While reading Madame Bovary the first thing I was struck by was the attention to object description and the almost overwhelming sensuousness of detail. Most of the narrative unfolds through the eyes of Madame Bovary, a woman who lives in a largely material world, thus making the opulence of detail not only fitting but necessary. The novel, however, does not open with Emma Bovary as narrator. (She, in fact, is never the narrator but the character through whose eyes we eventually see the story unfolding.) The very first word “we” and the passages that follow seem to suggest that the narrative voice belongs to a classmate of Charles Bovary, who, from the perspective of the omniscient narrator, is setting down the story of his life. Broadly speaking, the narrative voice never does shift. But although no obvious in-your-face instances point out such a shift, it nevertheless does occur, and with great subtlety, shortly after the arrival of Emma Bovary on the landscape of the story. It is almost as if she usurps the narrative voice and claims it as her own. However, interestingly enough, it is not this usurpation of the narrative voice that heralds the vividness of detail in object description – it is in the opening scene itself that we first encounter such an instance, with the description of Charles’s attire.
Although he was not broad-shouldered, his short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight about the arm-holes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces, he wore stout, ill-cleaned, hob-nailed boots. (1)
[T]he “new fellow,” was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were over. It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton night-cap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone. (2)
The scrupulous attention to detail, especially when it comes to the headgear, seems to betray a sensibility that is almost feminine in its persuasion – such a practiced eye for observing clothing surely cannot be male. It seems as if even before her appearance, Emma haunts the story with her presence.
The takeover of the narrative voice by Emma means that the action takes place through her field of vision, from her point of view. This results in certain characters getting airbrushed out of the picture, most notably Charles. Narrative sympathy for him, too, disappears. As for the child, Berthe - she is almost conspicuous by her absence. The most one gets to see of her, in fact, is after Emma’s death when the unnamed omniscient narrator returns once more.
As said before, Emma Bovary is a woman who lives largely in a material world. It is things that she craves, and occupies herself with the acquisition of. However, her brand of capitalism is unique in that although she displays acute interest in wanting and acquiring things, she seldom displays any towards how they get to her in the first place. Money, for Emma, lies at the mundane root of things and mundanity is something she does not concern herself with. It is the easy translatability of money into visible, tangible things that she likes.
She stared at the banknotes and had a vision of the countless love meetings those 2000 francs represented.(3)
A host of things she could do with the money stretched out before Emma in perspective. (4)
Yet it should not have been so. Growing up as the daughter of a framer, she would have had practical lessons in household economy despite the fact of the household being moderately well off. Emma’s great fault lies in her idealization of every situation and outright rejection of anything failing to live up to that ideal. In her mind it is an ideal world that she inhabits or rather, should inhabit and she does everything she possibly can to make to real world meet those standards which are, cruelly enough for her, derived ultimately from her reading of trashy romance novellas. And she does all of this, regardless, in her naiveté, of the consequences.
The combination of her obsession with both the material and a romanticized ideal leads Emma to ultimately commodify everything, especially desire. Desire, for her, is just another thing she needs in her life in order to make it closer to the ideal in her head. And this notion of desire, too, is an idealised one, derived, again, from the romance novellas she had read as a young girl and thus, stripped of anything that could ground it in reality thereby rendering it unattractive as a proposition to her. Like the box in which she stores her letters and gifts from Rodolphe, desire, too is seen by her as something that comes in compartmentalized and pretty gift wrapped boxes that she merely needs to open in order to imbibe what is contained within. What she does not see is that in reality, desire and the mechanics of it are as chaotic and messy as the contents of that box that come spilling out in a flood when Charles kicks it open at the end of the novel.
Emma insists that the course of desire follow a certain, predetermined path in order for it to qualify as such. This results in the bitter termination of her relationships with both Rodolphe and Leon, something that she, caught up in the intricacies of how desire should be, fails to foresee. While in the first instance it is Rodolphe who eventually tires of her and her insistence on a set, commodified and idealised notion of desire, the second sees Emma, too, discovering the banality of romance and then tiring of it. As a woman for whom the mundane roots of things best remain ignored, this discovery propels her towards realising the ideal in any way she possibly can.
They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, naive resources of a waning passion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. (5)
One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed before her eyes. And
"Yet I love him," she said to herself. (6)
She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the notion that a woman must write to her lover.
But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories, of her finest reading, her strongest lusts, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that she palpitated wondering, without, however, the power to imagine him clearly, so lost was he, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes. He dwelt in that azure land where silk ladders hang from balconies under the breath of flowers, in the light of the moon. She felt him near her; he was coming, and would carry her right away in a kiss.
Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery. (7)
Emma seems to be in love with the idea of being in love. Throughout the novel she continually defines and redefines herself on the sole criterion of being either in or out of love, all the while trying to live out the related ideal for except as an ideal, life really does not exist for her. Emma, then, is a woman whose life consists of trying to live in a world that does not exist, in situations that cannot exist. She continuously blocks out the real world as is evident from her actions when she finds herself falling into spiraling debt and it is her inability to map this downward spiral that eventually proves fatal. Literally.
It is possible to analyse Emma in many ways. A tragic figure, a heroic figure, a victim of the world that, in its banality, could not accommodate her view of it or, as Baudelaire saw it, the only dignified figure in her own small world. Emma can be seen as a person who tries to live out her life as a quest for the ultimate in experience and being restricted by the world around her. But what came through to me most strongly about this undoubtedly arresting character is that Emma Bovary is a child who never really grew up. Her total disconnect with the world around her, her naiveté, her inability to see the ends of actions and most importantly her idealised vision of the world all point to this. Pitted against the pedantic Homais who is strongly rooted in reality, Emma Bovary acts as the personification of the Romantic ideal in this novel. A study in contrasts, one perishes in a terrible end while the other continues on his coveted path of petty glory, thus lending fuel to Flaubert’s reputation as a harsh realist – one that would last for many years to come.
Citations
(1) Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert. E text accessed from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2413/2413-h/2413-h.htm
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
