An analysis of Flaubert’s use of
theme and detail in Madame Bovary
…first on the eyes, which had been so
covetous of earthly splendours; then on the nostrils, avid for warm breezes and
scents of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to emit lies, had groaned
with pride, and had cried out in lust; then over the hands, which had revelled
in sensual contacts; and finally on the soles of the feet, which had once moved
so rapidly when she was hurrying to quench her desires. (Madame Bovary, III,8).
This description of Abbé Bournisien administering
extreme unction to Emma Bovary, critically punctuated by authorial commentary,
serves as a climactic summary of Flaubert’s use of detail to interrelate the
themes and motifs of Madame Bovary. The senses and the organs or conduits of
sensation are used directly and symbolically as thematic links throughout the
novel, of which the main topics are romantic illusions or blindness,
incommunicability and the sensuous yearning for impossible gratification. Emma Bovary’s life disintegrates as a result
of her romantic illusions and insatiable desires. Flaubert’s use of detail to thread characters
and events together, adds dimension, explores perspective and sets up the
tensions of the novel.
It is significant that Charles is introduced before
Emma and that effectively, our first view of Emma is coloured by Charles’
romantic perspective. The view of
Charles on his first day at school, serves to introduce the theme of incommunicability
that, in different degrees, affects so many of the characters and torments the
Bovary marriage. As a schoolboy, Charles
could barely communicate his own name.
His first marriage, contrived by his mother, lacked the warmth and
security of understanding and communication.
Heloise, having misrepresented her fortune, tyrannised Charles by her
sharp tongue and self-regarding nature.
Later, Charles was to worship Emma blindly, fail utterly to comprehend
and therefore satisfy her, and die shortly after her of a broken heart.
The description of Charles’ clothing and appearance
emphasises his lack of grace and style, which Emma soon finds repugnant. He was awkward, submissive and dull from his
severely cut ‘village choirboy’s fringe’ to his ‘badly polished’ hobnail shoes
(I,1). Charles’ limitations were
emphasised by his lack of achievement in intellectual pursuits. He was a mediocre student, ‘impossible now to
remember’, and in his further studies ‘understood nothing’, maintaining a
tenuous grip on his later studies only by diligent plodding (I,1).
The introduction to Charles by a schoolfellow is
also significant in lending later credence of Emma’s rapid disillusionment, as
the view of Charles gradually shifts to her perspective of him. With such inherent dullness, Charles was unlikely
to change nor comprehend the need to do so.
After his marriage, his conversation remained ‘as flat as a sidewalk,
with everyone’s ideas walking through it in ordinary dress’ (I,8). His love for Emma was sincere and deep, but
the expression of it remained beyond his powers. Lovemaking rapidly assumed a dull routine:
‘he embraced her at certain hours. It
was one habit among others’ (I,7). All
these details about Charles render Emma Bovary’s plight worthy of compassion.
The first appearance of Emma in her neat. Efficient
kitchen, gleaming with polished metal and dancing light, and with her grace and
studied elegance of appearance, provides a complete contrast to the first view
of Charles and, significantly, it is viewed through the eyes of Charles. Of Emma’s three lovers, Charles alone remains
faithful and constant to the end, loving her most and understanding her least.
Two habitual characteristics of Emma are introduced
from the first: her habit of biting her fleshy lips when silent and her
tendency to gaze outside ‘forehead pressed against the window’ (I,2). These details reveal her sensuality and her
propensity to dream, and they recur throughout the novel to illustrate and
emphasise the theme of sensual desire and romantic illusion. Emma’s insatiable appetite for sensory
gratification forever compounds and conflicts with her romantic yearning to
escape the confines of her unsatisfactory, bourgeoisie life.
In a story about a sensuous woman, Flaubert neglects
no opportunity of bringing descriptions of the senses into frequent and usually
erotic play. Emma, ineptly sewing
bandages, repeated pricked her fingers and would ‘put them into her mouth to
suck them’, while her beautiful eyes would ‘look at you frankly, with bold
candour’ from beneath thick lashes (I,2).
In describing Emma sucking her injured fingers, Flaubert compounds an
important thematic link: the hands, besides their functional uses, are also
agents of communication and sensation, like the mouth. Interestingly, it is Emma’s hands that Charles
first notices; not attractive in themselves, but with surprisingly white,
finely-tapered fingernails ‘cleaner than Dieppe ivories and almond-shaped
(I,2); and one of the first indications of the stirring of Emma’s interest in
Leon is her observation of his well-manicured fingernails, ‘longer than they
were worn in Yonville’ (II,3).
Ironically, Leon kept a pen-knife in his desk to manicure his nails,
while Charles kept on in his pocket ‘like a peasant’ (II,3).
Leon’s well-tended hands become reservoirs for his
frustrated emotional energy in his leave-taking of Emma: ‘Leon enclosed her
hand in his and the very substance of his entire being seemed to pour into this
moist palm’ (II,6). Similarly, the
fusing of fingers seals Emma’s acquiescence to Rodolphe’s adulterous overtures
at the agricultural show; although at first her hand trembled ‘like a captive
dove trying to resume its flight’, but soon afterwards Emma and Rodolphe gaze
at one another, dry lips quivering with desire and ‘gently, without effort,
their fingers intertwined’ (II,8). But
Emma feeds on romantic illusions and Flaubert highlights these by the use of
ironic contrast. Those instruments of
sensuous contact are put to more practical use when Rodolphe, immediately after
his love-making and while Emma is still vibrating with passion, turns his hands
to the practical and unromantic task of repairing a broken bridle. Nor is there any delicacy of action when
Emma’s hand plunges into the jar of arsenic and stuffs the poison into her
mouth.
Emma commits suicide by devouring poison and
Flaubert uses the theme of food and ingestion in so many ways that food and
drink come to symbolise life itself as a continual process of devouring and
being devoured. For Emma, married life
soon became an unappetising collation and conjugal passion a habit ‘like the
established custom of eating dessert after the monotony of dinner’ (I,7). At the Tostes house, where the kitchen smells
penetrated the consulting room and the sounds of sick patients were heard in the
kitchen, Emma felt that ‘all the bitterness of her existence seemed to be
served up on her plate’ (I,9). Images of
food and consumption surround Emma’s life.
Rodolphe sends his clandestine messages to her in baskets of farm
produce, including the fateful communication in a basket of apricots, which
Emma then has to witness Charles eating with relish. Symbolically, Emma has ‘fed’ on Romantic
literature as a girl and her mother-in-law, recognizing too late that this diet
is ‘poisoning her’, belatedly recommends abstinence.
But if food has bitter connotations for Emma, it is
seen by some as a kind of panacea. Her
father, with his rather hedonistic attitude towards food and drink, liking his
cider ‘full-bodied’ and his ‘legs of lamb rare’, significantly found that his
grief at his wife’s death manifested in a ruined appetite, until time healed
his sadness ‘bit by bit, crumb by crumb’ (I,3).
Sympathising with Charles’ first bereavement, Rouault laments his
inability to provide such restoratives as ‘small pots of cream or stewed pears’
and, indeed, after the benefit of a good meal and by the time the coffee
arrived, Charles had forgotten his grief (I,3).
Similarly, Abbé Bournisien, misdiagnosing Emma’s spiritual torment as an
alimentary upset, recommends the restorative effects of tea or water with brown
sugar (II,6) and characteristically, Leon’s unhappiness is detected by Madam
Lefrançois because of his loss of appetite (II,6).
In Charles’ mind, food and sexuality are confused
when he contemplates his conjugal nights ‘like those who, after dinner, still
savour the truffles they are digesting’ (I,5).
The act of eating and drinking also expresses dissipation and
sensuality. Emma, provocatively licking
her glass of liqueur at Les Bertaux, or voluptuously giving herself up to the
enjoyment of chilled champagne or maraschino-flavoured ice at Vaubyessard (I,8)
are early indications of her propensity
to indulge her senses to the utmost, like the debauched old man she sees who
had ‘lived at Court and slept in the beds of queens’, and from whose mouth, as
he faced his mountainous plate of food, the sauce dribbled as he ate (I,8).
The sumptuous elegance of the meal at Vaubyessard
contrasts sharply with the Bovary wedding breakfast, notable for its vulgar
collection of guests, its monstrous wedding cake and its sixteen hours of
feasting, at which even the horses gorged themselves (I,4). Characteristically, Emma had the romantic
notion of holding her wedding ceremony at midnight. The Vaubyessard ball is later parodied by the
masked ball she attends in Rouen, in which she finds herself in the company of
‘the dregs of society’ (III,6) at the nadir of her own dissolute behaviour.
Blindness and dissipation are interrelated themes
recurring throughout the novel. Emma’s
propensity for extravagance was early discerned by her mother-in-law and
luxuries soon became so confused with life for Emma that she began to consider
her life in terms of spent or squandered illusions (II,10). Just as Emma saw only the surrounding romance
and not the reality of the old duke at Vaubyessard, so she was equally blind to
the mundanity of her surroundings at the agricultural show at Yonville, and the
location of her ‘honeymoon’ with Leon on the Rouen riverfront, with its
caulking hammers, yapping dogs, tar fumes and oily water (III,3). In hurrying through the meadow to her
clandestine meetings with Rodolphe, Emma would sink ankle deep into mud without
heeding it. The two themes come together
in the person of the blind beggar, with his oozing, ulcerated face, his
grotesque mime and his bawdy little ballad.
Emma’s moral decline and the disintegration of her
marriage are further punctuated by symbolic details. Her first affaire is associated with the sap
and verdure of the open air, whereas her second is symbolized by decay, in the
faded decadence of the hotel room in Rouen, the road to which was flanked by
ditches of stagnant water (III,5). In
the garden of the Tostes house, to which Emma went as a new bride, stood a
plaster statue of a priest with a breviary.
As Emma’s marriage began its inexorable process of decay, so the statue
began its own ominous decline, losing a foot and revealing white patches
beneath the frost-flaked plaster (I,9) and in transit to Yonville, the statue
falls from the wagon and is smashed.
The appearances of the blind beggar encountered en
route between Yonville and Rouen are strategically placed to coincide with the
deepening levels of Emma’s depravity, thus providing a moral commentary and
thematic link. After appealing to Leon
to steal for her, Emma throws the beggar her last five francs and ironically he
appears in Yonville as Emma is dying, as if to express his gratitude with his
crude serenade. Her final, horrible
laugh of recognition suggests that at the end, Emma is undeceived.
The theme of sight, or blindness, is exploited in
another way, by its link with Emma’s habitual tendency to gaze through
windows. This illustrates her propensity
to dream and her desire to escape the bourgeoisie confines of her life. The unrelieved landscape beyond those windows
is symbolic of the monotony of Emma’s married life. Her characteristically romantic yearning for
escape finds gratification in the proposed elopement with Rodolphe, but what
Emma frequently seeks is oblivion: ‘to escape like a bird, to go off somewhere
and recapture her youth, somewhere far off, in the immaculate expanse of space’
(III,6). Escape and death are
interchangeable in Emma’s disillusioned mind.
In the melancholy that rapidly infiltrates her married life, she
contemplates the joy of escape; when Rodolphe deserts her, she considers
suicide and in her ensuing illness, when she believes she is dying, has a
romantic vision of celestial joy, which is the ultimate escape (II,4). When death finally does approach, however,
she discovers that it is neither simple nor beautiful.
As befits Emma’s romantic imagination, her memories
are vivid, powerful and spontaneously triggered by sensory stimuli, showing
Flaubert’s unerring ingenuity in the exploration of his themes. The smell of Rodolphe’s hair pomade and the
sight of the Hirondelle recall to Emma’s mind the Vaubyessard ball and Leon,
and this memory heralds her complicity with Rodolphe (II,8). A letter from her father, with its
misspellings, coarse paper and sprinkling of ashes, stimulates a powerful
nostalgia that marks another crisis: the renunciation of Rodolphe and support
of M. Homais in persuading Charles to perform the fateful club-foot operation,
which would vicariously satisfy her aspirations. And her final adulterous relationship is
preceded by another chain of memories at the theatre in Rouen.
In contrast with Emma, Rodolphe has to try to
provoke sentimental memories to inspire the composition of his letter and,
failing utterly, resorts to an artificially manufactured teardrop. His glib and insincere language can be
compared with that of another insensitive character, M. Homais, who reports
with pompous fluency on the agricultural show and the club-foot operation, and
with heartless inexactitude on the blind beggar. Amongst Homais’ elaborate notions for Emma’s
tombstone is a ‘pile of ruins’, which, despite its reference in Romanticism,
nevertheless sounds prosaic when compared with the motif of ‘a spirit carrying
an extinguished torch’ (III,10) chosen by Charles who, to the end maintains his
romantic illusions.
In Madame
Bovary, almost every detail has functional or symbolic significance. By exploring and contrasting reality with
sentiment through his various themes, Flaubert depicts the ambiguities of life
and makes his novel of romantic love powerfully realistic and an indisputable
masterpiece.
The full text is available free online at: http://www.fullbooks.com/Madame-Bovary.html
(The text used for this essay was the New American Library Edition
translated by M. Marmur)
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