Madame+Bovary

= Scenes from a provincial life = She was a bourgeois narcissist in 19th-century France who was destroyed by her daydreams. But the brilliantly observed tragedy of Flaubert's Madame Bovary still resonates today Reading Madame Bovary for the first time was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life - at least up to that point. I was a very young woman - not even eighteen. I was au pair in the French provinces in the 1950s, and I read Madame Bovary in French, sitting in the furrow of a vineyard. I was like Emma Rouault before she became Madame Bovary, someone whose most intense life was in books, from which I had formed vague images of passion and adventure, love and weddings, marriage and children. I was afraid of being trapped in a house and a kitchen. Madame Bovary opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness, which was all the more appalling because it was so full of things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens. The worst thing of all was that it was the books that were the most insidious poison. Recently Madame Bovary appeared in a British newspaper listing of the 'fifty best romantic reads.' It was, and is, the least romantic book I have ever read. If I have come to love it, it is because now I am half a century older, and not trapped in a house and kitchen, I can equably sympathise with the central person in the book, who is its author - endlessly inventive, observant, and full of life. Madame Bovary was published in 1856-7 and is at the centre of any discussion of the European realistic novel of bourgeois life - especially provincial life. The nineteenth-century novel, however much it criticises the bourgeoisie, is a bourgeois form that grew up with the prosperous middle classes who had time for reading, and were interested in precise discriminations of social relations and moral and immoral behaviour. It comes after the chivalric epic with its codes of honour and courtly love, and after the religious epic, __Paradise Lost__, the __Divine Comedy__, religious dramas of the nature of the human soul in the mythic cosmology. The dense social novel flourished in countries with large cities - London, Paris, St Petersburg, Moscow - in which populations were in a state of rapid change - and provincial societies in which old orders and hierarchies and habits persisted and change was slower. The novel was interested in the structures of societies - from money to education, from religious habits to kinship and marriages, from ambition to failure. Fairy tale images, the hopes of princesses and kitchenmaids, of youngest sons and poor old women, are contained in but also corrected by the realist novel. Fairy stories end with the lovers marrying and living happy ever after. Jane Austen's novels keep that pattern. The great realist novels study at length what happens after marriage, within marriages, within families and businesses. One of the great subjects of the realist novel is boredom - narrow experiences in small places and unsympathetic groups. There is no greater study of boredom than Madame Bovary - which is nevertheless never boring, but always both terrifying and simultaneously gleeful over its own accuracy. Madame Bovary is also at the centre of any discussion of literary descriptions of adultery. Denis de Rougemont, in his book, Love in the Western World, observed that 'to judge by literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most remarkable occupations in both Europe and America'. He discussed the great lovers of mediaeval Romance - Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Iseult - and pointed out that the difficulty and unlawfulness of their love is part of the essence of their passion. Marriage is so to speak the social and normal framework of the human story - adultery is the great act of individual self-assertion and longing. In terms of mediaeval Romance which takes place in a world of dynastic marriages and chivalric devotion, such transgressions are doomed and glorious. In terms of bourgeois monogamous society they are different. Engels believed that 'individual sex love' is a recent concern in human societies, and in our modern capitalist monogamous world is more difficult for women than for men - for men are not condemned and ostracised for promiscuity as women are. Anna Karenina and the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton suffer for their desires; their souls are battlefields between good and evil, their fates are tragic. The outward events of Emma Bovary's life are a petit bourgeois version of the doom of Anna Karenina - with important differences. Both heroines have sexually unappealing husbands, and lives that leave them dissatisfied. Both take lovers and both, in their ways, are betrayed or let down by their lovers. Both are sensual and vulnerable and both commit suicide. It might even be said that both are physically attractive to the men who invented and trapped them in their stories, and that both are punished by their authors, as well as by society. Anna Karenina is tragic almost despite Tolstoy. But if Emma Bovary - who is small-minded and confused and selfish - is tragic, it is not in a romantic way, and not because her readers share her feelings or sympathise with her. Our sympathy for her is like our sympathy for a bird the cat has brought in and maimed. It flutters, and it will die. When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary - the fairy tale happy ending - she becomes the third Madame Bovary in the book, after her living mother-in-law and Charles Bovary's dead first wife, whose decaying wedding bouquet she finds in her drawer. Her name, and the title of the novel, define her as a person who is expected to behave in certain ways, fitting her station and function. She loses what individual identity she had. She herself has had vague conventional expectations of marriage, and Flaubert wonderfully describes her sexual disappointment, her reluctance to let go of the idea that she is experiencing post-wedding bliss. He also describes her fairytale, women's magazine attempts to make her house and clothes conform to an idea she has of decorum and elegance. What makes it impossible for her to inhabit her house or her marriage is her romantic sense that there is something more, some more intense experience, some wider horizon if she could only find it. Her desires are formed by her reading and her education. In the convent where she was educated her dreamy spiritual ecstasies are succeeded by dreamy visions of happiness derived from novels, good and bad. She is like that other archetypal reading hero, Don Quixote, in that her reading habits corrupt her vision of the world and her conduct of her life. They are both Romantics. Don Quixote desires to make provincial La Mancha into a battlefield of giants, demons and ladies in distress. Emma Bovary desires to be happy in lovely clothes in swift carriages, dancing at balls, being admired. The psychoanalyst, Ignès Sodré, wrote an illuminating paper on Madame Bovary, entitled 'Death by Daydreaming' in which she used Freud's essay on 'Creative Writers and Daydreaming' to discuss the particular daydreams of Emma Bovary. According to Freud, daydreams are related to children's play, in which the toys and objects they arrange are, like 'castles in the air', symbols of what they desire in their lives. Freud's interest in this essay is not, he explicitly says, in the great authors of epics and tragedies whose material springs from the myths and history of their world. He is interested precisely in the writers of consoling fantasy tales, minor fictions in which the reader can bathe in narcissistic fantasies of being perfectly brave and beautiful, beloved and successful. Folk tales, Freud says, are the daydreams of a culture. In 1856 George Eliot wrote one of the funniest critical essays of her time on 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'. In her mock accounts of the heroines of what she calls the 'mind-and-millinery' novel she describes its heroine as surrounded by men who 'play a very subordinate part by her side.
 * [|AS Byatt]
 * [|The Guardian], Friday 26 July 2002

' 'Ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany the heroine on her 'starring' expedition through life. They see her at a ball and are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding-excursion and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at church and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanour. She is the ideal woman in feelings faculties and flounces.'

Emma's daydreams derive from this pattern. In fact her lovers tire of her and desert her, and it is she who is subordinate.

Freud also makes the point that the hero or heroine of the daydream is in a narcissistic solitary world. Emma Bovary's romantic desires are little scenes in which she plays the heroine. She prefers to dream about her first lover, Léon, rather than to see him. Her moment of ecstasy after she has been seduced by Rodolphe is when she is able to tell herself in a mirror, 'J'ai un amant. J'ai un amant.' When she decides to set out on the fatal riding expedition with him, it is not desire, let alone love, which propels her - it is Charles Bovary's promise of a riding habit, an 'amazone'. 'L'amazone la décida.' She is, as other writers have pointed out, not only a romantic reader, but a bad reader. Flaubert is very precise about the lethal vagueness of her fantasies, as they sap the reality from her world, and simultaneously lay her open to the financial depredations of Lheureux, who sells her the concrete toys - the riding whip and cigar-case - to act out her daydreams. And to destroy the lives of her husband and child. It is not a nice story. So why is it one of the greatest novels of all time? To answer that, it is necessary to look at the history of its writing, and Flaubert's ideas about what he was trying to achieve. Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, where his father was the chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. His father hoped that Gustave would also be a doctor but the son seems always to have known that he wanted to write. He lived most of his life in Normandy, though he travelled often to Paris and in 1851 travelled with his friend Maxime du Camp in Egypt, the Near East and the Mediterranean. He contracted syphilis on this journey, and was also subject to severe epileptic fits. He never married, and lived close to his mother. He had a long, unsatisfactory affair with Louise Colet, eleven years older than he was, and also a writer, who saved his splendid letters. He had himself a Romantic interest in the distant and strange, both in space and in time. In 1849 Flaubert finished writing La Tentation de Saint Antoine, inspired by a painting by Brueghel he had seen in Genoa in 1845, which depicted the ascetic saint in the desert beset by demons and fleshly temptations. He did a great deal of research on fourth century beliefs, pagan, Christian and heretical, and staged his tale as an exotic drama of ideas. In 1849, just before setting out for Egypt with Du Camp, he spent - according to Du Camp - thirty-two hours reading the text aloud to him and his other great friend Louis Bouilhet. Also according to Du Camp, Bouilhet, when Flaubert finally demanded his opinion of the work, said 'I think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again.' Flaubert was understandably distressed by this response. In 1851 he abandoned various other romantic and exotic projects - Une Nuit de Don Juan, Anubis - and embarked on his novel of provincial life. The immediate inspiration for the plot was the death of a local doctor in Normandy, Eugène Delamare, whose second wife, Delphine, had caused scandal by taking lovers and running up huge debts. But already at the age of sixteen Flaubert had written a tale based on a news story in the Rouen newspapers. He called it Passion et Vertu. Its central character is a woman who poisons her husband and children in order to join her lover in America, and commits suicide when the lover rejects her. Flaubert gave his murderess and suicide romantic tastes as motivation, whereas the original woman seems to have been driven more by money and a desire to evade trial and execution. Flaubert's published letters - especially those to Louise Colet about the writing of Madame Bovary - are some of the most fascinating accounts of the writing process that exist. He tells her he is 'two distinct persons: one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase and lofty ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces.' And early in the writing of the novel he says 'The entire value of my book, if it has any, will consist of my having known how to walk straight ahead on a hair, balanced above the two abysses of lyricism and vulgarity (which I want to fuse in a narrative analysis.) When I think of what it can be, I am dazzled.' He wrote also that his new novel would be 'a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the external strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.' He was both excited and exhausted by the difficulty of the enterprise - Bovary, he told Louise in July 1852, 'will have been an unprecedented tour de force (a fact of which I alone shall ever be aware): its subject, characters, effects etc. - are all alien to me. Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.' The supreme importance of style is something to which he returns again and again. He believed he lived in a time when it was not possible to create great types, like Don Quixote or the characters of Shakespeare who 'was not a man, he was a continent; he contained whole crowds of men, entire landscapes. Writers like him do not worry about style: they are powerful in spite of all their faults and because of them. When it comes to us, the little men, our value depends on finished execution.' Flaubert himself is famous for the struggle with every sentence, for the length of time it took him to orchestrate and finish a scene. His style, he wrote, should be 'lisse comme un marbre et furieux comme un tigre' 'chaud en dessous et splendide à la surface.' Prose, he said, should be stuffed with things 'et sans qu'on les aperçoive.' The prose of Madame Bovary depends for many of its most startling effects on its accurate rendering of things. Flaubert told Louise that he wanted to make his reader feel his world 'almost physically' and the emotion and feeling of the novel are embedded in things, from Charles's uncouth cap in the first chapter, to Emma's delicate presentation of her meals, to her presents to Rodolphe. 'elle trouvait moyen d'offrir un plat coquet, s'entendait a poser sur des feuilles de vigne les pyramides de reines-claudes, servait renversés les pots de confiture dans une assiette, et même elle parlait d'acheter des rince-bouche pour le dessert.' This is an image of Emma making herself an image of domestic finesse and elegance, slightly absurdly beyond the limitations of her, and Charles's social situation. Her whole world is imbued with her sensations - we experience her most intensely through them, because she does not think clearly or well in abstract language, but only with images. Occasionally Flaubert's choice of comparison carries with it a lyric charge. Here is his description of Emma's vision of her garden in winter, when she has become bored and disillusioned. She is seeing a winter world through windows heavily frosted, whose whitish light remained unvaried throughout the day. She goes into the garden 'La rosée avait laissé sur les choux des guipures d'argent avec des longs fils clairs qui s'étendaient de l'un à l'autre. On n'entendait pas d'oiseaux, tout semblait dormir, l'espalier couvert de paille et la vigne comme un grand serpent malade sous le chaperon du mur, où l'on voyait, en s'approchant, se trainer des cloportes a pattes nombreuses.' This is a clear visual picture of a place but it is loaded with Madame Bovary's ennui and her way of seeing. The cabbages have taken on silver lace trimmings from romance. The idea of paradise is excluded from this real place. The vine is just a vine, not the True Vine, and is indifferently identified with the serpent, who is sick. 'Cloportes' which drag themselves along are not angels to close the gates but woodlice. The verbs are in the indefinite past - 'seemed to sleep' and 'saw... dragging themselves along.' Flaubert wrote that he liked 'clear sharp sentences... which must be clear as Voltaire, as abrim with substance as Montaigne, as vigorous as La Bruyère, and always streaming with colour.' He orchestrates the colours of the book as he orchestrates Emma's and the reader's sensations - in the passage I have just quoted silver and white, elsewhere, notably in the seduction in the forest, the blue of romantic distances, which is transmuted into the blue of the bottle of arsenic powder Emma steals from Monsieur Homais. He planned and discarded a scene where Emma was observing the landscape through coloured glass. The effect of his spreading of the feeling of the characters, and the novels, into the physical world, varies with the distance from which the narrator watches the things. It is not clear, when Flaubert describes Charles Bovary's first vision of Emma's flesh, exactly where Charles's thoughts end and authorial commentary begins. 'Tout en cousant, elle se piquait les doigts, qu'elle portait ensuite a sa bouche pour les sucer.' This is an erotic simple sentence, and it presents the young woman as unselfconscious and awkward with household tasks. It is followed by a long analysis - from very close - of her finger-nails, ostensibly from Charles's point of view, though in fact there are several elements of the description which read oddly if the reader looks, so to speak, out of Charles's head. 'Charles fut surpris de la blancheur de ses ongles. Ils étaient brilliants, fins du bout, plus nettoyés que les ivoires de Dieppe, et taillés en amande. Sa main pourtant n'était pas belle, point assez pâle peut-être, et un peu sèche aux phalanges; elle était trop longue aussi et sans molles inflexions de lignes sur les contours. Ce qu'elle avait du beau, c'étaient les yeux; quoiqu'ils furent bruns, ils semblaient noirs à cause des cils, et son regard arrivait franchement à vous avec une hardiesse candide.'

This is not exactly Charles's thought - or sensation - process. It appears to be, and some critics have seen in the ostensible use of the technical 'phalanges' and the possibly diagnostic note of the absence of 'molles inflexions' Charles's 'medical' eye. But the Charles whose life we have so far followed is not in the habit of making such precise discriminations about what is and is not beautiful. And the romantic comparison with the ivories of Dieppe is not Charles Bovary's, nor is the tone of voice describing the effect of Emma Rouault's 'regard' on an abstract 'you' which includes both the narrator and the reader? It is Flaubert mingling, but not fusing, his characters' relations to the physical world with his own. Something similar happens when he tries very directly to involve us in a physical analogy which he ascribes directly to Madame Bovary herself. In this case she is thinking in a conventional way about why she wanted a son not a daughter.

'Un homme au moins est libre; il peut parcourir les passions et les pays.' 'Mais une femme est empêchée continuellement. Inerte et flexible a la fois, elle a contre elle les mollesses de la chair avec les dépendances de la loi. Sa volonté, comme le voile de son chapeau retenue par un cordon, palpite a tous les vents; il y a toujours quelque désir qui entraine, quelque convenance qui retient.'

Here again, although the comparison between the veil and the female consciousness inside it is a beautiful physical image of the constraints of a woman's view of the world and of her volatile will on its string or cord, I do not quite believe the comparison is one Madame Bovary generated or thought out. It is beautifully articulated and precise, and is part of Flaubert's vision of his creation, not of her vision of her world. It is almost a complex metaphor - and complex metaphors, as we shall see, are not the way in which Madame Bovary proceeds. Somebody tries to think with the analogy between a woman's veil and a woman's will. Whereas the most moving passages are flatter and more absolute. Consider Madame Bovary sitting in her inappropriate boudoir.

'Elle portait une robe de chamber toute ouverte, qui laissait voir, entre les revers à châle du corsage, une chemisette plissée avec trois boutons d'or. Sa ceinture était une cordelière à gros glands, et ses petits pantoufles de couleur grenat avaient une touffe de rubans larges, qui s'étalait sur le cou-du-pied. Elle s'était acheté un buvard, une papeterie, un porte-plume et des envelopes, quoiqu'elle n'eut personne à qui écrire; elle époussetait son étagère, se regardait dans la glace, prenait un livre, puis, rêvant entre les lignes, le laissait tomber sur les genoux. Elle avait envie de faire des voyages ou de retourner vivre a son couvent. Elle souhaitait a la fois mourir et habiter Paris.'

This is simultaneously beautiful, funny in its bathos and terrible in its implacable vision. Something similar happens in the pathetic description of her chatter to Charles early in her marriage - she tells him things she has found in novels 'car, enfin, Charles était quelqu'un, une oreille toujours ouverte. Elle faisait bien des confidences à sa levrette. Elle en eut fait aux buches de la cheminée et au balancier de la pendule.' This passage describes Emma's world, and moves from the novels she reads to her uncomprehending but admiring husband and out, by way of the dumb animal to the world of inanimate objects. But those objects have a buried metaphorical meaning, in that - still described in the indefinite past tense of prolonged states of being - the burning logs in the hearth and the pendulum of the clock do represent the passing of time through the stasis of boredom. The logs and the clock are in a way Flaubert's metaphor for the movement of Emma Bovary's life, all the more effective for not being presented as metaphor, but simply as real objects. This precision and simplicity has the effect of making the whole book into one worked image, memorable for a reader simultaneously as a direct physical experience and as a whole as an articulated image for a certain state of things, the world of ennui, romantic longing, and physical restriction. Flaubert admired his heroic artists - Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes - for their power to create simple, absolute types and scenes. He says somewhere that great art can appear almost silly, stupid, in its self-sufficiency. His descriptions have exactly that self-sufficiency, a simplicity of presence which is meaning. He knew very well what he was doing. He curbed his naturally flamboyant style. He wrote to Louise Colet 'I think that Bovary will move along, but I am bothered by my tendency to metaphor, decidedly excessive. I am devoured by comparisons as one is by lice, and I spend my time doing nothing but squashing them: my sentences swarm with them.' Some of the wisest comments on his style and its working are those by Marcel Proust. Proust wrote to defend Flaubert against hostile criticism in 1919. He said that he himself believed that 'la métaphore seule peut donner une sorte d'éternité au style, et il n'y a peut-être pas dans tout Flaubert une seule belle métaphore.' But he goes on to say that Flaubert has changed French prose by changing the possibilities of French grammar - including his use of the imperfect tense, the tense of states of affairs and states of mind. By the time of L'Education Sentimentale, Proust said, things which before Flaubert had been action, had become impressions. Things had as much life as men. Working with the life of things in Flaubert's style and story is another great interest - idées reçues or clichés. One of Flaubert's projects over many years was the compilation of a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas - a collection of platitudes which would be 'the historical glorification of everything generally approved.' It would he said, for instance, show that 'in literature, mediocrity, being within the reach of everyone, is alone legitimate and that consequently every kind of originality must be denounced as dangerous, ridiculous etc.' The work would, he said, be 'raucous and ironic' and would lead to the great modern idea of equality, demonstrating 'everything one should say if one is to be considered a decent and likeable member of society.' His collection is usually appended to his last unfinished comic novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, the tale of two pedantic copy-clerks. He was fascinated by what could be learned about human nature by observing the automatic train of thoughts and words of conventional people in repetitive ordinary situations. Much of both the comedy and tragedy of Emma Bovary's two love affairs arises from Flaubert's merciless observation of the clichés in which the lovemaking is carried on. Here is his description of the writing of the first rapprochement of the young clerk Léon and madame Bovary, 'Things have been going well for two or three days. I am doing a conversation between a young man and a young woman about literature, the sea, mountains, music - all the poetical subjects. It is something that could be taken seriously and yet I fully intend it as grotesque. This will be the first time, I think, that a book makes fun of its leading lady and its leading man.' The same kind of shocking rapprochement between the sentimental and the banal occurs on a grander scale - and much more brutally and cynically - in the grand scene of the agricultural show, where the public platitudes of French civic oratory (and M. Homais's republican and scientific idées reçues) mingle with the practised seduction technique of Rodolphe, with his claims of ennui and sadness, his automatic flattery of Madame Bovary. Flaubert spent from July to the end of November in 1853 working on this one scene, and wrote of it in terms of orchestration. 'If the effects of a symphony have ever been conveyed in a book it will be in these pages. I want the reader to hear everything together in one great roar - the bellowing of bulls, the sighing of lovers, the bombast of official oratory. The sun shines down on it all, and there are gusts of wind that threaten to blow off the women's big bonnets. I achieve dramatic effect simply by the interweaving of dialogue and by contrasts of character.' There is a sense in which the very flatness of the reported clichés of rhetoric and feeling has the same effect as the direct descriptions of things which are their own meaning. It is the kind of quality that Flaubert admires in Homer, Rabelais, Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Goethe as 'pitiless.' It appears in the profound irony of the juxtapositions in sentences like 'Il admirait l'exaltation de son âme et les dentelles de sa jupe.' Or 'Elle souhaitait a la fois mourir et habiter Paris.' And Flaubert himself felt that his irony was also moving. After the observation about his book making fun of its leading lady and its leading man, he added 'The irony does not detract from the pathetic aspect, but rather intensifies it. In my third part, which will be full of farcical things, I want my readers to weep.' Flaubert may appear to keep a controlled and glacial distance from his fictional world. In fact his attitude to it was double. He told Louise Colet 'Rien dans ce livre n'est tiré de moi. . . Tout est de tête', but he also told Amélie Bosquet, famously, 'Madame Bovary c'est moi! - d'après moi.' His mother told him 'Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart'. But he lived the moments he was writing intensely - 'for better or worse it is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.' And when he came to kill Madame Bovary he imagined her agony so intensely that he tasted the bitterness of the arsenic in his own mouth, to the point of vomiting. When the novel was finished, Flaubert sent it to Bouilhet to be published in six bi-monthly parts in the Revue de Paris. Bouilhet sent him a letter which is a warning to all editors tempted to respond to complex manuscripts with confident proposals for improvement.

'Let us take full charge of the publication of your novel in the Revue; we will make the cuts we think indispensable. My personal opinion is that if you do not do this, you will be gravely compromising yourself, making your first appearance with a muddled work to which the style alone does not give sufficient interest. Be brave, close your eyes during the operation, and have confidence - if not in our talent, at least in the experience we have acquired in such matters and also in our affection for you. You have buried your novel under a heap of details which are well done but superfluous: it is not seen clearly enough, and must be disencumbered - an easy task. We shall have it done under our supervision by someone who is experienced and clever; not a word will be added to your manuscript, it will merely be pruned; the job will cost you about 100 francs which will be deducted from your payment, and you will have published something really good instead of something imperfect and padded. . .'

Flaubert, understandably, objected furiously. The novel was finally published in the review with only one cut - perhaps the most famous scene - the wild journey of the cab through the streets of Rouen, the box inside which Emma consummates her affair with Léon. Madame Bovary was nevertheless prosecuted by the police for obscenity in January 1857. Flaubert and his publishers were acquitted on February 7th; Flaubert was afraid the Ministry of Justice would appeal but it did not, and the notoriety added to the book's success, not entirely to Flaubert's pleasure - he said he disliked Art to be associated with things alien to it. In later years, after the publication of Salammbô, (1862), a novel about a Carthaginian princess, L'Education Sentimentale in 1869, and his Trois Contes in 1877, he complained about the excessive notoriety of Madame Bovary, as authors do when they feel one of their books is being singled out at the expense of others. All novels create characters and worlds which are both particular and typical. The nineteenth-century realist novel is at the crossroads between two kinds of 'type' - the Christian typological figure, whose story is related to the biblical stories, to the struggle of virtue and vice, and the statistical type, the sociological example of phenomena in a state, a group, a section of society. The novels of Balzac and Dostoevsky present us with a phantasmagoric world, in which spiritual shapes and forces are felt to be struggling invisibly - or half-visibly - behind a membrane of observed life. Balzac's ambitious plan is a taxonomy of French society and history. But it is also, as La Comédie Humaine, a direct descendant of Dante's Divine Comedy, and the circles of Hell and Paradise map his frenetic contemporary Parisian struggle. He was Swedenborgian visionary as well as social analyst. Dostoevsky sets his spiritual vision of the necessity of the belief in Christ and immortality, with its narrative forms of folk-tales and monastic histories, against his detailed knowledge of the behaviour of poor clerks, revolutionary anarchists, and provincial vanities. Lionel Trilling, writing about Buvard et Pécuchet, makes the interesting point that French realism has a project which is based on French social science, and reveals different things about the sources of energy in a society from what is revealed by the great American novels of the nineteenth century - which do in fact all have a visionary quality, a religious and allegorical aspect, from Moby Dick to The Golden Bowl. Flaubert excludes this dimension rigorously from Madame Bovary. An exemplary scene is the one in which Madame Bovary meets the local priest in the church. She wishes to tell him that she suffers. He chats to her amiably and fussily about the misdemeanours of children and the bloating sickness of cows. It is a scene in a church completely devoid of any spiritual or religious feeling. When we read Flaubert's account of his construction of this scene, we can see how carefully he achieved this effect.

'...my little lady, in an access of religiosity goes to church; at the door she finds the curé, who, in a dialogue (on no definite subject) shows himself to be so stupid, trivial inept, sordid, that she goes away disgusted and undevout. And my curé is a very good man, indeed an excellent fellow, but he thinks only of the physical side (the sufferings of the poor, no bread, no firewood) and has no inkling of my lady's moral lapses or her vague mystical aspirations.' Flaubert's priest, like his novel, concentrates on the 'physical side.' And Flaubert comments, 'frankly there are moments when I almost feel like vomiting physically, the whole thing is so low.'

Is Flaubert's deliberate self-limitation to the physical an aspect of an attempt to be 'scientific'? Dostoevsky, who like Flaubert took his subject-matter from the faits divers of newspapers, almost anonymous tales of comedy and disaster, typical tales, was aware of the glittering fascination of the new discoveries of statistics - on suicide for instance. Durkheim's theory of anomie derived from the scientific study of the curious regularity of the number of suicides in Paris, irrespective of the individual despairs that led to them. Dostoevsky believed that without God, in a universe that analysed bodies scientifically - since bodies were all that humans were, in the eyes of science - people would commit suicide because it was a matter of indifference to them whether they lived or died. Emma Bovary's suicide certainly takes place in a meaningless world, and her emotions are not so much tragic as automatic and confused. Her corpse is watched over by a pharmacist who thinks in scientific clichés, and a clergyman whose anointing of her body is told in terms of the sins that body has committed - 'les yeux, qui avait tant convoité toutes les sumptuosités terrestres... puis sur la bouche qui s'était ouvert pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil et crié dans la luxure. . .' Emma dies and becomes pure body, but her death is not a scientific event. It is delicately absurd, and terrible in its meaninglessness. Contemporary writers were made uneasy by Flaubert. Henry James expressed a recurrent unease which he said was experienced by the 'alien reader' and persisted. 'Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair.' DH Lawrence, a naturally visionary and prophetic realist himself, was more vehement. Flaubert, he said, 'stood away from life as from a leprosy.' Even Proust, writing his precise and elegant defence of Flaubert, begins with a caveat. 'Ce n'est pas que j'aime entre tous les livres de Flaubert, ni même le style de Flaubert.' All these express an unease which persists in readers faced with this very great novel. But between seeing Emma Bovary as 'really too small an affair', and Flaubert's vision of life as a leprosy, and understanding that Madame Bovary, with all its realistic nineteenth-century apparatus, is the beginning of a new vision, a modern vision, is only a step. The resolution with which Flaubert polished his perfect surface, and kept it almost purely surface, not transparent, not revealing any deeper meaning than its existence, is behind the nausea of Sartre's Roquentin, and the reduced worlds of Beckett's bare survivors. Its beauty is enchanting and terrible. It shows us implacably the limitations of our habitation in our bodies, in space and time. Emma Bovary is indeed 'really too small' but there is a sense in which she is a type of everywoman. Flaubert's relentless and fastidious observation and creation of his small world is itself a form of contemplation. He shows us laughter, irony and fear. And in the end gentleness, for sad, stupid, honest Charles, and silly, greedy, unsatisfied Emma. And grief for an unconsidered accidental daughter, who comes to a sad - and probable - end.


 * · ** (c) AS Byatt. This is the introduction to a Norwegian edition of Madame Bovary. AS Byatt's next novel, The Whistling Woman, will be published in September by Chatto at £16.99
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