1857
Madame Bovary, subtitled ‘Customs of the Provinces’, was a controversial novel from the start. A highly publicized trial for alleged obscenity in 1857 helped to make it a bestseller. But the public prosecutors missed the truly innovative nature of the book, in which the Romantic aesthetic that had swept through Europe in the early 19th century finally came of age, encountering a new, penetrating and merciless realism.
Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), like the early Romantics, was fascinated by the innermost motivations for human action. Like them, he saw the potentially far-reaching and tragic consequences of passion, but in Madame Bovary he brought those consequences into the everyday world of the provincial France he knew so well.
The story of a doctor’s wife in northern France, Madame Bovary tells how her self-destructive deceit and adultery drive her to suicide and her husband to bankruptcy. It first appeared as a serial in La Revue de Paris, late in 1856. Flaubert’s undisguised contempt for bourgeois manners and morality and his determinedly non-judgemental attitude towards his heroine led to charges that he was encouraging or condoning adultery, and when the story appeared in book form, it immediately faced a public prosecution. The case was dismissed, but Madame Bovary continued to remain bitterly controversial.
Flaubert’s meticulous attention to realistic detail and the presentation of immediately recognizable scenes and exchanges made the novel appear shockingly like an objective depiction of provincial life – which was exactly what he wanted. But where the passions of Jane Austen’s similarly provincial characters, in her ironic social novels 40 years before, smouldered respectably below the surface, those of Emma Bovary burst out in flame. It was this combination of passion and realism that made the book truly revolutionary.
In the novel, Charles Bovary, a doctor with a second-rate medical degree, is dragooned by his overbearing mother (the first Madame Bovary of the novel) into a respectable marriage with a 45-year-old widow, ‘ugly … as thin as a lathe, and with a face as spotted as a meadow in springtime’. Visiting one of his patients, he meets the young and beautiful Emma Rouault, and on the death of his first wife persuades Emma to marry him.
From then on, Emma – the Madame Bovary of the title – is at the centre of the novel. From her reading of sentimental literature, Emma has developed a romantic yearning for luxury and passion, and rapidly grows bored with her dull and uninspiring husband, with married life in general, and soon afterwards with motherhood when she has her daughter, Berthe. Two love affairs follow: the first, a seemingly unrevealed longing for a young student, Leon, ends when he moves away; the second is an ardent three-year relationship with a rich and cynical local landowner, Rodolphe, with whom she plans to run away.
Rodolphe lets Emma down callously at the last minute, and she is grief-stricken and falls ill. As she recovers, the unsuspecting Charles insists on taking her to the opera in Rouen, a few miles away (and Flaubert’s birthplace). There, they meet Leon again by chance, and a passionate affair ensues.
In the following extract, Emma has travelled to Rouen by coach (‘Hirondelle’), supposedly for a piano lesson, but actually to meet her lover, Leon. At this stage, they are still passionate about each other, but already, Emma’s excitement comes almost as much from the thrill of their illicit rendezvous as from the anticipation of seeing her lover. Flaubert ensures we appreciate realities, with the ‘perspiring’ heroine navigating the alleys of ‘bars and prostitutes’.
There was a stop at the city gate. Emma took off her overshoes, changed her gloves, arranged her shawl, and twenty paces farther on, she left the Hirondelle.
The city was coming to life. Clerks in caps were polishing shop windows, and women with baskets on their hips stood on street corners, uttering loud, regular cries. She walked on, her eyes lowered, keeping close to the house walls and smiling happily under her lowered black veil.
For fear of being seen, she usually didn’t take the shortest way. She would plunge into a maze of dark alleys, and emerge, hot and perspiring, close to the fountain at the lower end of the Rue Nationale. This is the part of town near the theatre, full of bars and prostitutes. Often a van rumbled by, laden with shaky stage-sets. Aproned waiters were sanding the pavement between the tubs of green bushes, There was a smell of absinthe, cigars, and oysters.
Then she turned a corner. She recognized him from afar by the way his curly hair hung down below his hat.
He walked ahead on the sidewalk. She followed him to the hotel; he went upstairs, opened the door of the room, went in – what an embrace!
MADAME BOVARY, PART III, CHAPTER 5, TRANSLATED BY FRANCIS STEEGMULLER, 1993
Gradually, their affair fizzles out, and Emma begins to compare Leon unfavourably with the dashing, romantic, and entirely selfish Rodolphe.
By now, Emma is in financial thrall to the trader Lheureux in her home town, from whom she has been buying goods on credit to maintain her taste for luxury. When he demands payment, neither Leon nor Rodolphe help her. In despair, she steals arsenic from the pharmacy opposite her house and poisons herself, dying a slow and painful death. Charles Bovary is distraught. He stops working, and starts selling his possessions to pay his bills, but more debts incurred by Emma keep appearing. Even when he finds love letters sent to Emma by Rodolphe, he remains desperately in love with the wife who has betrayed and destroyed him. In a painful interview, he tells Rodolphe that he blames no-one for the affair, which was, he says ‘decreed by fate’; shortly afterwards, Charles is found dead in the garden by his young daughter.
It is a simple, even trite plot; what makes it exceptional is the depth of Flaubert’s understanding of the motives and emotions of his characters. Flaubert takes many of the clichés of Romantic fiction and presents them with an icy realism – Rodolphe, for instance, is clearly well aware how shallow and self-centred his passionate declarations are, and the grand Romantic gesture of Emma’s eventual suicide is described in all its agonizing and undignified physical detail.
The contempt in the novel for the hypocrisy and self-seeking of the peripheral characters such as Lheureux is complete, but there are no simple moral judgements about Emma – which angered some critics. On the contrary, Flaubert observed after the book had been published: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ (‘Madame Bovary is me’).
‘The author, in his work,’ Flaubert commented, ‘must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.’ He was a meticulous stylist, obsessively working and reworking each page that he completed. The 120,000 words of Madame Bovary took him more than five years to write, and The Temptation of St Anthony, which he started sometime during the 1840s, appeared in three versions over a period of nearly three decades. He spent the four years after the publication of Madame Bovary writing Salammbô, a historical novel about the city of Carthage in the 3rd century BC, and then immediately started work on Bouvard and Pécuchet, a satirical novel about a junior clerk who inherits a fortune. This occupied him until his death 17 years later, and it was still unfinished when it was published posthumously.
While he was working on Bouvard and Pécuchet, he completed his other masterpiece, Sentimental Education, centring on the love of a young man for an older woman amid the social, moral and political vicissitudes of mid-19th-century Paris. It is at once a Bildungsroman, charting a young man’s induction into dizzy obsession and the unprincipled ways of the world, and an ambitious panoramic novel about the life of a city. Here, too, grand ideals fail to be lived up to, and aspirations are undercut, by characters’ own failings and by the self-interest of others. Some have called Flaubert a pessimist about human nature. Many would say that Flaubert’s skill, here as in Madame Bovary, was to tell it like it is.