Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Notes On:

INTRO BY LEO BERSANI

I. Background

In 19th century novelistic convention, the protagonist is:

• a “perceptive vessel of experience”;
• distinctively superior – intellectually, or morally, or;
• a “hero of fiction” with extraordinary sensitivity to articulate the human experience – in other words, wiser than the rest.
• Flaubert’s contemporaries included Austen, Stendal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky
• In literary history, MB was the 1st novel to defy this literary convention: his protagonist is not a hero we can champion.

II. On Theme

• This is a novel about the literary imagination;
• Flaubert is exploring:


• the link between art and reality, asking: “Can literature “represent” life?”
  Quality of Art compared to Quality of Life
• “…the distance between words and things” (pg. xviii)
• “the murder of meaning in language” (pg. xix)
• Not a mere morality story, not intended to raise social consciousness;
• Not criticizing Emma’s “cheap fantasies,” because “more interesting fantasies would not necessarily be more accurate representations of reality” (pg xvii)

III. On Style

• vision binoculaire – observe opposite poles of a subject
  Flaubert accomplishes this by juxtaposing different “worlds,” but he establishes no definitive “reality” (since both are real to its respective participants)

IV. On the Characters

• Emma is sensual, has a physical presence, a hunger for sensation. Her imagination is extravagant. She seeks to define, in real life, what her novels call “bliss” and “passion.” She comes to believe that “bliss” is immediate sensual gratification; her obsession is with consumption. Her plight is to “equate reality with art,” and her tragedy is that she “can’t connect…literary fantasies with her own experience.” (pg xiv)
  
  • “…she never finds her language in the world” (pg xxi)
  • Emma is also selfishly indifferent, and has no empathy for anyone else.
• Rodolphe displays Flaubert’s own mistrust of words. He hears words of passion from every mistress, therefore, Emma’s words are hollow, devoid of any meaning to him. (Flaubert’s philosophy is that writing breeds inspiration, leading to excess of imagination and betrayal of reality.)
• Homais. Flaubert identifies with him because what makes himself so different from “that detestable lover of clichés”?
  Simultaneously, though, Flaubert is critical of clichés because they pretend to “offer the possibility of enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas” (pg xviii)