"Madame Bovary," by Gustave Flaubert ---Episode 6

          Continuing On With The Emotional Life of Emma

   The ups and downs of Emma's emotions----the longings, the passions, the frustration, the loves, the disappointments ---- a checkered sequence, end in a violent self-inflicted and very messy death. Yet before we part with Emma, we shall mark the essential hardness of her nature, somehow symbolized by a slight physical flaw, by the hard angularities of her hands ; her hands were fondly groomed, delicate and white, pretty, perhaps, but not beautiful. 
   She is false, she is deceitful by nature : she deceives Charles from the very start before actually committing adultery. She lives among philistines, and she is a philistine herself. Her mental vulgarity is not so obvious as that of Homais. It might be too hard on her to say that the trite, ready-made pseudo progressive aspects of Homais's nature are duplicated in a feminine pseudo romantic way in Emma ; but one cannot help feeling that Homais and Emma not only phonetically echo each other but do have something in common --- and that something is the vulgar cruelty of their natures. In Emma the vulgarity, the philistinism, is veiled by her grace, her cunning, her beauty, her meandering intelligence, her power of idealization, her moments of tenderness and understanding, and by the fact that her brief bird life ends in human tragedy. 
 Not so Homais.  He is the successful philistine. And to the last, as she lies dead, poor Emma is attended by him, the busybody Homais, and the prosaic priest Bournisien. There is a delightful scene when these two --- the believer in drugs and the believer in God --- go to sleep in two armchairs near the dead body, facing each other, snoring in front of each other with bulging bellies and fallen jaws, twinned in sleep, united at lasting the same human weakness of sleep. And what an insult to poor Emma's destiny --- the epitaph Homais finds for her grave ! His mind scrammed with trite Latin tags but at first he is stumped by not being able to find anything better than sat victor ; pause, traveler (or stay, passenger). Pause where ? The end of this Latin tag is heroam calcas --- you tread on a hero's dust. But But finally Homais with his usual temerity substituted for hero's dust, your beloved wife's dust. Stay passenger, you tread upon your beloved wife ---the last thing that could be said about poor Charles who, despite all his stupidity, loved Emma with a deep, pathetic adoration, a fact that she did  realize for one brief moment before she died. And where does she die ? In the very arbor where Rodolphe and Emma used to make love. 
   {Incidentally, in that last page of his life, not bumblebees are visiting the lilacs in that garden but bright green beetles. Oh those ignoble, treacherous, and philistine translators of this novel from French to English. One would think that Monsieur Homais, who knew a little English, was Flaubert's English translator. }

   Homais has various chinks in his armor : 

1. His science comes from pamphlets, his general culture from newspapers ; his taste in literature's appalling, especially in the combination of authors he cites. In his ignorance, he remarks at one point " 'That is the question,' as I lately read in a newspaper," not knowing that he is quoting Shakespeare and not a Rouen journalist ---nor perhaps had the author of the political article in that newspaper known it either.

2. He still feels now and then that dreadful fright he got when he was almost jailed for practicing medicine. 

3. He is a traitor, a cad, a toad, and does not mind sacrificing his dignity to the more serious interests of his business or to obtain a decoration.

4. He is a coward, and notwithstanding his brave words he is afraid of blood, death, dead bodies.

5. He is without mercy and poisonously vindictive.

6. He is a pompous ass, a smug humbug, a gorgeous philistine, a pillar of society as are so many philistines. 

7. He does get his decoration at the endif the novel in 1856. Flaubert considered that his age was the age of philistinism, which he called muflisme. However, this kind of thing is not peculiar to any special government or regime; if anything, philistinism is more in evidence during revolutions and in police states than under more traditional regimes. The philistine in violent action is always more dangerous than the philistine who sits before his television set. 

Let us recapitulate for a moment Emma's loves, platonic and otherwise : 

1. As a schoolgirl she may have had a crush on her music teacher, who passes with his encased violin in one of the retrospective paragraphs of the book. 

2. As a young woman married to Charles (with whom at the beginning she is not in love), she first has an amorous friendship, a perfectly platonic one technically, with Leon Dupuis, a notary clerk.

3. Her first "affair" is with Rodolphe Boulanger, the local squire.

4. In the middle of this affair, since Rodolphe turns out to be more brutal than the romantic ideal she longed for, Emma attempts to discover an ideal in her husband ; she tries seeing him as a great physician and begins a brief phase of tenderness and tentative pride. 

5. After poor Charles has completely botched the operation on the poor stableboy's clubfoot---one of the greatest episodes in the book --- she goes back to Rodolphe with more passion than before.

6. When Rodolphe abolishes her last romantic dream of elopement and a dream life in Italy, after a serious illness she finds a subject of adoration in God. 

7. She has a few minutes of daydreaming about the opera singer Lagardy.

8. Her affair with vapid, cowardly Leon after she meets him again is a grotesque and pathetic materialization of all her romantic dreams. 

9. In Charles, just before she die, she discovers his human and divine side, his perfect love for her --- all that she had missed. 

10. The ivory body of Jesus Christ on the cross that  she kisses a few mites before her death, this love can be said to end in something like her previous tragic disappointment since all the misery of her life takes over again when she hears the awful song of the hideous vagabond as she dies.