(Moral) Capital Runs Out

Emma's visits to Rodolphe in his bed chamber and her feverish plans to run away with him are so shocking because of Emma's wilful eagerness to pursue her affair with him (Part II). Otherwise, the affair with Rodolphe has a well-established tradition - a wealthy, experienced man amusing himself with an attractive, provincial wife. This is the set-up of French mistresses we have learned to expect, echoing Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons (1782) and various more prosaic mistresses in books by such popular authors as Emile Gaboriau (see for example The Lerouge Case published in 1866).

Emma's newly kindled affair with Lėon, however, comes across as shockingly illicit and seedy. The couple first meet in the cathedral at Rouen, Lėon 'forces' Emma into a cab, and they go for an endless drive. The narrative lists street after street and we can almost build a map of Rouen out of heir erratic route:

"From time to time the coachman on his box cast despairing eyes at public houses. He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried, now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth before him. ... And on the harbour, in the midst of drays and casks, and in the streets, at the corners, the good fold opened large wonderstricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with drawn blinds, and which kept coming into view, shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel." (Part III, Chapter 1)

On October 10, 1854, in Surrey the adulterous Mrs Robinson had also been having an exciting cab ride with her lover. In her diary she wrote: "I never spent so blessed an hour as he one that followed, full of such bliss that I could willingly have died not to wake out of it again."  (Quoted in Kate Summerscale's Mrs Robinson's Disgrace [2012, p.86]) According to Summerscale, London hackney cabs with their pleasure-enhancing jolting motion were infamous meeting places for prostitutes and all manner of immoral trysts (Ibid, p. 87). And in Madame Bovary, when Emma protests, "Really - I don't know - if I ought," Lėon replies "How so? ... It is done in Paris." (Part III, Chapter 1)

After that first encounter, back in Yonville, Emma is called to Homais' house. Justin, the apprentice, is told off for picking up a pan next to a bottle of arsenic, then a book entitled Conjugal - Love  - with illustrations - falls out of his pocket. Next Emma is told her father-in-law is dead. Later, at home, she sits with Charles: "He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher - in a word, a poor thing in every way. How to get rid of him?" (Part III, Chapter 2). Any experiences reader of sensation fiction would add up the equation: arsenic + love + death = murder. At this stage it very much looks like it might Charles's life in danger, especially after L'Heureux suggests that Charles grants Emma a power of attorney (Ibid.)

Emma likes to spend money. She enjoys buying presents, whether they are a rug for Lėon (Part II, Chapter 4) or a riding whip for Rodolphe (Part II, Chapter 12). Her purchases are aides d'imagination. They are romantic crutches for Emma to create an image of an ideal existence. Lėon's rug indicates to everyone that he is Emma's lover. Rodolphe finds her presents an embarrassment. (Part II, Chapter 12). The riding habit convinces Emma to go riding Part II, Chapter 9), the luggage and travel cape are needed before an elopement (Part II, Chapter 12).

The Bovarys are a gold mine for the draper and loan-shark L'Heureux. Both Charles and Emma owe him money and he keeps encouraging them, cultivating their profligacy. At the end of Madame Bovary, when L'Heureux calls the bailiffs in, Emma tries to bargain with him (Part IIII, Chapter 6). She runs to Lėon, who has not money to help her. Next she goes to the notary, who makes a pass at her. Then she is seen to plead with Binet the tax-collector, who "as if at the sight of a serpent, recoiled as far as he could from her" (Part III, Chapter 7). Then Emma thinks of Rodolphe, her last hope: "not seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution." (Part III, Chapter 7).

This point is significant enough for the narrator to step out of the guise of a character and talk to us directly. It is Emma's decision to use "reawaking, in a single moment, their lost love" if necessary, to get money from him that is her final fall from grace. Fake piano lessons to cover appointments with Lėon (Part III, Chapter 4) and even partying the night away in Rouen without telling Charles (Part III, Chapter 5) are not as bad as this - the crime where sex and finances come together. Willingness to squander both sexual favours and money is the ultimate bottom of the moral pit.

It is not clear whether it is financial ruin or misfortune in love that brings about Emma's end. The affair with Lėon has run its course: "She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage." (Part III, Chapter 6). Her love for Lėon will not satisfy, her ability to re-kindle love with Rodolphe fails. The scene with Rodolphe is a magnificent show-down with Emma raging against her situation (Part III, Chapter 8). Rodolphe does not have the money to give her. Emma leaves him: "Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did not in the least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her love ..." (Part III, Chapter 8).

Emma goes straight to Homais's and gets Justin to open the laboratory door for her. (Ibid.)

Emma and the Experienced Seducer

Emma and Lėon's relationship is described as romantic love that remains physically unconsummated. They talk, but they do not have sex. The word 'adultery' has not yet been mentioned. After Lėon's departure Emma could still conceivably save herself from immorality and shame.

Rodolphe Boulanger is a man of many mistresses and has "an old Rheims biscuit-box" full of souvenirs from his past exploits (Part II, Chapter 13). "[H]e was of brutal temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to do with women, and knowing them well." (Part II, Chapter 7). Rodolphe effortlessly assesses the situation of the Bovarys: "I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn't shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she sits there darning socks. And she gets bored!" (Ibid.) He contemplates the option of making her his mistress from various angles and then decides: "Oh, I will have her." (Part II, Chapter 7).

What are the chances of Emma Bovary? Will she evade the clutches of this serial philanderer? So far, the narrative has built up tension with Emma's disillusionment with her marriage and her will they- won't they -relationship with Lėon. It is questionable whether any English novelist, no matter how sensational in aspirations, would have stated the immoral intent of a villain to seduce and debauch the novel's heroine quite so bluntly. Rodolphe's cool and composed declaration is effective and with one small sentence creates a whole new narrative momentum in the novel. We wait with anticipation how Emma will fare with Rodolphe.

Rodolphe opens his game during an agricultural show in Yonville. He settles down to talk to Emma about love at a window  while the town worthies sit on a platform below listening to a speech with "the common herd" of town's people gathered before it. I am not sure what to make of this scene (Part II, Chapter 8).  The speech by the Councillor (the Prefect could not come after all) and Rodolphe's persuasive discourse with Emma are mingled in alternate paragraphs. There is no obvious connection between the two; nothing in the speech seems to reflect Rodolphe's words.

There is the immediate comic effect of contrasting the pompous, public speech about the advances of agriculture with the private, intimate speech of romantic advances. There is also irony in Rodolphe conquering Madame Bovary on a day when Yonville is bursting with civic pride and self-importance. The narrative is quite brutal about the petty rivalries and inflated self-worth of Yonville. Just like the little, provincial town, Emma is today made to feel important.

Emma and Rodolphe's affair is consummated out in the woods and "with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him" (Part II, Chapter 10). This is a wildly melodramatic scene of heightened emotions and worthy of the most rampant romances. The sex is implied delicately, between the lines. The crucial paragraph records Emma's sensations of her surroundings and her own body: "Then far away, beyond the wood, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves." In the next sentence, Emma's sensuousness is contrasted with Rodoplhe''s manliness: "Rodoplhe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two broken bridles." Whatever took place was literally unbridled and cause for a cigar.

Throughout the affair with Rodolphe, Emma continues to compare herself to fictional heroines. She expects to feel emotions beyond any earthly delights - her imagination is always more powerful than reality, she is doomed to be disappointed.

"So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium." (Part II, Chapter 9)

Coming from a narrator, this excessive language is dripping with melodrama and pathos. But coming from Emma's point of view, as indirect free speech, it reveals the naivety of Emma's mind and her unrealistic expectations gleaned from romantic fiction. Flaubert is doing a nice trick here, giving us the full load of OTT passion in a third person narrative, but from an ironic distance by placing it inside the feverish mind of his protagonist.

"Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, ..." (Ibid.)

Emma finally sees her life reaching the romantic heights of fiction, and she is joining "the lyric legion" of adulterous heroines quite literally. The same theme surfaces later in the scene at the theatre, where Sir Walter Scott's Lucy of Lammemoor connects with Emma's mind and she lives through each emotion evoked by the play: "She recognized all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of the prima donna seemed to her to be but en echo of her conscience, and this illusion that charmed her appeared an actual part of her own life." (Part II, Chapter 15). Emma becomes her own fictional heroine, to star in the best romance ever produced: her own life. The irony is in the way a prosaic doctor's wife in provincial France and an eponymous heroine of a realist novel, is desperately longing to be a romantic adventuress and a heroine of a melodramatic romance. Emma Bovary is clearly in the wrong book.

In these chapters, Flaubert really lets rip with passion, desire and self-abandon. The language reaches new intensity in Emma's powerful expressions of desire and hatred. The narrative passes no judgment on Emma. Her dissatisfaction with poor Charles grows in step with her infatuation with Rodolphe, and again it is not clear if she is being driven into her lover's arms by her frustration with her dullard husband, or she is pulled into adultery by her own romantic imaginings fired up by fiction, or she is simply a country girl caught and exploited by an experienced womanizer. We can see Emma both as a wilful independent agent flouting convention and as a victim of circumstances and others' desires.

A letter from Emma's father recalls her to her sense and she begins to repent her adulterous passions. But Charles destroys all chance of marital happiness by his botched operation on Hippolyte's club foot and sends Emma straight back to Rodolphe's arms. M. Homais plants the seed in Charles's mind. Emma dreams of medical glory for her husband. Charles being Charles, we know that things will go horrible wrong. Amputation and a wooden leg, provided by Emma, are the direct result of this tragicomedy (Part II, Chapter 11). Emma's final disillusionment with her husband and her plan to elope with Rodolphe follow. (Part II, Chapter 12).

Emma is wildly committed to her lover, while he is growing both bored with her and alarmed by her ardour. "... I love you best. I know how to love best. I am your servant, your concubine! You are my king, my idol! You are good, you are beautiful, you are clever, you are strong!" (Ibid.) Emma's words leave Rodolphe more or less yawning:

"He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses, and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because libertine and venal lips had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers, exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor his conceptions, nor of his sorrows, and since human speech is like a cracked kettle, on which we hammer tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars." Part II, Chapter 12)

In the middle of the unravelling love affair of Emma and Rodolphe, Flaubert's narrator suddenly steps outside of the characters and their immediate situation to describe beautifully the universal inadequacy of language, and gives us one of the best-known Flaubert quotations.

The day before their planned escape together, Rodolphe dumps Emma by letter and flees Yonville alone. Rodolphe's exercise of composing the farewell letter is comical and at the same time brutal. He comes across as callous and truly villainous, faking tear stains on the paper. The narrative presents him as a product of his own dissolute life and the society which has allowed him to lead such a life. Therefore, he comes across as natural and not to be judged. Emma reads Rodolphe's letter by an open garret window and in a daze almost throws herself out of it. She is only saved y Charles's voice calling for her (Part II, Chapter 13). Instead, Emma succumbs to brain-fever for 43 days. At the end of her convalescence M. Homais has another brilliant idea that will lead to a disaster: Charles should take Emma to the theatre in Rouen. There they come across Lėon again.

Puppy Love: Emma and Lėon

The Bovarys move. Charles decides that a change of scenery is necessary to calm Emma's nerves and cure her vapours. Their new hometown Yonville is located precisely twenty-four miles from Rouen: "We leave the high road at La Boissière and keep straight on to the top of the Leux Hill ..." Mentioning place names (the forest of Argueil, the Saint-Jean Hills) and positioning us with the narrator on the journey ("Before us ... ", "Here we are ...") (Part 1, Chapter 1) Flaubert is doing his best to bring us right into the landscape and into real France. Moreover, the narrative states that "Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at Yonville." (Ibid.) This does not only suggest the immutable nature of sleepy French country side, but it also that we could today walk into the setting of Emma Bovary's life. Unlike many earlier novels, setting their scandalous events in the town of X or the village of Y, Flaubert is rooting his story firmly in reality.

 During the move from Tostes to Yonville-L'Abbaye, three significant things happen, if we choose to read them as significant. First, Emma's greyhound - that token of chivalric romance - runs away (Part 2, Chapter 1). Secondly, in the carriage with them travels Monsieur Lheureux, a draper. Thirdly, a little later we learn that the plaster curė has fallen from the removal load and shattered to pieces on the pavement (Part 2, Chapter 3). Emma believes the move to Yonville and sleeping in a strange place is "an inauguration of a new phase in her life." (Part 2, Chapter 2) All of the three little details above would seem to support this notion.

The night the Bovarys arrive in Yonville, a young notary's clerk joins them for the evening meal at the inn. Lėon is "a good deal bored in Yonville" and keen to sit down with the new arrivals. Emma and Lėon get on like a house on fire. The narrative very neatly dovetails the discussion around the table showing Emma and Lėon talking to each other ignoring the others (Part 2, Chapter 2). Again, Emma confesses she loves to be thrilled. When Lėon tells her he appreciates poetry because he thinks "verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears." Emma replies: "I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in Nature." (Part2, Chapter 2) No soppy poetry for Emma, she prefers sensational stories.

"Thus side by side, while Charles and chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague conversations where every chance saying brings you back to the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked of everything till the end of dinner." Part 2, Chapter 2).

Like two teenagers in the company of dull adults, Emma and Lėon stick together. "Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce of books and of romances." (Part 2, Chapter 4)

Motherhood does not distract Emma. Berthe Bovary is born outside of the narrative and is sent to a carpenter's wife to nurse. The idea of motherhood attracts Emma only fleetingly and she simply does not like her child very much. This is evil; it was evil in 19th-century France and it is evil today. Mothers are expected to dote on their children. At no stage in the novel does the narrator say that Emma is a bad mother. The relationship of Emma and Berthe and their encounters are superb examples of Flaubert's narrative method of showing us what happens but not explaining anything (see particularly Part 2, Chapter 6). Maybe Emma is to be pitied as she is lumbered with a child she has no feelings for, a child she is incapable of loving. Maybe she is to be despised for her lack of maternal instinct. You decide.

Emma hoped for a boy. This is one of the more explicitly 'feminist' moments in the novel:

"She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered." (Part 2, Chapter 3)

If Emma cannot be a man, strong and free, the next best thing is to have a son and somehow experience manly freedom through him. This reminds us of Madame Bovary Sr, Charles's mother. That is exactly what she did - ran her son's life until she was ousted by his love for Emma. Maybe Mme Bovary Sr would have been happier going to the medical school herself, rather than squeezing her hapless son through it.

Lėon is very much a male version of Emma. He usually "maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and dissimulation." He is not interested on politics, he has "some accomplishments" - a term usually reserved for the skills of young ladies - a little watercolour painting, a little music, and he "readily talked literature" (Part 2, Chapter 3). After a walk with Emma, noted by the gossips of the town, Lėon wonders to the hills: "he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched the sky through his fingers. 'How bored I am!' He said to himself, 'how bored I am!' He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village" (Part 2, Chapter 3).

It is inevitable that these two bored romantics would get emotionally entangled. Lėon falls in love with Emma. The narrative charts this fall nicely describing Lėon's feelings but again not explaining them. Again, as throughout the whole narrative, Flaubert's technique of showing us how the characters feel, but not explaining those feelings, makes us feel alongside them. In this way, this technique seeks to have a sensational effect.

First "Lėon did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible." (Part 2, Chapter 3) He talks of Emma endlessly (Part 2, Chapter 4). He goes through all the agonies of a first-time lover, afraid to declare his devotion "always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward." (Part 2, Chapter 4)

Emma does no recognize these symptoms at first. "Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings - a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss." (Part 2, Chapter 4).  After an afternoon outing in February with the Homais family, the penny finally drops. Emma contrasts the charming appearance of Lėon, with his bare skin of his neck showing, with that of Charles and his "look of stupidity" and the knife he carried in his pocket "like a peasant."

"Yes, charming! Charming! Is he not in love?" she asked herself; "but with whom? With me!" (Part 2, Chapter 4)

Emma is pleased by this conclusion, "her soul filled with a new delight." (Part 2, Chapter 4). The very next day, she receives a visit from M. Lheureux the draper, who comes to tempt her with his wares and even offers her credit. Emma does not buy anything and feels virtuous. When Lėon visits, she continues to be good and makes a point about her many duties in looking after her house and her husband. "What madness!" is all Lėon can say. Emma maintains her role of a good wife: "her talk, her manners, everything changed. She took interest in the housework, went to church regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity." (Part 2, Chapter 5) Even Berthe is brought home from the nurse. Charles loves this, "his cheeks flushed with feeding, his eyes moist with happiness" (Ibid.).

The narrative does not explain why the discovery of Lėon's love for her should suddenly turn Emma into an 'angel in the house.' This is a conundrum: why is their love not consummated?

For both Emma and Lėon imagination seems more powerful and satisfying than reality. Emma appears so "virtuous and inaccessible" to Lėon that he loses all hope; "he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle." She goes through an apotheosis, becomes an unobtainable goddess. (Part 2, Chapter 5). Similarly, Emma "sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his [Lėon's] image. The sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this meditation." (Ibid.) She prefers an imagined Lėon to the real man.

Emma is "eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate." "Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering." (Ibid.) She is in a desperate situation: she is keeping Lėon at bay, loving him and knowing that he loves her. Her hatred is focused on Charles:

"What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then, was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle of all felicity, the cause of all misery and, as it were, the sharp clasp if that complex strap that buckled her from all sides?" (Part 2, Chapter 5)

Emma is firmly caught between "desire that draws her" and "conventionality that restrains." (Part 2, Chapter 3). She is trapped in a marriage like any average 19th-century, middle-class woman. She dreams of running away with Lėon, but she does not dare seriously contemplate leaving the safety of Charles. At the same time, the narrative also lets us see her relationship with Charles as the driving force behind her turmoil, rather than her desire for Lėon. The way the image of Lėon seems more desirable to Emma than the man, suggests that he is just a catalyst, something to bring to the boil the dissatisfactions of her marriage.

Emma's psychology and motivations can be interpreted in several ways in this part of the narrative. Her apparent virtuousness, her refusal to declare her feelings to Lėon, her hatred for Charles, all create a mix of emotions and reactions which produce a complex character. Emma feels more real because she is not easy to figure out. It is not important to 'explain' her but it is important to recognize Flaubert's success in creating a fictional character with considerable depth; there are internal workings in Emma that we do not need to see or understand for them to make her feel real.

The emotional tensions give Emma physical symptoms: "She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with flowing tears." (Part 2, Chapter 5) We feel for Emma, the narrative is able to convey her panic and her frustration as she thrashes against the bonds of respectability and religion. It seems a tragedy that Emma is tied to Charles, when she and Lėon seem to suit each other so well and are in love. How sweet life could be if they were free to head off to the sunset together - or would it? Any union of these two young air-heads would probably end in disaster. But for a short while at least, the reader's sympathies are with them. The narrative has shifted that sense of sympathy quite cleverly from poor Charles with a difficult spouse to poor Emma imprisoned in a stifling marriage with true love almost within her grasp.

Lėon is man, therefore he can move on. He "was weary of loving without any result; ... He was so bored with Yonville." (Part 2, Chapter 6) Lėon begins to imagine an artist's life in Paris, with blue velvet slippers and a guitar. And once he has conquered his fear for such "a new condition of life," he packs his bags and goes (Part 2, Chapter 6).

Lėon's memory slowly fades in Emma's mind and "Then the evil days of Tostes began again." Emma becomes restless and starts spending. (Part 2, Chapter 7). She becomes a customer of M. Lheureux. The only cure for this that Charles and her mother can come up with is to stop her library subscription and "the poisonous trade" of the librarian. (Ibid.) A more efficacious remedy, however, appears in the form of Monsieur Rodolpho Boulanger of La Huchette. As on so many occasions, medicine is also poison.

The Undefinable Uneasiness

The Bovarys' house in Tostes and its garden are described in detail, with a bridle hanging by the door, badly hung canary-yellow wallpaper and the smells of the kitchen and noises of the consulting room mingling through the walls. In Charles's consulting room medical dictionaries stand "uncut, but the binding rather worse for the successive sales through which they had gone" (Part 1, Chapter 5), and in the garden "Right at the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a curė in plaster reading his breviary." Even the outbuildings are included: "Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came a large dilapidated room with a stove, now used as wood-house, cellar, and pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to guess." (Ibid.)

Some details seem to give a specific message: the uncut, second-hand medical volumes indicate Charles's lack of ambition, while religion in the form of a plaster-priest has been banished to the bottom of the garden. The untidy outhouses, which are never mentioned again in the novel, reflect the general nature of the inhabitants: cluttered with random items from the past, piling up inside. Emma fills her head with romantic imaginings from fiction and religion, Charles is easily persuaded to accept others' opinions and follow their advice. The "mass of dusty things" can also be read as an indication of trouble: the respectable house of the country doctor harbours chaos inside. The description of the house opening chapter 5 is technically similar to Charles's cap at the beginning of the novel: there is so much material detail that you are pretty much forced to read meaning into it.

Charles is besotted with his new wife: "He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a walk in the evening on the high road, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now made up the endless round of his happiness." (Part 1, Chapter 5) Charles's sense of portly contentment is very well written: "his heart full of the joys of the past night, his mind at rest, his flesh at ease, he went on, re-chewing his happiness, like those who after dinner taste again the truffles which they are digesting." (Ibid.) Charles is not only in love, he is also enjoying the physical side of his marriage. "For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat." (Ibid.) His whole world is lodged within Emma's undergarments.

Emma's feelings are more complicated; "Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken." (Ibid.) With this little sentence Flaubert opens a whole chasm of writhing serpents; it has all been a horrible mistake, and Charles's happiness just established in the narrative with such glowing terms is doomed. How could Emma have been so mistaken and so fundamentally misunderstood her own feelings?

Let's blame convent schooling and romantic fiction. In a couple pages Flaubert traces a sentimental education that turned a girl with a vivid imagination into an air-head full of romantic and esoteric nonsense. Emma enters the convent at thirteen and is soon lost in the perfumed folds of its spiritual world. She is drawn to dramatic images of the Catholic faith: "she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries." (Part 1, Chapter 6) She tries to take part: mortify her flesh by not eating for a whole day, "find some wow to fulfill," invent "little sins" to confess. Unsurprisingly, sexual and romantic notions embedded in the religion affect the mind of the adolescent girl: "The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness." (Ibid.)

The narrative sums up Emma's nature: "She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes." (Part 1, Chapter 6). She is a seeker of sensations. She longs to have her blood stirred and her skin tingled.

And there is nothing better than sensational fiction to offer that thrill. At the convent, every week there is a visit from a woman with a romantic past and apron pockets bursting with romantic novels. She is a member of "an ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution" who comes to mend the linen. Flaubert gives a brilliant summary of the kinds of novels this lady "swallowed" herself and lent to the girls in the convent:

"They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, 'gentlemen' brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. For six months then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries." (Part 1, Chapter 6)

This was the stuff that filled Emma's head: a high dosage of sensational romance and mystery. This world of fiction filtered into real life in "keepsakes" her friends brought back from their holidays. These little tokens of friendship are signed by counts or viscounts, and illustrated with a hotchpotch of exotic and romantic images of English ladies, kissing doves and Sultans. Flaubert is having fun here, too: they tend to contain "especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often show us at once palm-trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by a neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam trembling in the water, where, standing out as if etched in white on steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about." (Ibid.)

Emma looks at "these pictures of the world" with "dazzled eyes."  This is her education. Emma's mother dies. She cries a little and quickly wearies of mourning for her. The nuns realize that she was "slipping from them," and Emma returns home with her father. Very soon she gets tired with the life on the farm and even longs for the convent.

Now it makes more sense why she married Charles and why she feels so let down after their marriage: "the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the disturbance caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe that she at last felt the wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendour of the skies of poesy; and now she could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness she had dreamed." (Part 1, Chapter 6)

Emma tries hard to make the marriage work for her: "in accord with theories she believed right, she wanted to make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after this as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved." (Part 1, Chapter 7).

Emma is not only romantically but also sexually frustrated: "she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant.  His outbursts became regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner." (Ibid.)

 The Bovarys do not click as a couple. Neither is to blame, it seems; the narrator is equally unsympathetic towards both. "But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that separated her from him." (Ibid.) Feeling "undefinable uneasiness" (Part 1, Chapter 7), unable to confide in anyone, Emma goes for a walk with her greyhound. The dog Djali links her real life to her romantic notions: greyhounds were featured in the "keepsakes." (see quote above). Slowly her swirling thoughts galvanize into one question: "Why did I marry him?" (Ibid.) Why indeed?

The Marquis's ball brings on a crisis. It gives Emma a glimpse into the fashionable world of the aristocracy: young ladies pass surreptitious notes to well-dressed gentlemen; servants break window panes to let fresh air into the heated rooms; peasants stand outside gazing in at the wonderment of the frolicking rich. (Part 1, Chapter 8). While Emma waltzes in the arms of a viscount, Charles stands by the cards table for five hours solid because Emma has forbidden him to dance, and finally he falls asleep propped up against a door (Part 1, Chapter 8). The narrative is constructed very cleverly from Emma's point of view. We see the ball through her eyes, and we observe her reactions. Not once do we hear her thoughts, but it is clear from her actions how she feels and what she is thinking (her admiration of the gentlefolk, her embarrassment with Charles).

Afterwards, Emma's mind lingers on the ball, she counts days from it. Her memory of the waltzing viscount mixes with her reading of fiction: "the memory of the viscount always returned when she read." (Part 1, Chapter 9) She dreams of Paris and gets a map of the city to trace imaginary walks in its streets. Dreams and reality are beginning to overlap in Emma's life. Emma grows listless, she loses interest. "She wished at the same time to die and live in Paris." (Part 1, Chapter 9) She is in limbo: "the same series of days recommenced. So now they would thus follow one another, always the same, innumerable, and bringing nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some event. One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences, and the scene changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so! The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast." (Part 1, Chapter 9).

Flaubert describes Emma's incapacitating boredom extremely well. We can feel her restless pain. "She lent her head against the walls and to weep; she envied stirring lives; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield." (Ibid.). The walls are caving in on Emma, she is desperate for some release, for something to happen, even is she is not quite sure what it is. Her life has become unbearable. Whether we think her capricious and selfish (which she undoubtedly is), we feel what she feels. We have all been there in our own lives; the same strong emotions are in every toddler who throws a temper-tantrum. This is not to belittle Emma's predicament but to argue that is very human, something most of us are familiar with.

At the trial for Madame Bovary it was argued that the novel showed the unhappiness and social mayhem that would be caused if women were educated beyond their station: a country doctor's wife with a head full of romantic nonsense about aristocratic lovers and a fashionable life was a disaster waiting to happen.

Even if we judge Emma's romantic longings silly and unrealistic, we still recognize her "undefinable uneasiness" as a legitimate and plausible reaction to being trapped in a deeply unsatisfying marriage, no matter how sweet we think Charles is. Emma entered the marriage with the best of intentions and she made an effort to make it work. But it is clear now that Emma will pay dearly for her mistake. The Marquis's ball creates "a hole in her life, like one of those great crevasses that a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains." (Part 1, Chapter 8). Part 1 of Madame Bovary is a big build up and the story is primed for disaster.

A Love Match

Madame Bovary is divided into three parts: the setting of the scene, the developing disaster and the final showdown. The first part can also be clearly divided into three sections. Chapters one to four set up the main theme and the starting point for the tragedy that is to follow. Chapters five to seven delve into Emma's character and provide a psychological background that make her actions plausible and convincing. Chapters eight and nine provide the trigger and the build-up for the catastrophe.

It is clear early on that this novel is about marriage. There are several portraits of marriage in the opening chapters which culminate in Charles and Emma's wedding.

The Bovarys, Charles's parents, have a marriage based on economic considerations. "His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Batholome Bovary, retired assistant-surgeon-major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals, and forced at this time to leave the service, had then taken advantage of his fine figure to get hold of a dowry of sixty thousand francs that offered in the person of a hosier's daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks." (Part 1, Chapter 1)

Emma's parents, on the other hand, seem to have married out of love. Monsieur Rouault describes to Charles his sorrow when his wife died (Part 1, Chapter 3) and remembers fondly how he carried his new wife away from her father after their wedding (Part 1, Chapter 4).

Charles Bovary married his first wife Heloise, because his mother told him to. It was part of the course she had set for his life:

"But it was not everything to have brought up a son, to have had him taught medicine, and discovered Tostes, where he could practice it; he must have a wife. She found him one - the widow of a bailiff at Dieppe, who was forty-five and had an income of twelve hundred francs. Though she was ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds, Madame Dubuc had no lack of suitors.  To attain her ends Madame Bovary had to oust them all, and she even succeeded in very cleverly baffling the intrigues of a pork-butcher backed up by the priests." (Part 1, Chapter 1).

This description of Charles's first marriage is almost slap-stick. It is funny, but it is also outrageous. Charles's mother schemes to secure an apparently wealthy, respectable wife for him. Madame Dubuc is considerably older than Charles, but clearly there is no attempt here to match personalities or interests. Madame Bovary gives no consideration to grandchildren either. Charles is her only son, and yet Madame Dubuc is a little old to start a family. Financial matters and social appearances are clearly paramount, possibly also Madame Bovary's desire to continue to reign supreme in her son's life.

Madame Dubuc is ugly with pimples - whose opinion is this? The narrator is extremely rude about poor Heloise Dubuc here. It is already clear that the third person narrator is not very sympathetic towards any of the characters, but this would appear to go even beyond calling a spade a spade. Charles's first marriage can be read as criticism of the unpleasant and greedy tradition of arranging bourgeois marriages according to matters of property rather than matters of the heart. It is also a comment on parents' eagerness in securing marriages for their children without considering the desires or inclinations of their offspring.

Emma and Charles's relationship develops against the background of these three marriages (Bovarys', Rouaults' and Charles and Heloise's). Charles's feelings for Emma are given a boost by her contrast with his wife: "And then the widow was thin, she had long teeth ..." (Part 1, Chapter 2). Again this is the narrator speaking from Charles's point of view and being quite horrible about Heloise. As long as this is indirect speech and Charles is thinking about his wife, this is funny. If this is the narrator expressing his own view, this is disturbing - a narrator this brutal and unsympathetic is hardly reliable. There is slippage in the narrative voice: mostly it remains within a character's point of view - describing the action and the world from a specific character's perspective. But there are moments when the narrator seems to step outside of the confines of a single character. The narrator in Madame Bovary hides within characters, but occasionally his passion gets the better of him and he breaks cover to reveal himself. This is something to keep an eye on while reading.

Charles meets Emma while attending to M. Rouault's broken leg. He admires her physically; her fingers; her nails; her throat, her lips (Part 1, Chapters 2 and 3). The narrative follows Charles's gaze. He even notes the perspiration on her bare shoulders - a physical detail you would perhaps not expect to see in a 19th-century novel (Part 1, Chapter 3). Charles is besotted, and Heloise drops dead soon after she has realized that Charles is in love with Emma (Part 1, Chapter 2).   

In these chapters before the wedding, it is not clear what feelings Emma has for Charles. In fact, we know very little about her. We know she cannot sew (Part 1, Chapter 2) and that her father thinks that she is "of no use to him in the house" (Part 1, Chapter 3). In addition, we only know what she has told Charles: she went to a convent school and her mother is dead. There is a slight indication of her nature in her comments about longing to live in town and being weary of the country (Part 1, Chapter 3).

Sex is very much present in the novel, just under the surface. Charles's eyes feast on Emma's beauty (Part 1, Chapter 3), physical contact makes a strong impression on them both (Part 1, Chapter 2). At the wedding "a fishmonger, one of their cousins (...), began to squirt water from his mouth through the keyhole."(Part 1, Chapter 4). He is quickly stopped by M. Rouault because "the distinguished position of his son-in-law would not allow of such liberties." (Ibid.)  We may not be familiar with this French country tradition, but the gesture is suggestive enough for us to see its meaning.

The morning after the wedding night Charles is blissful and the narrator is extremely outspoken in his comments: "he seemed another man. It was he who might rather have been taken for the virgin of the evening before, whilst the bride gave no sign that revealed anything. The shrewdest did not know did not know what to make of it, and they looked at her when she passed near them with an unbounded concentration of mind. But Charles concealed nothing." (Part 1, Chapter 4)

The first few chapters of Madame Bovary set up the central topic of marriage. The narrative seems to criticize marriage based on financial considerations and shows us Charles and Emma as a couple who marry for love. This should be a recipe for 'happy ever after' but there are some ominous signs in the air. Emma is still very much an enigma. We know Charles to be a simple soul very much in love, but we know hardly anything about her and nothing about her feelings for Charles. This is a good hook for the reader: we want to know how Charles and Emma will get on.

Charles's Cap

Madame Bovary opens with a scene of Charles as the "new fellow" in the school and the third person narrator seemingly present in the class as one of the pupils. Charles's cap is described in excruciating detail:

"It was one of those headgears of composite order, in which we can find traces of bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton nightcap; 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 a 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." (Part 1, Chapter 1)

This description brings up three points about Madame Bovary. First, it is French, provincial and mid-nineteenth century. Some details are beyond the modern reader without the help of some research: what is "shako" or a "billycock hat"? (A shako is a military hat shaped like a bucket with a small visor and usually draped in golden braids and tassels; a billycock hat is also called a derby and similar to the bowler hat.) There are references to customs, traditions and contemporary events in the novel that leave today's reader amused and baffled. As we may not understand every reference in the narrative, we may not be shocked by the same things as original readers of Madame Bovary. What maybe was sensational then, no longer makes our heart beat faster. Also, what was commonplace then may seem absolutely outrageous to us. In this way Charles's cap is at the heart of this blog: I may not know what shako, and billycock hat are, but does the description of the hat still have the effect on me Flaubert wanted to create?

The hat is clearly ridiculous and by detailing it so carefully, the narrator makes Charles appear ridiculous, too. This is the second point about the cap: it seems to indicate the character of its owner. Charles is awkward, large, listens carefully absorbing influences from his environment like his cap, until in the end both the man and his headgear are a hotch-potch of others' opinions and views. Maybe the narrator wants us to see Charles, too, as "one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile's face." The narrative, so Charles's cap indicates, uses inanimate objects and landscapes to give us information about the internal workings of the characters. The detailed descriptions of things in Madame Bovary are significant not only in order to give verisimilitude and make the world of the novel appear more real, but there is deeper meaning and symbolism in them.

The first page of Madame Bovary establishes the narrative style: this is 'show not tell'. Charles's appearance, demeanour and behaviour are observed minutely. His gestures, expressions, details of his clothing are recorded. We are not in Charles's head; we do not hear his thoughts. The narrator studies him closely like he is an object of scientific examination. Charles appears almost as a dumb animal who cannot be expected to explain his own thoughts and emotions; these can only be detected by observing him carefully. 

Chapter 1 of Madame Bovary charts the development of Charles Bovary, this sample case of French provincial bourgeoisie. We come to understand his nature, his psychological make-up from the recounting of his childhood, education and first marriage. We put him together from pieces of his past life, just like his cap is pieced together from different materials. This is the third point about the cap: Charles's cap can be read as a metaphor for the whole narrative method of Madame Bovary. The narrator will not explain, will not analyze, will not preach a moral point. He will present the pieces and we can put them together and draw our own conclusions.

Indications of Madame's Sensational Nature

Further assessing the sensational potential of Madame Bovary, two factors speak in its favour: the famous trial and Flaubert's own stated aspirations about his writing.

In January 1857, soon after the publication of Madame Bovary in La Revue de Paris, Flaubert was hauled to court by the police, accused of obscenity. The novel was "an affront to decent comportment and religious morality," or as www.madamebovary.com puts it, "the novel challenged public mores, blasphemed against the Church by trying to justify the mortal sin of adultery, and included provocative images intermingled with religious affairs, therefore promoting the concept of a fictional utopia devoid of decency and moral values." Crucially, Madame Bovary depicted Emma as enjoying her infidelity. Flaubert's novel, Ernest Pinard, the Imperial Prosecutor argued, would drive its female readers to adultery, liberating them to do whatever they wanted. This was a dangerous, novel oozing with corruption.

Flaubert could not see anything offensive in his novel. And the published version had already been censored by the editor of La Revue de Paris. The outrageous scene of Emma consummating her affair with Leon during the long cab ride in Rouen (Part III, Chapter 1) had been left out. The trial turned out to be an excellent publicity stunt. It has been said that Flaubert enjoyed it and pretty much brought it about as he publicized his work by complaining about La Revue's censorship.

Flaubert was acquitted 7 February, 1857, after a plea by Marie-Antoine Jules Senard (a lawyer, politician and a family friend to whom the novel is dedicated) arguing that the character flaws so evident in Emma Bovary, together with her unhappiness and miserable end, quite to the contrary, work to confirm and support moral values. Madame Bovary was published in book form in April 1857. During the trial Ernest Pinard had been very impressed by Flaubert's writing, and he went on to pen pornographic poems. Is this evidence of Madame Bovary's corrupting power? (This detail comes from "In Our Time" episode on Madame Bovary broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thu 12 July 2007 and available on the internet.)

In her review of the novel in The Guardian (27 July 2002) A. S Byatt refers to Flaubert's letter to his lover Louise Colet (Flaubert's love letters to her are famous and often plagiarized by less creative lovers): "he wanted to make the reader feel his world 'almost physically'..." Flaubert also said that Madame Bovary was "a novel about nothing." This has been interpreted to mean that the story and the moral message were not what interested him in this work; the novel was an exercise in style and skill of writing. He could take the most boring topic - a country doctor and his adulterous wife - a petty bourgeois tragedy so common and tedious they are thirteen to a dozen - and turn it into a narrative so great and powerful that it would make the audience gasp and tremble, call the police and drag the author to court.

A trial for obscenity shows that the novel certainly lit a fire under some trouser-seats. Flaubert's primary aspiration to write in order to affect his readers and to give them 'almost' physical sensations, rather than to make a political or a moral point with his narrative, suggests that he aimed for something literally sensational.