The Mystery of the Vanishing Lady Detective

The female detective seems to appear in popular fiction before we encounter her in real life. Once the detective officer was established as a popular hero of sensational fiction by the 1860s, it was but a short step to add more spice into the story by dressing this officer in a petticoat.

In real life, from the 1850s onwards, there were women working as 'police matrons' at police stations to look after and search female suspects. They were usually police sergeants' wives. In 1883 the Metropolitan Police employed the first woman as a female visitor to keep an eye on female convicts on license and women under police supervision. In 1889 fourteen women were engaged to look after female prisoners at the police courts. In The Invention of Murder (2011) Judith Flanders writes: "two women were hired to look after female prisoners at police stations in 1883" (p. 298) (Her information clearly differs from that of the Open University website). The first female police officer worked in Portland, Oregon in 1905. In the UK it was only after WWI that women joined the police force as officers.

Women's Police Service of volunteers was started in 1914, and two years later women were employed as typists by the Metropolitan Police. When an official of the Met was asked by the journalists of women would ever serve as police constables, the official famously replied: "No, not even if the war lasts fifty years." In December 1918 plans were made for new "Metropolitan Women Police Patrols." (This information about the history of the police is from the Open University website and the website of the Metropolitan Police. For more information see also Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950. Ed by Clive Emsley and Haya Shpayer-Makov, 2006 ).

This is the official history of women police. But the obvious question is whether fiction reflects the reality more than we are aware of? There is an argument to be made that women were occasionally employed to assist in investigations on a freelance basis. Until 1884 detectives, and before them Bow Street runners, sold their services as thief-takers and unravellers of tangled skeins to anyone wanting to employ them. It would only make sense that there would be situations where a woman's assistance would come in handy.

British Library has very conveniently re-published the adventures of the two earliest known professional female detectives in fiction. Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective was published in May 1864. At its heels followed The Revelations of a Lady Detective (October 1864) attributed to William Stephens Hayward. Both books have first person narratives, the Female Detective is Miss Gladden and the Lady Detective is Mrs Paschal. They are consummate professionals and a pair of tough cookies. The two collections of stories give a good view into the roots of detective fiction. They stand in the confluence of three traditions: sensational, gothic melodrama and the spine-tingling reporting of real crime can be seen to give way to the equally sensational romance of the newly invented detective police with its scientific methods.

There were surely other detective heroines in addition to Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal. Flanders mentions Ruth the Betrayer (1862-3) by Edward Ellis (The Invention of Murder, p. 298), and she makes a reference to women attached to a private inquiry office in Collins's Armadale (1866). In "The Lenton Croft Robberies" (1894) by Arthur Morrison, the detective says that "Of course there will be a female searcher at the Twyford police-station." There were also female detectives in stage plays (see The Invention of Murder, pp. 380-1). We know of a tradition of amateur detectives in sensation fiction (Marion Halcombe in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White in 1860 or, even much earlier, Susan Hopley in The Adventures of Susan Hopley by Catherine Crowe in 1841). By the 1890s there were plenty of female detectives fiction: Dorcas Dene, Detective by George M. Sims (two series of stories in 1897 and 1898); Amelia Butterworth by Anna Katharine Green (3 novels: That Affair Next Door [1897], Lost Man's Lane [1898] and The Circular Study [1900]); Loveday Brooke by C. L. Pirkis (1894). Where are the lady sleuths of the 1870s and 1880s?

In his introduction to The Revelations of a Lady Detective, Mike Ashley mentions Mr Bazalgette's Agent by Leonard Merrick in 1888 and, in the US, "The Lady Detective" by Harlan P. Halsey in his dime-novels, possibly in 1880. Are there more?

Margaret Kinsman is surely right to say that there is a whole hidden history of female detectives in the 19th century. They appear so special to us, because we only know of a handful of women detectives from that period. (Kinsman spoke at a panel discussion on the female detective at the British Library 8.3.2013.)

In her book about female detectives in fiction, Kathleen G. Klein argues about Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal that "These characters are anomalies" - they have no precedents, and no followers (Klein. The Woman Detective: Gender & Genre, 2005, p. 29). "Certainly, the lack of additional similar characters and the absence of further British female private detectives until the 1890s diminishes the status of these precursors through silence and omission." (Ibid.)

Are Miss G and Mrs P oddities and mere gimmicks to attract readers, or are they part of a lost tradition of Victorian female private eyes? Can you solve the mystery of the vanishing lady detective?

Flaubert's writing is thrilling

The secret of the sensational power of Madame Bovary is Flaubert's superb writing. I said at the beginning that I was not interested in his quality of writing, his pernickety insistence of finding just the right word or his celebrated position as a towering figure in the development of the modern novel. I did not care if it took him four years to write Madame Bovary and sometimes several days to write a single sentence. But quite frankly, I was wrong. Good writing is thrilling. Although Madame Bovary is a 'sensation novel' because of its melodramatic story of adultery, financial collapse and suicide, what makes it truly sensational is the way this story is presented from a point of view integral to the story and its characters.

In her Beginner's Guide to French Literature (2011), Carol Clerk highlights two techniques Flaubert uses in his realist narrative: free indirect speech and characters' point of view at looking at the world around them.

To reel us in, Flaubert's narrative shows us characters act, talk and think. It is left to the reader to figure out the internal life of the characters and their motivations. This gives the narrative a hook: the actions, words and thoughts of the characters become clues for us to piece the whole characters together. This is both engaging and rewarding, it fires up the imagination. It demonstrates superbly the golden rule of good writing: 'show, don't tell.'

Part of this method of leaving the reader to draw her own conclusions is the apparent lack of judgment in the narrative. The narrator does not express an opinion about the events. Flaubert's probably most famous quote comes from one of his letters to Louise Colet: "An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." The narrator passing judgment would be too much like God showing his hand.

Emma is contradictory, she dotes on Berthe and pushes her away; she tries to feel something for Charles, she loathes him; she wants to be loved by Rodolphe and she decided to be a good wife; she dabbles with religion then rejects it. Her behaviour is illogical, her emotions are messy and sometimes contradictory. This is a risky strategy for an author to adopt: a fictional character should have continuity and her actions should have an internal logic. Otherwise the reader will struggle to believe and the character will have no depth, no sense of being real. Flaubert manages to do the very opposite. Emma's erratic emotional states, her toing-and-froing in her marriage, her failed attempts at piety and virtue, all add up to build a portrait of a young woman in turmoil. She comes across as a character with a shallow nature and hidden depths.

Madame Bovary is sensational because it makes readers understand and accept the roots of Emma's adultery and profligacy. The narrative works hard to show us the world and life from Emma's point of view. We understand her motivations, we see her as a victim of her own imagination and we do not judge her morals. We may think her silly, provincial, selfish, but we do not think her unnaturally wicked or evil. She is, above all, natural - acting according to her own nature.

There is no simple message or moral to be gleaned from Madame Bovary. This is why it has stood the test of time and is still good reading today. But nevertheless, it is still commenting on its own time and society.

 Many have interpreted Emma Bovary as a model of a middle-class woman of the nineteenth-century: bound with the ties of social norms to home and motherhood, and above all lethally bored. She can be seen as a proto-feminist character pursuing her own dream and chafing against the constraints of society. It can also be argued that Madame Bovary gives expression to Flaubert's own frustrations with the middle-class society and his dislike of the high bourgeoisie of the mid-19th-century France. God may not be so invisible in his universe after all.

Arsenic

Emma pretends that she wanted to kill the rats that kept her from sleeping." (Part III, Chapter 8). She asks Justin to give her the key to Homais's laboratory. Together they climb the stairs.

In the nineteenth-century arsenic was not only used as rat-poison, pesticide and in fly-papers and sheep-dip. There was arsenic in paints, wallpapers, furniture, toys, artificial flowers and even cake decorations. Arsenic was used in dyes to produce a beautiful emerald green. Ladies (like Ms Florence Maybrick, convicted of poisoning her husband in 1889) soaked arsenical fly-paper to get a face-wash. Arsenic was good for the skin and produced a rosy-glow (by stimulating the blood vessels under the skin). Arsenical soaps and lotions were also available in shops. The only danger for avid use was that you hair might fall off, but that just made arsenic a good hair-remover, too. During the Maybrick trial a local chemist testified that Mr James Maybrick together with other gentlemen would line-up daily at his shop to take their arsenic-laced tonic as a 'pick-me-up.' It was a stimulant with, so men believed, aphrodisiac properties. Arsenic was also given to horses to work them, to make their coats glossy and to make them run faster. For a full and entertaining history of arsenic in the Victorian period, read James C. Wharton's The Arsenic Century (OUP, 2010).

Arsenic is colourless, odourless and tasteless. It is a white powder and cannot be detected without chemicals tests. It was therefore thought to be the choice weapon of poisoners, particularly unhappily married or abandoned women. In the 1840s there were two famous cases of poisoning by arsenic in France: Marie Lafarge and Euphėmie Lacoste were both ladies forced into marriages by poverty and family with men they did not much fancy. (Their stories are included in Mary S Hartman's Victorian Murderesses [Robson Books, 1977]). In the 1850s, there was a minor panic about arsenic in Britain. Although statistics do not seem to support the idea of a poisoning epidemic, the media made a bid deal out of arsenic. Like Julie Flanders writes in The Invention of Murder (Harper Press, 2011): "Once newspapers picked up the idea, the ubiquity if arsenic made it terrifying; as they printed more (and more sensational) cases, it appeared that poisoning cases were on the rise." (Flanders, p. 232). In fact, in the ten years 1849 to 1858, according to Flanders, there were only seventeen trials for poisoning at the Old Bailey (p. 234). Arsenic was seen particularly as a woman's weapon. This makes sense, because its administration in food to an unsuspecting victim and its acquisition in fly-paper, rat poison or cosmetic products are both activities that fall within the feminine realm in the Victorian house. Also, administering arsenic does not require physical force, only cunning and daring and, often, desperation.

M. Homais is very careful with this lethal substance and horrified by the prospect of mixing it with domestic activities. When Justin brings him a pan for jam-making from the laboratory, Homais explodes in anger, while Emma stands by to witness the scene:

"Didn't you see anything in corner, on the left, on the third shelf? .... You saw a bottle of blue glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains white powder, on which I have even written 'Dangerous!' And do you know what it is? Arsenic! And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!"

            "Next to it!" cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. "Arsenic! You might have poisoned us all."

And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in their entrails." (Part III, Chapter 2)

Now, "Emma went straight to the third shelf - so well did her memory guide her -seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, withdrawing it full of a white powder, she began eating it." (Part III, Chapter 8). "Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity of one who had performed a duty." (Ibid.) Emma's action is quick and impulsive. She executes her suicide without forethought and without giving any consideration to consequences. She stays true to her character. But she might have thought it through a little more and chosen a less painful way. Emma is perhaps not aware of the agonies in store for her: "Ah! it is but a little thing, death! ... I shall fall asleep and all will be over." (Part III, Chapter 8). On the other hand, she has chosen her poison well for a melodramatic, prolonged death scene. Taking an overdose of opium, readily available in most households like the Bovarys', would have been quick and quiet; she would have just fallen asleep.

Arsenic is a mineral hat exists naturally around us and in our bodies. Small doses of arsenic may even be good for us, it stimulates metabolism and may help growth. Excess arsenic is processed by the liver. Our individual arsenic tolerance can vary greatly, and we can increase that tolerance by taking small doses of the poison. In the 1850s Styrian peasants in the Alps astonished the medical world by their ability to withstand lethal doses of arsenic without any ill effects. This was down to their life-long habit of dosing themselves with it. (This information and the following details of arsenic poisoning are from The Elements of Murder by John Emsley [OUP, 2005]).

When too much arsenic enters the body and its natural mechanism can no longer cope the first reaction is for the body to empty the gut. Vomiting starts any time between fifteen minutes and several hours after arsenic has been swallowed. The victim feels thirsty, she finds it difficult to swallow and her mouth and throat feel sore.

"I'm thirsty; oh, so thirsty," Emma sighs. Then she tells Charles to open a window "I am choking." "She was seized with a sickness so sudden that she had hardly time to draw out her handkerchief from under her pillow." (Part III, Chapter 8) Flaubert's description of Emma's symptoms follows closely those of acute arsenic poisoning. The painful stomach sensitive to pressure, the pale, damp and cold skin, weak and erratic pulse are all indications of acute arsenic poisoning. Decorously Flaubert has left out the diarrhoea, which starts after twelve hours and goes on until the body is convulsed in empty spasms. Death comes usually in 12-36 hours, some have been known to linger up to four days. The doctors cannot save Emma. She receives last rites from M. Bournisien.

"Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes as they rolled, grew paler, like the two globes of al amp that is going out, so that one might have thought her already dead but for the fearful labouring of her ribs, shaken by violent breathing, as if the soul were struggling to free itself." (Part III, Chapter 8).

Emma's servant is kneeling before a crucifix, the priest is praying in Latin, her husband is kneeling by the bed, his arms outstretched, holding on to her hands. Even Homais "slightly bent his knees" while M. Canivet, the celebrated doctor "vaguely looked out at the Place." The death scene tableau is almost perfect in its conventional piety. Suddenly the scene is penetrated by the "raucous voice" of the blind, homeless beggar singing of love: "Maids in the warmth of a summer day / Dream of love and of love alway."

"Emma raised herself like a galvanised corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring." She laughs "an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh." "The wind is strong this summer day, / Her petticoat has flown away." The song goes on and she falls dead with a final convulsion.

Emma has killed herself. In one sense her death seems selfish and unnecessary, a dramatic gesture of a wildly romantic young woman.  But at the moment she scoops up a handful of arsenic from the blue bottle and pushes it into her mouth, she is also desperate, lost and feeling that she has run out of options. She is not considering the impact of her actions, she just wants out. Her lovers have rejected her; all she has left is the hopelessly inadequate husband, a child she does not love and financial ruin. What does that final atrocious laugh mean? What memories, desires or regrets does the blind beggar's song recall?

(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.