Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Gustave Flaubert (Review of Madame Bovary)

“Madame Bovary c’est moi,” Flaubert famously observed, but was he talking about the book as a whole or its heroine? Titles are important clues as to how a book should be read: Madame Raquin, Miss Emma Woodhouse, or even Emma Bovary carry a different freight than the originals do. And if titles are significant then subtitles represent another covert shove in the right direction. Madame Bovary was originally subtitled Moeurs de Campagne. “Moeurs”—in my Petit Robert — is defined thus: “habitudes (d’une société, d’un individu) relatives á la pratique du bien ou du mal”—a far more nuanced term than the usual English translation of “customs.” “Customs of the countryside” will not do.

Both the title “Madame” and the subtitle speak of decorum, or, more precisely, bourgeois decorum. Madame Bovary is a book about the “bourgeois” of provincial France and their “habitudes relatives á la pratique du bien ou du mal.” And the mal in question here is the adultery of Emma Bovary, the causes and the consequences thereof. Emma Bovary dreams of a different life and her dreams are driven by romantic literature, good and bad. Every choice she makes in her life is vitiated by this corrupting influence: she sees the world through a glass, rosily. Her marriage to the widower Charles Bovary, country doctor, her affairs with Rodolphe, the libertine, and Léon, the clerk, are a series of straw-clutching efforts to escape.

Flaubert, a bourgeois who lived in the provinces, loathed the bourgeois and the book is a sustained dissection and condemnation of this sensibility and class. When he quoted Voltaire’s dictum that “the history of the human mind is the history of stupidity,” he meant it from the bottom of his heart.

Everybody in the novel is stupid: Charles Bovary is stupid for loving Emma; Homais, the insufferable chemist, is a smug monster of stupid homilies. Emma’s two lovers are stupid and selfish in equal measure. Nothing escapes Flaubert’s gimlet eye and the precision of his detailing. And God is in the details of this novel, so lovingly reproduced in a perfectly fashioned prose that we forget we are dealing with a dull tale of provincial adultery. If Flaubert’s pen is dipped in bile it is so that he may write all the more clearly — phrases even italicized so they will not escape notice, relish and censure. The effort and art in this procedure were both phenomenal and revolutionary. One detail will have to stand for the mass. Emma’s daughter Berthe is brought into a room to say goodbye: “… la servante amena Berthe, qui secoua au bout d’une ficelle un moulin á vent la tête en bas.” Most novelists might have mentioned a toy, a few might have chosen a windmill, but only Flaubert would have had it dangling upside down on a string.

Emma, ruined, poisons herself; Charles dies — of grief — and the impossible Homais triumphs and is awarded the Légion d’Honneur. Flaubert is unremittingly and uncompromisingly bleak in his final vision — no consolation is offered. “I remain glued to the earth,” he wrote to George Sand, “… everything disturbs me, everything lacerates and ravages me, though I make every effort to soar.” It is his rage against the bourgeois spirit that informs his novel and his furiously precise prose but that alone cannot explain the book’s endurance as a classic. We are all, in our own way, bourgeois — like Emma Bovary — and even Flaubert admits he made every effort to soar. For to think that life might be better is no shame — it is, indeed, to be human. In the end, Madame Bovary, c’est nous.

1999