per roll. Worse, ideas and sentiments, like wallpaper, have become a kind of money too and they share with money the quality of abstractness, which allows them to be exchanged. It is their use as coins that has made them trite—worn and rubbed—and at the same time indistinguishable from each other except in terms of currency fluctuation. The banalities exchanged between Léon and Emma at their first meeting (“And what music do you prefer?” “Oh, German music, which makes you dream”) are simply coins; money in the usual sense is not at issue here, since both these young people are poor; they are alluding, through those coins, to their inner riches.

The same with Rodolphe and Emma; the same with nearly the whole cast of characters. A meeting between strangers in
Madame Bovary
inevitably produces a golden shower of platitudes. This shower of platitudes is as mechanical as the droning action of the tax collector’s lathe. It appears to be beyond human control; no one is responsible and no one can stop it. There is a terrible scene in the middle of the novel where Emma appeals to God, in the person of the curé, to put an end to the repetitive meaninglessness of her life. God is preoccupied and inattentive, and as she moves away from the church, she hears the village boys reciting their catechism. “What is a Christian?” “He who being baptized...baptized...baptized...” The answer is lost in an echo that reverberates emptily through the village. Yet the question, although intoned by rote, is a genuine one—the fundamental question of the book—for a Christian means simply a soul here. It is Emma’s demand—“What am I?”—coming back at her in ontological form, and there is no reply.

If this were all,
Madame Bovary
would be a nihilistic satire or howl of despair emanating from the novelist’s study. But there
is
a sort of tongue-tied answer. That is Charles Bovary. Without Charles, Emma would be the moral void that her fatuous conversation and actions disclose. Charles, in a novelistic sense, is her redeemer. To her husband, she is sacred, and this profound and simple emotion is contagious.

He is stupid, a peasant, as she calls him, almost a devoted animal, clumsy, a dupe. His broad back looks to her like a platitude. He has small eyes; he snores. Until she reformed him, he used to wear a nightcap. Weeping beneath the phrenological head, he is nearly ridiculous. He is nearly ridiculous at the opera (she has taken him to hear
Lucia di Lammermoor)
when he complains that the music is keeping him from hearing the words. “I like to know where I am,” he explains, though he, of all people, does not know where he is, in the worldly way of knowing what is going on under his nose. His next blunder, at the opera, is to spill a glass of orgeat down the back of a cotton spinner’s wife. He has no imagination, Emma thinks, no “soul.” When they find the green silk cigar case that must belong to the vicomte, on the way home from the ball at Vaubyessard, Charles’ only reaction is to note that it contains two smokable cigars.

Yet this provincial, this philistine is the only real romantic in the novel—he and the boy Justin, Monsieur Homais’ downtrodden apprentice, who dreams over Emma’s fichus and underdrawers while Félicité irons in the kitchen. These two, the man and the boy, despised and rejected, are capable of “eternal love.” Justin lets Emma have her death (the arsenic) because he cannot refuse her, just as Charles lets her have her every desire. The boy’s passion drives him to books, instead of the other way around: Monsieur Homais catches him reading a book on “Married Love,” with illustrations. Justin is only a child and he weeps like a child on Emma’s grave. Charles is a man, a provider, and he has a true man’s solicitude for the weaker creature. He sheds tears when he sees Emma eat her first bread and jam after her brain fever. This heavy, maladroit man is a person of the utmost delicacy of feeling. If he is easy to deceive, it is because his mind is pure. It never enters his head that Emma can be anything but good.

He first meets her in the kitchen of her father’s farmhouse. He has been waked up at night to go set Farmer Rouault’s leg, in a scene reminiscent of a genre painting: “Fetching the Doctor.” A succession of genre scenes follows that evoke the Dutch masters of light—Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch: Emma making the bandage, pricking her fingers with the needle and putting them into her mouth to suck while the doctor watches; Emma in the kitchen sewing a white stocking, darting her tongue into a liqueur glass of curaçao; Emma in the farmyard under a silk parasol. In the big kitchen Charles’ senses are heated as she cools her cheek against her palm and her palm against the great andirons, and his mind is buzzing, like the flies crawling up the empty cider glasses, as he looks at her bare shoulders with little drops of sweat on them. He is a man, and she is a young lady; his bewilderment and bewitchment arise from this fusion of the sensual and the sacred. For him, marriage with Emma is a sacrament, and the reader never sees him in the act of love with her, as though Charles, ever tactful, reverently drew the bed curtains.

Why did she marry him? Flaubert does not really say. “To get away from the farm” is not enough. Would she have married Monsieur Homais if he had come courting? There are a number of questions about Emma’s inner life that Flaubert does not ask. But thanks to Charles, the answer does not matter, because to him the whole thing is a mystery, and like the mysteries of faith to be accepted with holy joy and not puzzled over. For Charles, Emma is a mystery from start to finish. The fact that she ministers to his comfort, prepares charming little dishes, takes care of his house and his patients’ accounts, is part of the ineffable mystery of her sharing his bed. The reader is persuaded by Charles’ unquestioning faith, to the point where Emma’s little gewgaws—her watch charms, her monocle, her ivory workbox, the blue glass vases on her mantelpiece, her silver-gilt thimble—partake of her seductiveness. More than that, these acquisitions, seen through Charles’ vision, do just what an advertiser would promise: they give Emma
value.
Thus Charles is not only Emma’s dupe but also the dupe of commerce. And yet it works; the reader is convinced that Emma is somehow
better
than, say, Madame Homais—which is not true.

Through Charles, Emma acquires poetry. But he could not possibly put into words what she means to him, and if he could have articulated a thought on the subject, would have declared that
she
had brought poetry into his life. This is so. There was no poetry with his first wife, the widow. Emma’s beauty, of course, is a fact of her nature, and Charles has responded to it with worship, which is what beauty—a mystery—deserves. This explains why Charles, though quite deceived by Emma’s character, is not a fool; he has recognized something in her about which he
cannot
be deceived.

Charles, like Farmer Rouault, is dumbly rooted in the organic world, where things speak in a simple sign language. A turkey delivered to the doctor says “Thank you” every year for a cure, like a votive offering in church, and two horses in the stable say that business is doing well. Flaubert is not sentimental about the peasantry, yet he prefers Nature and those who live with her and come to resemble her—as old couples come to resemble each other—to the commercial people of the town and the vulgar aristocrats of the châteaus, toward whose condition the tradespeople are aspiring. The peasants still have the virtue of concreteness, and their association with the soil and its products guarantees that they are largely, so to speak, home-made. Emma brings her freshness from the cider-presses of the farm, which she hates.

The country people in general are at a kind of halfway stage in the process of evolution from the animal kingdom to Monsieur Homais. The farm men who come to Emma’s wedding are seen by the author as collections of strange, out-of-date clothes hung on frames of flesh and bones—tailcoats and shooting jackets and cutaways and stiff shirts, reeking of history and doubtless of camphor, that have been kept in the wardrobe all year round and issue forth only to go to weddings and funerals, as if by themselves. These grotesque animated garments, each with a strong personality, have as absurd a relation to their owners as the queer cap Charles wears on his first day at school. The new cap, which is like a recapitulation of the history of headgear, is an uncomfortable ill-fitting false self donned for a special occasion—Charles’ introduction to civilization, learning, book culture. The country boy does not know what to do with the terrible cap, any more than how to give his full name, which he pronounces in a queer way, as though it too were extraneous to him, a humiliation that has been stuck to him and that he cannot get rid of, just as he cannot put the cap down. A name is a label. Witness the penmanship flourishes of Monsieur Homais’ names for his children: Napoleon, Franklin, Athalie...

Many novels begin with the hero’s first day in school, and Charles is the hero of the book that, characteristically for him, bears someone else’s name.
Madame Bovary
starts with his appearance among his jeering schoolfellows and ends with his death. Charles is docile. It does not occur to him to rebel. His mother, his teachers, his schoolmates, and finally the widow, make a citizen of him. They equip him with a profession, for which he is totally unfitted but which he wears, like the cap he has been given, mildly and without protest. He did not choose to be a doctor; he did not choose his name; he did not choose the widow. The only thing in life he chooses is Emma. She is his first and last piece of self-expression. Or not quite the last. When she is taken away from him, his reverence and gratitude to the universe turn to blasphemy. “I hate your God!” he bursts out to the curé, who is trying to console him with commonplaces. “Still the spirit of rebellion,” the priest answers, with an ecclesiastical sigh.

Now at first glance this appears to be an irony, since Charles has never rebelled until that moment against anything, let alone God. But Flaubert’s ironies are deceptive, and what sounds like an irony is often the simple truth, making a double irony. The priest is right. From the very beginning, Charles has been an obstinate example of passive resistance to the forces of the time and the milieu. A proof of this is that, in all his days, he pronounces only one platitude. His love for Emma is the deepest sign of that obstination. He loves her in the teeth of circumstance, opinion, prudent self-interest, in the teeth even of Emma herself.

This passive resistance of Charles’, taking the form of a love of beauty, seems to come from nowhere. There is nothing in Charles’ history to explain it: a drunken father, a dissatisfied mother, a poor education, broken off for lack of money. Add to this a very middling I.Q. No program for human improvement could be predicated on Charles’ mute revolt against organized society. He is a sheer accident, nothing less than a placid miracle occurring among the notaries and tradesmen, the dyers and spinners of the textile city of Rouen, where he hankers, uncomplaining, for his country home, which was no arcadia either. He is a revelation, and at the same time his whole effort is to escape notice, to hide in his fleshly envelope like an animal in its burrow. Moreover, his goodness (for that is what it amounts to) has no practical utility and will leave no trace behind it. As a husband, he is a social handicap to Emma, and his mild deference probably contributes to her downfall; a harsher man might have curbed her extravagances, so that she would not have felt obliged to commit suicide. After his death his little girl is sent to work as a child-laborer in a cotton mill; he has not even been able to protect his young. His predecessor, a Pole (perhaps another romantic; he “decamped” to avoid his creditors), whose practice and house he moved into at least left behind the bower he constructed to drink beer in on summer evenings, which in Emma’s day was shaded by clematis and climbing nasturtiums. But the only reminder of himself Charles leaves in Yonville l’Abbaye is Hippolyte’s stump and two artificial legs, one for best—bought by Emma—and one for everyday. Was he drawn from life? A little of him, including his first wife, the widow, may have been borrowed from Eugène Delamare. There may be reminiscences of a schoolmate, especially the cap. All that can be said is that Charles Bovary, wherever he came from, dawning in a vision or patiently constructed out of treasured bits and pieces of reality, was cherished by his creator as a stubborn possibility that cannot be ruled out even from a pessimistic view of the march of events.