"Madame Bovary," by Gustve Flaubert

                             Our Approach To Reading Emma

     The girl Emma Bovary never existed. The book Madame Bovary will exist forever and ever. The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and illusions that shocked the prudish philistine government of Napoleon III. Indeed, the novel was tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Flaubert won his case. Today, our kids and grandkids watch much raunchier sex scenes on TV. Times change. 
   We shall discuss this book in terms of structures(if you read biographies of Flaubert, you know he called these mouvements),  thematic lines, style, poetry, and characters. The novel consists of 35 chapters, each about ten pages long, and is divided into three parts set respectively in Rouen and Tostes, in Yonville, and in Yonville, Rouen, and Yonville, all of these places invented except Rouen, a cathedral city in northern France. 
   The main action is supposed to take place in the 1830s and 1840s, under King Louis Philippe (1830--1848). Chapter 1 begins in the winter of 1827, and in a kind of afterword the lives of some of the characters are followed up till 1856 into the reign of Napoleon III and indeed up to the date of Flaubert's completing the book.  Madame Bovary was begun at Croisset, near Rouen, on the nineteenth of September 1851,  finished in April 1856, sent out in June, and published serially at the end of the same year in the  Revue de Paris. A hundred miles to the north of Rouen, Charles Dickens in Boulogne was finishing Bleak House in the summer of 1853 when Flaubert had reached part two of his novel. One year before that, in Russia, Gogol had died(we discussed this 8-10 years back) and Tolstoy had published his first important work, Childhood. 

          Don't Be Misled : Flaubert Invented All Characters and 
                    the Environment of Madame Bovary (I was formerly  
                    wrong about this.) 

Three forces make and mold a human being : heredity, environment, and the unknown agent X. Of these the second, environment, is by far the least important, while the last, agent X, is by far the most influential. In the case of characters living in books, it is of course the author who controls , directs, and applies the three forces. The society around Madame Bovary has been manufactured by Flaubert as deliberately as Madame Bovary herself has been made by him, and to say that this Flaubertian society acted upon that Flaubertian character is to talk in circles. Everything that happens in the book happens exclusively in Flaubert's mind, no matter what the initial trivial impulse may have been, and no matter what conditions in the France of his time existed or seemed to him to exist.  I missed the boat the first time around by insisting upon the influence of objective social conditions upon the heroine Emma Bovary. Flaubert's novel deals with the delicate calculus of human fate, not with the arithmetic  of social conditioning. 
   
             Don't Be Fooled by the Term Bourgeois, As I Was

   We are told that most of the characters in Madame Bovary are bourgeois. But one thing that we should clear up once and for all is the meaning that Flaubert gives to the term bourgeois. Unless it simply means townsman, as it often does in French, the term bourgeois as used by Flaubert means "philistine," people preoccupied with the material side of life and believing only in conventional values. He never uses the word bourgeois with any politico-economic Marxist connotation. Flaubert's bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket.  For example, in a famous scene of our book when hardworking old woman, getting a medal for having slaved for her farmer-boss, is confronted with a committee of relaxed bourgeois beaming at her --- mind you, in that scene both parties are philistines, the beaming politicians and the superstitious old peasant woman --- both sides are bourgeois in Flaubert's sense. ( Recall that we so-called serious readers must also be careful readers. ) It's the same as in communist Russia, where Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, were fundamentally and smugly bourgeois. There was a lace curtain behind the iron one. A Soviet official, small or big, was the perfect type of bourgeois mind, of a philistine. The key to Flaubert's term is the philistinism of his character Monsieur Homais. Think about it this way : Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts. 


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The reign of LouisPhilippe, the citizen king ( le roi bourgeois ), from1830 to 1848, was a pleasantly dingy era in comparison to Napoleon's fireworks in the beginning of the century and to our own times. In the 1840s "the annals of France were tranquil under the cold administration of Guizot." But "1847 opened with gloomy aspects for the French Government : irritation, want, the desire for a more popular and perhaps more brilliant rule . . . Trickery and subterfuge seemed to reign in high places. . ." A revolution broke out in February 1848. Louis Philippe, "assuming the name of Mr. William Smith, closed an inglorious reign by an inglorious flight in a hackney cab." This is mentioned because good Louis Philippe with his cab and umbrella was such a Flaubertian character. Now another character, Charles Bovary, was born according to best calculations in 1815 ; entered school in 1828 ; became an "officer of health" (which is one degree below doctor) in 1835; married his first wife, the widow Dubuc, in the same year, at Tostes, where he started practicing medicine. After losing her, he married Emma Rouault (our heroine) in 1838 ; moved to another town, Yonville, in 1840 ; and after losing his second wife in 1846, he died in 1847, at age thirty-two. 

 THIS IS THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE BOOK IN A CAPSULE