A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  That is true enough, and many a critic has diagnosed Emma’s problem as a romantic distortion of the real and noted that her fate reflects Flaubert’s judgment on the delusions inculcated by romance novels, and by the Romantic generation of writers that preceded his own more disabused generation. That’s true, too: Emma is indeed deluded and self-deluding. But we should note as well that what makes Emma self-deluding is also what makes her interesting and worthy of our sympathetic attention. Following her initial sense of deception after her marriage, just before we learn of her reading, we are told that since the happiness that should have resulted from love had not come, “she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words ‘bliss,’ ‘passion,’ and ‘intoxication,’ which had seemed to her so beautiful in books.” The cynical or world-weary reader may want to respond that those are merely words, and that striving to find their meaning will offer no guidance to real life, but on the contrary only illusions that must be painfully shattered. Nonetheless, Emma’s meditation on the meaning of these abstractions, and on their fit with reality, makes her superior to other characters (including Charles) who never examine language or the world at all. Of Charles we learn that his conversation is “flat as a sidewalk.” In terms of the Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living, most of the characters in Madame Bovary are brain dead, whereas Emma seeks to discover what it all means. We can criticize her for going about it in the wrong way. But she gains our troubled sympathy for trying to change life.

  Here again, language is both the apparent escape ladder and the trap. For instance, she wonders about the discrepancy of her life as a newlywed and the traditional discourse of the honeymoon:

  She sometimes imagined that these were, nevertheless, the most beautiful days of her life—the honeymoon, as it was called. To savor its sweetness, she would doubtless have had to go off to one of those lands with melodious names, where the days following a wedding have a softer indolence! In a post chaise, under curtains of blue silk, you climb the steep roads at a walk, listening to the postilion’s song as it echoes through the mountains, mingling with the bells of the goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall. As the sun goes down, you stand together on the shore of some bay, inhaling the fragrance of the lemon trees; then, at night, alone on the terrace of the villa, your fingers intertwined, you gaze at the stars and make plans. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like a plant that was peculiar to that soil and grew poorly in any other spot. If only she could have leaned on her elbows on the balcony of a Swiss chalet or locked away her sadness in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband dressed in a long-skirted black velvet coat, soft boots, a pointed hat, and ruffles at his wrist!

  One can read this passage with an ironic smirk or with tears in one’s eyes, depending on temperament or simply current mood. It is pathetic and self-delusive, of course, imagined in the language that makes us sign up for cruises to tropical islands, but it is also the stuff of everyone’s dreams. If you think that everyone has the right to a certain modicum of happiness in life, Emma’s reverie is a place of true pathos. If you think rather that we all are doomed to the discovery of the fundamental discrepancy between desire and fulfillment, then Emma’s longings are unpersuasive. Such a passage can thus take on different colorations. It is both touching and pathetic, absurd and meaningful. Emma’s daydreams are inauthentic, the stuff of travel brochures, yet they make her also a kind of proto-poet, someone whose imagination recasts the world. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Aren’t we all daydreamers, inflating our egotistic wish-fulfillments in the realm of fantasy even while we may recognize their falsity?

  Language deludes us. It conjures up worlds that have no local habitation for us on earth. There are moments when Emma thinks she is on the verge of an experience that would match the books she has read. Notably, there is the ball at the château of La Vaubyessard that she and Charles are invited to, an episode that will create a “hole” in her existence by making momentarily real a world just dreamed of. It’s a world of orchestras playing and a dizzying waltz with a vicomte, of maraschino ices, and of the host’s father-in-law, a decrepit remnant of the ancien régime: “He had lived at Court and slept in the beds of queens!” Early in the morning, Emma looks out from the window of her guest room in the château: “The first light of dawn appeared. She looked at the windows of the château for a long time, trying to guess which were the rooms of all those people she had observed the night before. She would have liked to know all about their lives, to enter into them, to become part of them.” Windows in novels of a realist ambition tend to be frames for observing the world, for the presentation of landscapes and scenes. Here there are two windows. But if Emma can look out of one, she is frustrated in looking in the other, on the lives she would like to know. More than know: to enter, to become part of (“y pénétrer, s’y confondre”). Long after the visit to La Vaubyessard, she will ache for a repetition, but this never comes.

  What she is left with is the green silk cigar case that Charles finds in the road on their way home the next day. This emblem of a more glamorous existence becomes for Emma the most important object of her existence, one that she takes from the cupboard and fondles when Charles is out. Like so many of the things in the novel, it is both a physical object and more, something endowed with emotion, a fetish. She assumes it belonged to the vicomte. “Perhaps it was a gift from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some rosewood frame. … A breath of love had passed among the stitches of the canvas; each stroke of the needle had fastened into it a hope or a memory, and all those interlaced threads of silk were merely an extension of the same silent passion.” A fetishized object is one that has become meaningful, itself a kind of language. Things and words can change places, as when her reverie over the silk cigar case evokes its probable context, Paris: “The name itself was so vast! She would repeat it to herself softly, to give herself pleasure; it would resound in her ears like the great bell of a cathedral.” She buys herself a map of Paris, in order to imagine the word as a visitable place.

  Things and words are both subject to wearing out, becoming that flat sidewalk of Charles’s speech, or the worn coin whose denomination is no longer evident. When her affair with Rodolphe reaches what she sees as a climactic decision to elope together, Rodolphe decides the time has come to break with her. He begins to rummage in the old biscuit tin in which he has preserved her letters, along with those from past mistresses, and other keepsakes: “some bouquets, a garter, a black mask, pins, and hair—hair!—brown, blond, some of which, even, caught on the iron fittings of the box and broke when it was opened.” Opening the box releases “a smell of damp dust and withered roses.” When he starts to write his letter of rupture, it has the same withered and generic qualities as these souvenirs. He judges his clichés to be “in excellent taste,” and sends them off to Emma, who will nearly throw herself from the attic window after reading them. Such is the gap between the sending and the reading of messages. Clichés can be lethal.

  Rodolphe’s sense of tedium in his liaison with Emma provokes a reflection on language that seems to speak to Flaubert’s own deepest preoccupations as a writer, though as usual without offering us a clear insight into his position. It is worth an extended quotation:

  He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the
emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

  This passage appears to carry us beyond Rodolphe’s limited capacity to understand the quality of Emma’s passion—because the language in which it is expressed has been worn out by prior use—to Flaubert’s more general reflection on the limits of language. But we may be left uncertain as to what it is about language that makes it inadequate to the expression of our needs, our ideas, and our desires. Is it simply that we can’t find the right words? Or is language itself inherently limited? And perhaps also limiting: we cannot, as Nietzsche said, think outside the prison house of our language. Indeed, our thinking, our feeling, our wanting may themselves be determined by what language allows us to think, feel, desire. We are to that extent creations of language as much as users of language. We cannot find an outside of language, a breakout from the prison.

  If that is what Flaubert suggests here, it points a fundamental paradox of his stance as a writer. He worked incessantly to perfect the language of what he was writing. He could spend days on a single paragraph, pacing his study overlooking the River Seine in the Norman town of Croisset, outside Rouen, bellowing his sentences aloud to judge their cadence and their beauty. He was a self-described hermit in the service of art. Yet he was haunted by the suspicion that all language was in the final analysis like Rodolphe’s letter: nothing but commonplaces, places where people could gather with a sense of communicating with one another that was limited if not false. In his last novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, left unfinished at his death, Flaubert experiments with the creative possibilities of the commonplace and the cliché, with the idea of a book made up exclusively of the words of others, so arranged that readers would have no idea whether they were to take it ironically or straight.

  Already in Madame Bovary, Monsieur Homais, the pharmacist-philosopher, is presented as a kind of compendium of clichés, pompous, self-inflated, ultimately as limited in his “freethinking” as the priest Bournisien in his Catholic orthodoxy. The novel also foregrounds the speech of the herdlike collectivity, of the French pronoun on—one, no one in particular, everyone. As if to dramatize that the language of commonplace is at the very center of his representation of reality, Flaubert gives a full dramatic representation of its public role in the scene of the comices agricoles, the agricultural fair much anticipated by the residents of Yonville-l’Abbaye, the background against which Rodolphe undertakes his seduction of Emma. In the judging arena, the animals are described in loving detail. The judges on the other hand are “des messieurs”: indistinguishable frock-coated gentlemen who thereafter are referred to as on. The speeches of the local notables are labored and cliché-ridden. In counterpoint, Rodolphe’s caressing language of flattery shows up as equally banal, secondhand, expressive of nothing but a commonplace notion of seduction. Rodolphe has been claiming a natural affinity that has brought him and Emma together:

  And he grasped her hand; she did not withdraw it.

  “For all-around farming!—” cried the chairman.

  “A few days ago, for example, when I came to your house …”

  “To Monsieur Bizet, of Quincampoix—”

  “Did I know that I would be coming here with you?”

  “Seventy francs!”

  “A hundred times I’ve tried to leave you, and yet I’ve followed you, stayed with you.”

  “For manures—”

  This carefully orchestrated counterpoint continues, until we reach:

  “No! I will—won’t I—have a place in your thoughts, in your life?”

  “Porcine breed, prize ex aequo: to Messieurs Lehérissé and Cullembourg, sixty francs!”

  Rodolphe squeezed her hand, and he felt it warm and trembling like a captive dove trying to fly away again …

  Henry James described Madame Bovary as a world saved by style. That is right insofar as Flaubert’s style makes everything, even a tedious small-town agricultural fair, engaging. But it perhaps not so much that the world is “saved” by style than that it is grasped as style, as a kind of oratorio of voices whose interplay and agon make the banal interesting. It is a linguistic medium that shows up Rodolphe’s predictability and superficiality—as in his inability to understand the nuances of passion, in which, as noted above, he finds only an “eternal monotony”—and Emma’s limitations as a reader of language that she wishes to see as sincere and transparent, when it is isn’t that at all. Strikingly, the agricultural fair also produces one of the few characters in the novel who seems beyond our ironic reaction: Catherine Leroux, who receives a prize for “fifty-four years of servitude on the same farm.” When the crowd pushes her forward to receive her prize, Catherine Leroux is nearly deaf and dumb. “Living so much among animals, she had taken on their muteness and placidity.” Flaubert will develop this brief sketch of a long-suffering farm servant, limited in intelligence and sensibility yet also dignified, in his late novella Un coeur simple (A Simple Heart) written, he claimed, to show his dear friend the novelist George Sand that he could write something devoid of irony, something that demonstrated what she always said of him: that despite appearances, he had a good heart. Beyond irony lies a life of simple sensation, like that of animals.

  Emma attempts to escape from the confines of her existence through her passion for Rodolphe, and then briefly in an effort to aggrandize her husband, Charles, when he undertakes an operation on Hippolyte’s clubfoot, an excruciating failure; then, when Rodolphe drops her, she undergoes a brief experience of religious devotion, and then begins a new affair with Léon in the local capital, Rouen. But passion by its very nature seems unsustainable. Emma comes to each new tryst with Léon full of hope for extraordinary sensations, but more and more feels disappointed. Her attempts to resuscitate eros fail. And Flaubert writes this chilling summary aphorism: “Emma was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage” (Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage). It is not surprising that the imperial prosecutor at Flaubert’s trial was outraged by this sentence, which doubles the matter-of-fact reference to adultery (as itself something banal) with the claim that marriage itself is platitudinous—using in “platitude” a word we normally apply to language (like Charles’s speech, “flat like a sidewalk”). Adultery, marriage: all part of the same set of clichés. In the former you find the same boredom as in the latter.

  As her affair with Léon is reaching this impasse, Emma is also facing an accumulating mountain of debt. She has been borrowing from the merchant Lheureux, who supplies her with the luxury articles she needs to fulfill her idea of the glamorous life. She gives her lovers expensive accessories—Rodolphe gets a whip with an enameled handle, a signet, a scarf, a cigar case like the vicomte’s—and she adorns herself. It is important to her that her world be embellished by pretty things. But to define yourself in terms of expensive accessories becomes costly. Her attempts to borrow money fail. She is declared bankrupt, and the bailiffs come to inventory her possessions: “They examined her dresses, the linen, the dressing room; and her life itself, down to its most private recesses, was spread out at full length, like a cadaver being autopsied, under the eyes of these three men.” Losing those things that have defined you presages a loss of self. Emma turns to suicide, by arsenic stolen from the pharmacist’s store.

  Here Flaubert’s realism bears down—as realism often does—on the gruesome, perhaps in a kind of demonstration that to be honest and faithful to the real requires a detailing of the body in pain and sickness. Flaubert was a stickler for exactitude, and he researched carefully the effects of arsenic poisoning before writing Emma’s death scene, with its convulsions, sweat, and vomitings. Death itself comes under the guise of the leprous blind beggar and his smutty song, “the hideous face of the wretched man looming like terror itself in the darkness of eternity.” Just before the final co
nvulsion that ends in her nothingness, the priest is summoned to administer last rites:

  Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions: first on eyes, which had so coveted all earthly splendors; then on the nostrils, so greedy for mild breezes and the smells of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to utter lies, which had moaned with pride and cried out in lust; then on the hands, which had so delighted in the touch of smooth material; and lastly on the soles of the feet, which had once been so quick when she hastened to satiate her desires and which now would never walk again.

  This is another passage, not surprisingly, that outraged the imperial prosecutor. This farewell to Emma’s body uses the ancient rituals of the Church to remind us of the sensual uses of the bodily parts. Emma at the last is less a coherent self than a physiological bundle, a set of bodily sensations. And that might be the last word of realism.

  The bleak aftermath of Emma’s death cannot in any manner be seen as redemptive. Charles finds the cache of her love letters. Strangely, he comes to envy Rodolphe, to wish to be him, and when he encounters him sums up what has happened with supreme banality: “Fate is to blame!” (In French, it’s more delectable: C’est la faute de la fatalité!) Charles’s own death is followed by utter destitution, and Berthe—his and Emma’s child, about whom we’ve heard very little in the novel—is sent off to work in a cotton mill, a bitter end to Emma’s dreams of luxury. And the detestable Homais, in the last sentence of the novel, receives France’s highest decoration, the Legion of Honor.

  Like many nineteenth-century novels, Madame Bovary was published first in serial form, in six installments from October through December 1856, in the Revue de Paris, which took the liberty of deleting, without the author’s permission, some passages that the editors found too risky. Flaubert was furious. The editors were not mistaken in their estimate of the risk, yet their deletions merely attracted the attention of the censors, who wanted to know what went on in what wasn’t there. Characteristic here was the scene in which Léon seduces Emma during a long ride in a cab, its curtains closed, that wanders for hours through Rouen. We as readers see nothing of what is going on in the cab. Near the end of its perambulations, a “bare hand” emerges and scatters fragments of paper: the letter of rupture that Emma had prepared for Léon, now useless. But that “bare hand” (une main nue) was judged scandalous. Somehow that one small body part (“naked,” because a proper woman would be wearing gloves) was more suggestive, more erotic than a full view through the cab windows. By censoring the scene, the editors of the Revue de Paris reinforced the fetishistic investment in the detail that suggests the absent whole.