Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
For many years I had the enjoyable task of teaching Flaubert’s great 19th century novel Madame Bovary to sixth form pupils, supposedly because the syllabus required us to study a work of literature in the context of a particular region of France (or a French-speaking country). And what, after all, could be more regional than the setting of Flaubert’s masterpiece, the small and sleepy town of Yonville, set in deepest Normandy, where nothing happens and Emma Bovary, the heroine striving for higher things goes mad with frustration? Yet I always thought that Flaubert must be turning in his grave at the thought of us cataloguing all those regional characteristics that were supposed to prove to the A level examiner that Madame Bovary was the regional novel par excellence. It was, true enough, set in the green pastures of Normandy where the very names of characters like M. Tuvache, Mlle Leboeuf and even Emma Bovary herself echoed the habits of a cider-and calvados swigging, cheese-munching bunch of bovine rustics.
Flaubert may even have been inspired by the true story of the suicide of a doctor’s wife in a small Norman town, an event reported in the local press. But he uses his art to transcend reality, portraying characters who are universal and timeless in their appeal. We have all fantasised as Emma has, allowing our dreams and illusions to intrude into our lives, with sometimes catastrophic results. Emma’s case is more severe than most. A farmer’s daughter whose convent education and reading of trashy romances fill her head with fanciful notions, she dreams of marriage to a glamorous aristocrat. She finds herself wedded instead to a conscientious but dull country doctor, Charles, whose conversation is as “flat as a pavement”. Bored out of her mind, flattered by the attentions of the dashing but selfish local squire Rodolphe Boulanger, she allows herself to be seduced during a ride in the woods. Months of ecstasy follow, heightened for Emma by the excitement of having a secret lover. But abandoned by Rodolphe when things get serious after she threatens to run away with him, her consequent nervous breakdown leading to crazy spending sprees which bankrupt her husband, Emma rapidly descends into a spiral of self-destruction. A second adulterous liaison, this time with Leon, a younger toyboy lover, seems momentarily to satisfy her dreams, but again her demands prove too much. Abandoned by both Leon and Rodolphe, she commits the ultimate romantic gesture and dies in agony, poisoned by self-administered arsenic.
So this is sensationalist stuff, worthy of the juiciest tabloid with its mixture of illicit sex – the cab ride through Rouen scandalised contemporary readers – financial skulduggery, and graphically portrayed suicide – Flaubert apparently visited hospitals to gather details of the effects of arsenic poisoning. The government tried to ban the book. The author had upset the Establishment with his portrayal of a hypocritical bourgeoisie, and his supposed attack on religion: Yonville’s kindly but intellectually limited parish priest Bournisien is incapable of understanding the heroine’s tormented soul. For many readers, the final and deepest shock was to read of Emma the adulteress on her deathbed, kissing the body of Christ on the crucifix “more passionately than she had kissed any of her lovers”.
But for some, the portrait of Emma Bovary was a moving echo of real life’s tragedies and disappointments. She exists in thousands of villages in France, one elderly woman reader told Flaubert. One might therefore think that Flaubert was perhaps writing a feminist novel, exploring the plight of women imprisoned by convention.
This would be a mistake, limiting the book’s meaning in much the same way as seeing it as an archetypal regional novel. Just as Yonville represents Anytown, so Flaubert’s heroine is a universal figure, recognisable for the human aspirations and failings which mark all of us. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert is supposed to have said. Emma’s journey through life, with its frantic contrasts between joy and despair, echoes the work of another great work of French literature dating from the same period, the poet Charles Baudelaire’s collection entitled Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire, like Flaubert, shows us a world where humans try to find meaning and satisfaction in a harsh universe from which God is absent: drink, drugs, sex, and artistic activity are among the ways that we explore to help us find meaning in life, and in every case the taste of pleasure in such activities turns to ashes as we discover how they fail to provide the permanent joy, the ‘ideal’ for which we strive. Both Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s works were condemned by the French government of the time. As recently as 1954 in the USA, Madame Bovary was on the blacklist of the National Organization of Decent Literature. And yet both Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal can be interpreted as works of spiritual exploration.
The Industrial Revolution, and in France the 1789 Revolution, had led many to see belief in God as a superstitious nonsense which had no place in a world dominated by Science and Progress. In Madame Bovary, the chemist Homais represents such a view, with his self-proclaimed atheism, his scorn of the Jesuits contrasting with his worship of Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. His belief that Science, not miracles, will help the blind to see and the lame to walk again is an obvious mockery of Christianity. Yet Flaubert shows clearly in the novel, in the club-foot episode where an operation performed by Emma’s husband goes disastrously wrong, that Science cannot be trusted. Both Flaubert and Baudelaire reject the comfortable materialism of the 19th century as providing all the answers to life’s problems. Emma’s spending spree as she furnishes her house with the latest fashionable knick-knacks made possible by the Industrial Revolution is of only temporary emotional satisfaction. The end of the novel shows us Homais the chemist, and Bournisien the parish priest arguing grotesquely over Emma’s body, as one sprinkles holy water while the other sprinkles disinfectant around her deathbed. Flaubert refuses to take sides. Perhaps, he hints, only Emma has discovered the solution to problems such as the existence of God and the meaning of life about which Homais and Bournisien battle so stupidly.
The extract that I have chosen comes from the second part of the novel, where Emma Bovary is slowly beginning to feel the intense tedium of life as a country doctor’s wife. Leaning out of her window on a mild spring evening, she contemplates the pastoral scene of the water meadows outside Yonville:
On était au commencement d’avril, quand les primevères sont écloses; un vent tiède se roule sur les plates-bandes labourées, et les jardins, comme des femmes, semblent faire leur toilette pour les fêtes de l’été. Par les barreaux de la tonnelle et au delà tout alentour, on voyait la rivière dans la prairie, où elle dessinait sur l’herbe des sinuosités vagabondes. La vapeur du soir passait entre les peupliers sans feuilles, estompant leurs contours d’une teinte violette, plus pâle et plus transparente qu’une gaze subtile arrêtée sur leurs branchages. Au loin des bestiaux marchaient; on n’entendait ni leurs pas, ni leurs mugissements; et la cloche, sonant toujours, continuait dans les airs sa lamentation pacifique.
A ce tintement répété, la pensée de la jeune femme s’égarait dans ses vieux souvenirs de jeunesse et de pension. Elle se rappela les grands chandeliers, qui dépassaient sur l’autel les vases pleins de fleurs et le tabernacle à colonettes. Elle aurait voulu, comme autrefois, être encore confondue dans la longue ligne des voiles blancs, que marquaient de noir ca et là les capuchons raides des bonnes sœurs inclinées sur leur prie-Dieu; le Dimanche, à la messe, quand elle relevait sa tête, elle apercevait le doux visage de la Vierge, parmi les tourbillons bleuâtres de l’encens qui montait. Alors un attendrissement la saisit: elle se sentit molle et tout abandonee comme un duvet d’oiseau qui tournoie; et ce fut sans en avoir conscience qu’elle s’achemina vers l’église, disposée à n’importe quelle devotion, pourvu qu’elle y courbât son âme et que l’existence entière y disparût.”
"One evening as she was sitting at the open window looking at Lestiboudois, the beadle, who was cutting the hedge, she heard the Angelus ringing.
For many years I had the enjoyable task of teaching Flaubert’s great 19th century novel Madame Bovary to sixth form pupils, supposedly because the syllabus required us to study a work of literature in the context of a particular region of France (or a French-speaking country). And what, after all, could be more regional than the setting of Flaubert’s masterpiece, the small and sleepy town of Yonville, set in deepest Normandy, where nothing happens and Emma Bovary, the heroine striving for higher things goes mad with frustration? Yet I always thought that Flaubert must be turning in his grave at the thought of us cataloguing all those regional characteristics that were supposed to prove to the A level examiner that Madame Bovary was the regional novel par excellence. It was, true enough, set in the green pastures of Normandy where the very names of characters like M. Tuvache, Mlle Leboeuf and even Emma Bovary herself echoed the habits of a cider-and calvados swigging, cheese-munching bunch of bovine rustics.
Flaubert may even have been inspired by the true story of the suicide of a doctor’s wife in a small Norman town, an event reported in the local press. But he uses his art to transcend reality, portraying characters who are universal and timeless in their appeal. We have all fantasised as Emma has, allowing our dreams and illusions to intrude into our lives, with sometimes catastrophic results. Emma’s case is more severe than most. A farmer’s daughter whose convent education and reading of trashy romances fill her head with fanciful notions, she dreams of marriage to a glamorous aristocrat. She finds herself wedded instead to a conscientious but dull country doctor, Charles, whose conversation is as “flat as a pavement”. Bored out of her mind, flattered by the attentions of the dashing but selfish local squire Rodolphe Boulanger, she allows herself to be seduced during a ride in the woods. Months of ecstasy follow, heightened for Emma by the excitement of having a secret lover. But abandoned by Rodolphe when things get serious after she threatens to run away with him, her consequent nervous breakdown leading to crazy spending sprees which bankrupt her husband, Emma rapidly descends into a spiral of self-destruction. A second adulterous liaison, this time with Leon, a younger toyboy lover, seems momentarily to satisfy her dreams, but again her demands prove too much. Abandoned by both Leon and Rodolphe, she commits the ultimate romantic gesture and dies in agony, poisoned by self-administered arsenic.
So this is sensationalist stuff, worthy of the juiciest tabloid with its mixture of illicit sex – the cab ride through Rouen scandalised contemporary readers – financial skulduggery, and graphically portrayed suicide – Flaubert apparently visited hospitals to gather details of the effects of arsenic poisoning. The government tried to ban the book. The author had upset the Establishment with his portrayal of a hypocritical bourgeoisie, and his supposed attack on religion: Yonville’s kindly but intellectually limited parish priest Bournisien is incapable of understanding the heroine’s tormented soul. For many readers, the final and deepest shock was to read of Emma the adulteress on her deathbed, kissing the body of Christ on the crucifix “more passionately than she had kissed any of her lovers”.
But for some, the portrait of Emma Bovary was a moving echo of real life’s tragedies and disappointments. She exists in thousands of villages in France, one elderly woman reader told Flaubert. One might therefore think that Flaubert was perhaps writing a feminist novel, exploring the plight of women imprisoned by convention.
This would be a mistake, limiting the book’s meaning in much the same way as seeing it as an archetypal regional novel. Just as Yonville represents Anytown, so Flaubert’s heroine is a universal figure, recognisable for the human aspirations and failings which mark all of us. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert is supposed to have said. Emma’s journey through life, with its frantic contrasts between joy and despair, echoes the work of another great work of French literature dating from the same period, the poet Charles Baudelaire’s collection entitled Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire, like Flaubert, shows us a world where humans try to find meaning and satisfaction in a harsh universe from which God is absent: drink, drugs, sex, and artistic activity are among the ways that we explore to help us find meaning in life, and in every case the taste of pleasure in such activities turns to ashes as we discover how they fail to provide the permanent joy, the ‘ideal’ for which we strive. Both Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s works were condemned by the French government of the time. As recently as 1954 in the USA, Madame Bovary was on the blacklist of the National Organization of Decent Literature. And yet both Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal can be interpreted as works of spiritual exploration.
The Industrial Revolution, and in France the 1789 Revolution, had led many to see belief in God as a superstitious nonsense which had no place in a world dominated by Science and Progress. In Madame Bovary, the chemist Homais represents such a view, with his self-proclaimed atheism, his scorn of the Jesuits contrasting with his worship of Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. His belief that Science, not miracles, will help the blind to see and the lame to walk again is an obvious mockery of Christianity. Yet Flaubert shows clearly in the novel, in the club-foot episode where an operation performed by Emma’s husband goes disastrously wrong, that Science cannot be trusted. Both Flaubert and Baudelaire reject the comfortable materialism of the 19th century as providing all the answers to life’s problems. Emma’s spending spree as she furnishes her house with the latest fashionable knick-knacks made possible by the Industrial Revolution is of only temporary emotional satisfaction. The end of the novel shows us Homais the chemist, and Bournisien the parish priest arguing grotesquely over Emma’s body, as one sprinkles holy water while the other sprinkles disinfectant around her deathbed. Flaubert refuses to take sides. Perhaps, he hints, only Emma has discovered the solution to problems such as the existence of God and the meaning of life about which Homais and Bournisien battle so stupidly.
The extract that I have chosen comes from the second part of the novel, where Emma Bovary is slowly beginning to feel the intense tedium of life as a country doctor’s wife. Leaning out of her window on a mild spring evening, she contemplates the pastoral scene of the water meadows outside Yonville:
On était au commencement d’avril, quand les primevères sont écloses; un vent tiède se roule sur les plates-bandes labourées, et les jardins, comme des femmes, semblent faire leur toilette pour les fêtes de l’été. Par les barreaux de la tonnelle et au delà tout alentour, on voyait la rivière dans la prairie, où elle dessinait sur l’herbe des sinuosités vagabondes. La vapeur du soir passait entre les peupliers sans feuilles, estompant leurs contours d’une teinte violette, plus pâle et plus transparente qu’une gaze subtile arrêtée sur leurs branchages. Au loin des bestiaux marchaient; on n’entendait ni leurs pas, ni leurs mugissements; et la cloche, sonant toujours, continuait dans les airs sa lamentation pacifique.
A ce tintement répété, la pensée de la jeune femme s’égarait dans ses vieux souvenirs de jeunesse et de pension. Elle se rappela les grands chandeliers, qui dépassaient sur l’autel les vases pleins de fleurs et le tabernacle à colonettes. Elle aurait voulu, comme autrefois, être encore confondue dans la longue ligne des voiles blancs, que marquaient de noir ca et là les capuchons raides des bonnes sœurs inclinées sur leur prie-Dieu; le Dimanche, à la messe, quand elle relevait sa tête, elle apercevait le doux visage de la Vierge, parmi les tourbillons bleuâtres de l’encens qui montait. Alors un attendrissement la saisit: elle se sentit molle et tout abandonee comme un duvet d’oiseau qui tournoie; et ce fut sans en avoir conscience qu’elle s’achemina vers l’église, disposée à n’importe quelle devotion, pourvu qu’elle y courbât son âme et que l’existence entière y disparût.”
"One evening as she was sitting at the open window looking at Lestiboudois, the beadle, who was cutting the hedge, she heard the Angelus ringing.
It was at the beginning of April, and the primroses were in bloom, a warm wind was blowing over the freshly turned beds, and the gardens, like the women, seemed to be adorning themselves for the high days of summer. Through the lattice-work of the summer-house and out and away beyond, you could see the little river threading its way through the green meadows in little wandering curves. The evening mist loitered, slowly drawn, among the leafless poplars, shading their outlines with a violet paler and more transparent than the frailest gauze entangled in their branches. In the far distance cattle were moving leisurely homeward, but they were too far off for their lowing to be heard, and, all the while, the bell went on ringing, ringing, burdening the wandering airs with its unvarying lament. The reiterated, rhythmic sound sent Emma's thoughts wandering among the memories of her young days, memories of her convent school. She remembered the tall candlesticks on the altar towering above the vases filled with flowers, and the tabernacle with its little columns. And a longing came over her to be back again, to make one in the long line of white veils, broken here and there by the stiff black hoods of the nuns, kneeling with bowed heads at their prie-Dieu. At Mass on Sundays, when she raised her head, she could see, amid the blue-grey clouds of incense, the meek and lovely countenance of the Virgin. Then something knocked at her heart, she felt all yielding and helpless like a downy feather from a bird's breast, eddying in the storm, and, half unconscious of her action, she began to make her way to the church, bent on some act of devotion, no matter what, if only she might drown her spirit therein and so become oblivious of the world about her."
The passage would seem to confirm Flaubert as a regional writer, with its depiction of the peaceful Norman countryside where cattle graze in an idyllic landscape. But Flaubert uses this real geographical setting to steer his reader on an interior journey, creating links between the outer and the inner worlds as we penetrate the dream-world of his heroine. Most of us have experienced a situation where a particular sound or smell, suddenly and unexpectedly encountered, can catch us off our guard and transport us into a lost universe, hidden deep within our subconscious. The novelist Marcel Proust famously does this in his book A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, where the tinkling of a spoon against a teacup, and the taste of a Madeleine cake take the middle-aged narrator back to his childhood. “Un homme qui dort tient en cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes” explains Proust.
Flaubert’s use of the imaginary world of sounds and sensations to transcend the boundaries of time and space is less well-known than Proust’s, but it deserves recognition if only because it was written half a century earlier. Emma, musing unhappily on her married state but still childlike in her innocence and experience, is suddenly transported in her mind back to an earlier time and place thanks to a tiny but significant sound. In her case, the distant calling of the Yonville church bell as it sounds the Angelus prayer, reawakens her memories of her convent education. The primroses of the springtime countryside call to mind an image of the flower-decked altar in her school chapel, while the violet mist over the water meadows of Yonville merges into the bluish smoke of incense during the service. The sight of the Yonville gardens, decked out in their finery and compared to an image of feminine beauty, lead Emma to rediscover her memories of the picture of the Virgin Mary.
Emma at this point in the novel is not yet the deceitful adulterous wife. She is a vulnerable, abandoned soul seeking spiritual solace and yearning for the peace that religious experience is supposed to bring. Sadly, the meeting of the inner and the outer worlds fails to harmonise. Emma is drawn irresistibly to the parish church by her innocent childhood memories, ready to offer her all to a spiritual comforter. Instead she finds the priest Bournisien whose understanding of her innermost desires is as limited as that of the peasants whom he helps in the fields with the harvest in his good-hearted way. “Je souffre,” replies Emma to the priest’s enquiry “Comment vous portez-vous?” He is unlikely to understand her reference to the spiritual malaise from which she suffers. “Ce ne sont pas les remèdes de la terre qu’il me faudrait,” she tells Bournisien when the priest suggests that Charles could provide her with medication. And when Emma implores his help because, as her priest, “vous soulagez toutes les misères”, Bournisien can think only in terms of colic and other diseases affecting his parishioners’ cattle. One of the many tragedies of human existence is our failure to communicate effectively with each other. We use language as clumsily as a dancing bear clattering with metal saucepans, noted Flaubert.
Flaubert’s world is a harsh and grim one where hypocrisy and self-interest dominate, but I hope that I have shown it to be worth exploring for these ideas and their relevance to our times. Emma’s search for happiness is after all paralleled by our consumer society gone mad. And of course, going back to the geographical level, reading about Madame Bovary’s adventures and perhaps discovering extracts such as Flaubert’s description of Rouen may even inspire you to explore Normandy. Mais attention au trou normand! *
1 September 2005
The passage would seem to confirm Flaubert as a regional writer, with its depiction of the peaceful Norman countryside where cattle graze in an idyllic landscape. But Flaubert uses this real geographical setting to steer his reader on an interior journey, creating links between the outer and the inner worlds as we penetrate the dream-world of his heroine. Most of us have experienced a situation where a particular sound or smell, suddenly and unexpectedly encountered, can catch us off our guard and transport us into a lost universe, hidden deep within our subconscious. The novelist Marcel Proust famously does this in his book A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, where the tinkling of a spoon against a teacup, and the taste of a Madeleine cake take the middle-aged narrator back to his childhood. “Un homme qui dort tient en cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes” explains Proust.
Flaubert’s use of the imaginary world of sounds and sensations to transcend the boundaries of time and space is less well-known than Proust’s, but it deserves recognition if only because it was written half a century earlier. Emma, musing unhappily on her married state but still childlike in her innocence and experience, is suddenly transported in her mind back to an earlier time and place thanks to a tiny but significant sound. In her case, the distant calling of the Yonville church bell as it sounds the Angelus prayer, reawakens her memories of her convent education. The primroses of the springtime countryside call to mind an image of the flower-decked altar in her school chapel, while the violet mist over the water meadows of Yonville merges into the bluish smoke of incense during the service. The sight of the Yonville gardens, decked out in their finery and compared to an image of feminine beauty, lead Emma to rediscover her memories of the picture of the Virgin Mary.
Emma at this point in the novel is not yet the deceitful adulterous wife. She is a vulnerable, abandoned soul seeking spiritual solace and yearning for the peace that religious experience is supposed to bring. Sadly, the meeting of the inner and the outer worlds fails to harmonise. Emma is drawn irresistibly to the parish church by her innocent childhood memories, ready to offer her all to a spiritual comforter. Instead she finds the priest Bournisien whose understanding of her innermost desires is as limited as that of the peasants whom he helps in the fields with the harvest in his good-hearted way. “Je souffre,” replies Emma to the priest’s enquiry “Comment vous portez-vous?” He is unlikely to understand her reference to the spiritual malaise from which she suffers. “Ce ne sont pas les remèdes de la terre qu’il me faudrait,” she tells Bournisien when the priest suggests that Charles could provide her with medication. And when Emma implores his help because, as her priest, “vous soulagez toutes les misères”, Bournisien can think only in terms of colic and other diseases affecting his parishioners’ cattle. One of the many tragedies of human existence is our failure to communicate effectively with each other. We use language as clumsily as a dancing bear clattering with metal saucepans, noted Flaubert.
Flaubert’s world is a harsh and grim one where hypocrisy and self-interest dominate, but I hope that I have shown it to be worth exploring for these ideas and their relevance to our times. Emma’s search for happiness is after all paralleled by our consumer society gone mad. And of course, going back to the geographical level, reading about Madame Bovary’s adventures and perhaps discovering extracts such as Flaubert’s description of Rouen may even inspire you to explore Normandy. Mais attention au trou normand! *
1 September 2005
*P.S. If you don't know what this is ask Google; e.g. http://www.inntravel.co.uk/destinations/rom_normandy.htm
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