In brief
Emma Rouault, a farmer’s daughter educated in a convent, marries Charles Bovary, a slow, kind country health officer. She finds marriage nothing like the books, takes two lovers, buys things she cannot afford from a draper who is glad to wait for his money, and swallows arsenic when the bailiffs arrive. The plot would fit on a postcard, which was the point of choosing it.
What makes the book matter is the way it is written. Flaubert spent about five years making sentences in which nothing is explained and nothing is wasted, and in which a provincial adultery is treated with the attention other novelists gave to empires. Whether the result is cruel has never been settled. I think that is the wrong argument, because the coldness is what lets the pity through.
The argument
The usual summary is that Emma was spoiled by romantic novels. That is true, and it is the smaller half. At the convent she reads Paul and Virginia and Walter Scott and comes away with a vocabulary (I.6). The end of the chapter before gives the trouble exactly: Emma “tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books” (I.5). Her desire is real. Everything she has to desire with is secondhand.
The twist is that nobody else has better equipment. Homais talks in newspaper progress, Bournisien in the catechism, the councillor in official uplift, Rodolphe in the phrases that have worked before. Emma is mocked for her clichés by a book in which everyone lives inside clichés and only she suffers from it. In the great sentence at the centre of the novel, Rodolphe has stopped listening to her because he has heard such words from other women, and the narrator suddenly steps past him: “human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars” (II.12). That “we” includes the author. Flaubert, who wrote the sentence after years of agony over sentences, is saying that the foolish woman and the great stylist have the same problem.
So the novel is no warning against reading. It shows how a person with strong feelings and no means of knowing them gets used by those with something to sell, whether seduction, ribbons or the future of science.
The shape of the book
There are three parts, each with its own town and each larger in appetite than the last. Part I (Tostes) begins without Emma, in a schoolroom with Charles as the new boy, and it reaches its peak in one night at the Marquis’s ball at Vaubyessard (I.8), which she spends the rest of the book trying to get back to. A dropped cigar case on the road home (I.8) becomes her relic. Part II (Yonville) gives her the two men, the failed cure of Hippolyte’s club-foot, and the collapse after Rodolphe’s letter. Part III (Rouen) repeats the affair with Léon at higher speed and lower quality until the money runs out.
Almost everything happens twice, and the second time is worse. Two lovers, two collapses, two turns to religion, a first Madame Bovary who dies and a second who does. Rodolphe’s letter arrives at the bottom of a basket of apricots (II.13), and when Emma has recovered the book takes her to the opera to watch Lucia (II.15), where Léon is waiting in the stalls. The form is a judgement: this is what it is like to learn nothing.
The frame matters too. The novel starts before Emma is on the scene and goes on after she is dead. Charles dies on the seat in the arbour, Berthe is sent to work in a cotton-factory, and the last chapter closes on the chemist. “He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour” (III.11). The tense is the sting: everybody else’s story is over, and Homais’s is still in the present.
The voice
The first word in the book is “We”. “We were in class when the head-master came in”, and for some pages a schoolboy narrator watches Charles and his appalling cap, “one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile’s face” (I.1). A little later the group dissolves: “It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him.” The narrator never says “we” in that way again. A witness has been removed, and we are left with no one to ask.
Flaubert then writes in free indirect style, sliding into Emma’s idiom without quotation marks, so that “How far all of this! How far away!” (I.7) is both her cry and the narrator’s exhibit. He wanted the author to be, as he said in his letters, present everywhere and visible nowhere, and for a good while the reader cannot tell whether a sentence is sympathising or sneering. That uncertainty is the experience of the book.
The showpiece is the agricultural show (II.8). On the platform below, an official awards prizes for livestock; at a window above, Rodolphe makes love to Emma; and Flaubert cuts between them until they run together. “Manures!” shouts the president, and Rodolphe answers, “And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!” It is a very funny joke and a demonstration: two public languages, both rotten, and a woman listening to one of them with her whole heart.
Then there is the prose’s refusal to look away. The boredom at Tostes is built from things, the smoking stove, the sweating walls, until “all the bitterness in life seemed served up on her plate” (I.9). Her death (III.8) is reported like a case history, by a surgeon’s son who knew what such a case looks like. The priest anoints her senses in turn, “First upon the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly pomp”, and a blind beggar’s bawdy song comes in through the window as she dies.
Credit
Read as a thriller, this is a novel about debt, and the villain is Lheureux, whose name means the happy man. He arrives with a pack of Algerian scarves (II.5), asks for nothing, and lets the account grow. When Charles’s father dies she takes her lesson from him and persuades her husband to sign a power of attorney (III.2), which gives her the means to sell up the family. By the time the writ comes (III.6) the romance has died of its own accord: “Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.”
What finishes her is not guilt or love. She goes round asking for money (III.7): the notary, who offers it for a price; Binet at his lathe, who backs away; and finally Rodolphe, who has none to spare and is surrounded by nice things (III.8). She is destroyed by a commercial process, step by step, with the paperwork in order. The new shops offered a farmer’s daughter the look of a duchess on easy terms, and Flaubert is exact about the terms.
The people
Emma
Vain, greedy, a careless mother who pushes Berthe away so that the child cuts her cheek (II.6), and much the most alive person in the book. She is not intelligent, and Flaubert will not pretend she is. But she alone in Yonville thinks life ought to be more than this, and the novel never entirely takes that away from her.
Charles
Dull, faithful, a poor doctor who is talked into operating on a stable-boy’s foot and ends by having the leg cut off (II.11). He notices nothing for years and, when he finds the letters, forgives everyone. Meeting Rodolphe at the end, he makes “a fine phrase, the only one he ever made”: “It is the fault of fatality!” The narrator’s comment is one of the nastiest in fiction: “Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean” (III.11). Charles is also, in his grief, the one character whose love is not an imitation of something.
Homais
The chemist, free-thinker and local correspondent, with a phrase for everything and a passion for being seen to be modern. He practises medicine without a licence, promotes the disastrous operation, poisons the blind beggar’s reputation in print, and wins. He is the first great portrait of the man who has never had a doubt because he has never had an original thought.
Rodolphe and Léon
Rodolphe is the experienced seducer, who drops water on his farewell letter to pass for a tear, and tells her in it: “Is it my fault? O my God! No, no! Accuse only fate” (II.13). Léon is the shy young clerk who shares her taste in poetry and is frightened of her by the end. Once he is “soon to be head clerk” (III.6) he gives her up. Neither has much inner life, which is the joke of her loving them.
Bournisien and Justin
Abbé Bournisien, when she goes to him in real distress, thinks she has a stomach complaint (II.6). Justin, the chemist’s boy, loves her silently and lets her into the room with the arsenic (III.8); on the night of the funeral he is the one sobbing at her grave (III.10).
The trial
The novel ran in the Revue de Paris from October to December 1856. The editors, nervous, cut passages against Flaubert’s wishes, including the scene in which Emma and Léon are driven round Rouen for hours in a closed cab with the blinds down (III.1), a passage that shows nothing at all. In January 1857 the imperial prosecutor Ernest Pinard charged Flaubert, the editor and the printer with offending public and religious morals. He argued, in effect, that the sin was the book’s failure to condemn her.
Flaubert’s lawyer, Jules Senard, won an acquittal on 7 February, with a reprimand attached to the judgment. The book came out in two volumes in April and sold very well indeed. The dedication in this text thanks Senard for his “magnificent defence”. The same prosecutor went after Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal that summer and won.
How it was made
In 1849 Flaubert read The Temptation of Saint Anthony aloud to his friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp, and they told him to burn it and write about ordinary life. After his journey to Egypt he took up, at Bouilhet’s suggestion, a local story. The usual source given is Delphine Delamare, a doctor’s wife in the village of Ry near Rouen, who died in 1848 after a run of lovers; how close the likeness is remains disputed. He wrote at Croisset, roughly from 1851 to 1856, sometimes producing only a few sentences in a week and testing them by shouting them aloud. In one of the letters to Louise Colet that record the work he dreams of “a book about nothing” held together by style alone.
The most famous remark attached to him, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, is not found in his letters and reaches us at second hand. His letters also say the opposite: that he put nothing of his feelings or life into the book.
Readers and critics
Baudelaire defended the book in 1857 on the grounds of its art. Henry James returned to Flaubert for decades, admired its perfection almost grudgingly, and complained that Emma was too limited a mind to carry such a weight of art. That objection deserves respect, though it seems to me to mistake what the book is doing: the smallness is the subject. Nabokov, teaching it at Cornell, called it “prose doing what poetry is supposed to do”.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy (1975) is the great confession of love for the book, and reads Emma as an early case of the alienation of modern consumers. Jules de Gaultier took a word from her, bovarysme, for the human habit of conceiving oneself as other than one is. Feminist readers have asked what else an energetic woman could have done in Yonville, and the novel offers her nothing, which is part of its case.
This translation
Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, published her translation in London in 1886. It was not the first complete English version; Mary Neal Sherwood’s appeared under a pseudonym in 1881, and Juliet Herbert had started one with Flaubert’s help that came to nothing. It is complete: all 35 chapters are here, each within a few per cent of the French by word count. It has life in it and also clumsy passages and slips of sense, which is why critics split over it and why Nabokov was severe.
It also has a shadow. In March 1898, after finding that Edward Aveling had secretly married, she took prussic acid. Readers have found that hard to leave out of the arsenic chapter, but she should be remembered for much more than her end: she was a socialist organiser and the translator of Ibsen as well.
Afterlives
Film has kept trying and rarely managed: Jean Renoir (1934), Vincente Minnelli (1949), Claude Chabrol with Isabelle Huppert (1991), Sophie Barthes with Mia Wasikowska (2014). The loose versions are often sharper. Ketan Mehta’s Maya Memsaab (1993) moved it to India, Manoel de Oliveira’s Abraham’s Valley (1993) to Portugal, Alexander Sokurov’s Save and Protect (1989) into Russian, and David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970) to Ireland. Posy Simmonds’s Gemma Bovery (1999) turns it into a satire on English expatriates in France.
How to read it
- Read II.8 slowly, then aloud. Take the two voices as a duet and you will hear what he was testing his sentences for.
- Follow the bills. Keep a rough note of what Emma owes and to whom from II.5 onward. The plot tightens like a contract.
- Do not decide about Emma too early. Note when you despise her and when you stop; the book is built to move you back and forth.
- Try a modern translation as well. Marx-Aveling is free and complete. Lydia Davis (2010) is the closest to Flaubert’s syntax and tenses, and sometimes awkward as a result; Geoffrey Wall (1992) and Margaret Mauldon (2004) read more easily.
Read next
- Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869). The same disillusion on a larger scale, with the 1848 revolution passing outside the window.
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878). The other great adultery novel, and a direct contrast in how much the author lets himself love the woman.
- James Joyce, Dubliners (1914). The method transferred to Dublin: scrupulous meanness, and clichés quoted without comment.
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). Fiction as footnote, and the most entertaining route back to Flaubert.