Introduction Bovary

Flaubert's obsession with his art is legendary: he would work for days on a single page, obsessively attuning sentences, seeking always le mot juste in a quest for both beauty and precise observation.

Her first lover, Rodolphe, mimics romantic discourse in his seducer’s letter of rupture, reducing words to empty husks, vehicles of lies, in the same way that Léon, the besotted, blue-eyed lawyer’s clerk, can spout only poetic clichés.

While taking her fate into her own handsfn4 and embarking on daring affairs, Emma lacks the superhuman force needed to break free imaginatively from a world in which women were relegated to roles dictated by men (and it was almost impossible for middle-class women to go out and work); the novel has three ‘Madame Bovary’, after all – each nominally subsumed.

The register, for once, is not ironic, but touching: it is set brilliantly at the very moment it seems furthest off, against a window (a central leitmotif in the novel) that has just been shattered by a servant to let in the night air on a stifling ballroom.fn5

And it offered Flaubert a treasure-house of possibilities: he could play the full range of linguistic and literary devices – parody, pastiche, nuance, irony, wordplay, imitation, contrast, repetition and so on – without any apparent intermediary.

There is something in this of the desert hermit’s self-flagellating discipline and denial.

Flaubert loved to denigrate his task, to liken himself to an organ-grinder or, like Yonville’s tax-gatherer Binet, a turner of napkin rings.

It was affordable only because a page had been torn out, I presume by the reader who had scrawled ‘oeuvre immorale’ (‘immoral work’) with a quill pen on its flyleaf.

‘I am pledged to contradictory ideals!’ the author complained to George Sand in 1869, ‘living is a métier for which I am not cut out!’

Part of Emma’s plight is the elusiveness of that meaning: between episodes of stasis or ‘immobilité’, she races from hedonism to self-denial, from country to town, from grisette-like freedom to bourgeois motherhood, from despair to faith, from charitable works to extravagant shopping sprees, just as she does from man to man.

Eliot’s cubist collage of voices in The Waste Land, the subjective fluidities of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

At the time Madame Bovary was being written France was still traumatised by the collapse of the ancien régime a half-century earlier, followed by revolutionary experiment and terror; imperial aggression and grandiloquence under Napoleon; a consolidation of both religion and monarchy under the ultra-reactionary Charles X; before a further revolution established a more genial figure on the throne, the bourgeois Louis-Philippe, in 1830 (the novel’s action mostly takes place in the 1830s and 1840s).

Flaubert's obsession with his art is legendary: he would work for days on a single page, obsessively attuning sentences, seeking always le mot juste in a quest for both beauty and precise observation.

The period continued to be spattered with civilian blood, however, as the disenfranchised, often starving, failed to be included in the utilitarian drive for progress – manned by armies of bureaucrats and businessmen whose generals were members of Flaubert’s hated bourgeoisie.

The excitement of the modernist experiment was just this thrill of tension, like an electric current, between the two opposite poles of reality and artifice: a self-consciousness that reveals, not surface, but a vertiginous depth, a glorious mise en abîme in which humanity struggles to find meaning.

The period continued to be spattered with civilian blood, however, as the disenfranchised, often starving, failed to be included in the utilitarian drive for progress – manned by armies of bureaucrats and businessmen whose generals were members of Flaubert’s hated bourgeoisie.

No novel, except perhaps Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, has been more carefully composed at the level of sound and rhythm: the action seems to seep from the words themselves, and in real time (when Flaubert occasionally lapses into the present, it is not the historical present used by Dickens).

A moment of genuine insight comes in the chateau at Vaubyessard, the apogee of her social pretensions, when she recalls her widowed father (one of the few sympathetic characters) on the family farm, and the simple sensuousness of her lost existence.

Yet she acts her various roles – daughter, wife, mother, housewife, secretary, lover, bohemian – to perfection, at least briefly (her failure to feel maternal love for more than short bursts is perhaps the most painful thread in the book); even her cultural accomplishments – drawing, playing the piano – make Charles marvel.

reverberating masterpiece with purely nineteenth-century eyes, that furious ‘oeuvre immorale’, scratched on the flyleaf, urges us to honour the attempt. fn1 See, for instance, the accounting vocabulary on see here: ‘So she carried over to him …’ fn2 A striking example being the waltz scene on see here, when the words blur and all but decompose as Emma is whirled: ‘Ils tournaient: tout tournaient autour d’eux …’ See also the blending of palm (‘paume’) and ‘pommel’ (‘pomme’) when Emma cools her

Recording the reality of human society – including its peevishness, ugliness, hypocrisy and stupidity – meant honouring it with language just as a poet might honour a sunset or the eyes of a lover.

Flaubert had abandoned his previous work, a seething phantasmagoria concerning the life of Saint Anthony in his desert retreat, after a thirty-two hour reading had numbed his long-suffering friends Maxime du Camp and Louis Bouilhet, who suggested he write something ‘down-to-earth’.

So it is perhaps no coincidence that one of the recurring words in the novel is ‘étaler’: to put in the window; to display; to show off; to spread or stretch out; to sprawl (s’étaler).

He was no Zola, whose own tale of adultery, Thérèse Raquin (1867), takes urban ennui and shabbiness to a gruesome extreme.

Alongside this magical relic, I have used the modern edition edited by Jacques Neef (Le Livre de Poche, 1999), which is based on the so-called ‘definitive edition’ (Charpentier, 1873), and draws on Claudine Gothot-Mersch’s magisterial critical edition (Garnier, 1971).

Madame Bovary appeared initially as a serial in the Revue de Paris in 1856, and was the author’s first published work.

with purely nineteenth-century eyes, that furious ‘oeuvre immorale’, scratched on the flyleaf, urges us to honour the attempt. fn1 See, for instance, the accounting vocabulary on see here: ‘So she carried over to him …’ fn2 A striking example being the waltz scene on see here, when the words blur and all but decompose as Emma is whirled: ‘Ils tournaient: tout tournaient autour d’eux …’ See also the blending of palm (‘paume’) and ‘pommel’ (‘pomme’) when Emma cools her hands on the

Flaubert continually reminds us, then, that what we are reading is itself an artifice, subject to the same critical scepticism as any other verbal matter.

This sets up two elements: a collusion with the reader, and an apparent narrator.

Fragments of poems, stereotypes drawn from literature, technical manuals, medical parlance, scientific facts and statistics, newspaper articles, religious tracts, litter the characters’ conversations, making us doubt what they are saying or thinking, or even whether they know what they really think.

We then have a supple narrator who seems both limited and omniscient, varying between microscopic intimacy and a disdainful loftiness that apparently reaches its extreme with Emma’s unseen coupling in the hackney coach.

This self-control extended even to the depiction of characters who would be at home in a period ‘sensation’ novel or melodrama: the salesman and moneylender Lheureux is all too plausible in his commonplace cunning (his schemes never quite criminal), while the upper-class libertine Rodolphe is closer to nihilism than to fashionable cynicism.

He studied law in Paris for a short time but in his early twenties suffered a probable epileptic attack which curtailed his law career and, with some relief, he devoted himself to writing, ‘with the stubbornness of a maniac’.

THE NOVEL WAS, HOWEVER, WRITTEN against the grain: Flaubert was at heart a romantic in love with exotic tales, realms and ruins – not the gritty, the seedy, the banal.

The realism of the novel includes its emotional truth: Flaubert’s understanding of human nature is not only complex but, for all his grumpiness and bluster, deeply compassionate; Emma is no material for a sympathetic heroine, but in keeping her true to herself and her situation, Flaubert renders her fate not only moving, but genuinely shocking.

An eye-witness, a schoolboy in a rowdy class, recalls watching the trembling new boy, Charles Bovary, arrive during term time.

One of Emma’s difficulties is that life itself is not conveniently categorised into genres or registers, high, middling or low, but is a dishevelled entity on which we struggle to impose order; it may travel in one direction (Flaubert’s ‘geometrical straight line’), but it is continually disrupted by dissonant elements, and confused by the interpenetration of the subjective and the objective.

Everywhere in the novel, then, the exquisitely conjured physicality of ordinary life at a particular historical moment is ready to deflate human pretension and roughen its frail hopes, just as Flaubert’s breathtaking descriptions – whether of Rouen’s dawn cityscape or a door’s latch-bar knocking a wall – allow us to marvel at the closing gap between words and things; at the miraculous and, finally, the salving possibilities of art.

This truth certainly fails to save Emma, exiled from herself as much as from the ‘imbecilic petty burghers’ or the ‘tedium’ of her surroundings – which are not only cultural, but stickily physical: her rendezvous with Rodolphe survives on her footwear in the form of mud which, when the servant-boy Justin longingly reaches for the boots to clean them, ‘came off in powder under his fingers, and which he would watch gently rising in a beam of sunlight’.

Her first lover, Rodolphe, mimics romantic discourse in his seducer’s letter of rupture, reducing words to empty husks, vehicles of lies, in the same way that Léon, the besotted, blue-eyed lawyer’s clerk, can spout only poetic clichés.

So it is perhaps no coincidence that one of the recurring words in the novel is ‘étaler’: to put in the window; to display; to show off; to spread or stretch out; to sprawl (s’étaler).

In a letter to Louise Colet in 1853, Flaubert worries that, after 260 pages, he has written only descriptions of place and expositions of character, consoling himself with the notion that it is a biography, not a developed event.

Thanks to Flaubert’s abundant letters, particularly to his mistress Louise Colet and to the novelist and feminist George Sand, we know that the novel’s five-year composition, inked with a quill (Flaubert hated metal nibs as much as he hated railways), was both agonising and exhilarating.

Although Flaubert loathed the ultra-bourgeois, conservative France of the mid-nineteenth century, he was himself both deeply conservative politically (‘the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois’) and passed a thoroughly regulated existence in a riverside maison de maître, in the Normandy hamlet of Croisset, living off the proceeds of family land and cosseted by his mother and assorted servants.

Throughout, Madame Bovary skilfully negotiates inner and outer experience with such subtlety that it is only in the modulation of a phrase, a minutely calibrated change of rhythm or vocabulary, that we pass from one to the other, even in the shifting of point of view.

with purely nineteenth-century eyes, that furious ‘oeuvre immorale’, scratched on the flyleaf, urges us to honour the attempt. fn1 See, for instance, the accounting vocabulary on see here: ‘So she carried over to him …’ fn2 A striking example being the waltz scene on see here, when the words blur and all but decompose as Emma is whirled: ‘Ils tournaient: tout tournaient autour d’eux …’ See also the blending of palm (‘paume’) and ‘pommel’ (‘pomme’) when Emma cools her hands on the

Alexander Spiers’s celebrated General English and French Dictionary (Paris, 1853) has been my stalwart desk-companion.

An account, based on real cases, of provincial adultery in the flatlands of Normandy, it is also ‘brutal’ (the author’s word) in its realism; notorious for its dissection of the consumerist, industrialising France of the mid-century; prescient in its depiction of a woman alienated from the life that surrounds her; and often, it must be said, piercingly funny.

She is an embedded product of her culture, as helpless in that guise as the ancient, work-crippled farm servant shuffling in front of the Agricultural Show’s worthies.