Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

This item represents the first of this year's entries from Ward's Lifetime of Reading, and also an important item on the list of books I pretended to have read in college. I remember giving up at the end of part one, partly out of moral discomfort, partly out of boredom. The book bothered me, even then; if there is one key descriptor that I would apply to Emma Bovary as a character, it is "uncomfortable". This is not only to say that she is perpetually ill-at-ease, but also that I shared her discomfort while reading it. I became maudlin and self-absorbed. I began to mentally revise my version of my last relationship. In this new version I was Emma, troublesome, aloof, unfair. I even wrote a needy email to . . . someone--that probably would have been better off unsent. Some drunk-text. I send Flaubert-mail.

I was similarly affected by Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, though not so deeply. When affected effectively, the reader cannot help but wonder how the author did it. What tricks did Flaubert use to get into my mind? Flaubert is traditionally treated as one of the first and foremost Realist writers. Although it is not clear whether he would have agreed with this appellation, looking at him in this light is helpful to decoding his tactics. It is an easy matter to observe his selection of common characters and common events, his aversion to anything epic. What interested me more in this novel, however, were stylistic elements that I perceived.

For one thing, I was reminded of Mark Twain's quote: "When you catch an adjective, kill it." Although Flaubert may not have had the same conscious aversion to Adjectives, one can see how it would fit in nicely with a Realist philosophy. Adjectives can easily become editorials. The "crystal clear sky" imparts a judgment, as opposed to the adjectiveless "there are no clouds in the sky", a subtle, but stylistically significant distinction. I am now going to open up to a random passage, and try to find a decent example . . .

"The countryside was deserted; he heard nothing around him but the regular swishing of the grass against his shoes and the chirping of crickets hidden in the distant oatfields. He thought of Emma in the parlor, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her" (127).

It is clear that this remarkable passage draws much of its power from its frankness. The one adjective in the paragraph, "distant", does not editorialize, and gives relevant information. A grammarian might call it a identifying adjective, rather than a descriptive one. This pattern is noticeable throughout Bovary. Although Flaubert does not entirely eschew descriptive adjectives, their presence is muted--even Twain did not recommend killing them entirely.

Related to this restraint is Flaubert's limited employment of figurative language. Metaphor also can stray into editorial if not checked, and Flaubert stops well short of that line. Let's examine another random passage, shall we?

"At dawn he saw three black hens asleep in a tree; he shuddered, terrified at this omen. He promised the Holy Virign he would donate three chasubles to the church and walk barefoot from the cemetery at Les Bertaux to the Chapel in Vassonville" (330).

That this short passage is free from anything resembling figurative language is not terribly surprising. It would be a simple matter to add a bit of it here, but it does not take a genius to recognize that the image of the hens is powerful enough without poetic embellishment. Further examination reveals, however, that the entire page is just as matter-of-fact, no, two pages, three, one has two read four pages to find a solid example of figurative language, and even then it is the rather tame " . . . their voices floated out over the countryside, rising and falling in waves" (333). One might be tempted to call this writing prosaic, so free from embellishment is it, but the effect is not prosaic; it is profound. The strength of Flaubert's writing stems not from his facility with a phrase or his gift for painting a scene. No, it comes from the very real, very plain things that people do, say and think.

For this reason it should come as no surprise that Flaubert does not indulge in that fatal poetic flaw, apostrophe. He presents the story, and leaves it to the reader to decide what it means. On occasion, he cannot restrain himself from being epigrammatic, but the reader forgives him, both due to the rarity of his intrusions and their quality. Only two examples come to mind, both of them welcome: "It is better not to touch our idols; the gilt comes off on our hands" and "Speech is a rolling mill that always stretches out the feelings that go into it" (278, 230).

Such observations do not necessarily answer the question, "How does Flaubert creep into the mind of the reader so surgically?". The answer might well be his keen and honest observations of the human thought process, as I observed in my notes on A Sentimental Education. What I comment on here might merely be stylistic choices on Flaubert's part, rather than real strategic genius. At any rate, it is clear that I did him a disservice in college by reading only one section, and I am glad to have revisited him now, with a little more insight under my belt.