Desire in Madame Bovary
Per Bjørnar Grande
Bergen University College, Norway
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 23, 2016, pp. 75–98. ISSN 1075-7201.
© Michigan State University. All rights reserved.
In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel),
René Girard attempts to explain how desire has been depicted in different
European novels. According to Girard, the lesser novelists have retracted
to some kind of romantic worldview in their description of human relationships.
While the “romantic writer” does not see that desires are mediated by
other people’s desires, and instead describes desire as object-related,
linear, and devoid of any ongoing mimetic contagion, a number of novelists, are, nonetheless,
able to reveal the illusion of romantic desire. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,
the author tries to peer into the desires that govern Emma Bovary’s relentless
search for a romantic life. These desires seem to be fundamentally mimetic
and triangular. In this article, I wish to further the insights originally offered by
Girard on how desire works in Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary.
This work originally appeared in Contagion 23, 2016, published by
Michigan State University Press.
SYMBOLS OF DESIRE
The very movement in Madame Bovary is a movement toward death and total
undoing.1 Flaubert’s famous statement that the novel is about nothing must be
seen in the light of desire and its ability to gradually infiltrate everyone and
everything. Emma Bovary is a woman driven by unfulfilled longings. Her aim
in life is to realize her innermost dreams—dreams of romantic love, luxury,
and heroic deeds—whichare beyond the reach of a farmer’s daughter in rural
Normandy. Madame Bovary is a modern novel in the sense that character plays
no decisive role. Everything changes and shifts in tune with desire.2
In order to reveal desire, Flaubert, as a writer vacillating between romanticism
and a realism in its making, creates a world where everything is strictly
realistic and, at the same time, heavily laden with symbolic meaning. Most
of the symbols prefigure the death and decay caused by desire. According to
Corrado Biazzo Curry, desire transforms realistic descriptions into disorderly
descriptions and juxtapositions of images without causal relations.3 Desire in
the novel is such a dominant theme that the most everyday descriptions seem
to lose their original meaning and relate to some kind of strong urge. From
Chapter IV onward, the novel’s perspective seems to be related to Emma’s state
of mind: For example, the flat fields stretching their great surface until they fade
into gloom of the sky represent the monotonous existence to which she finds
herself condemned; the closed shutters indicate a gradual degeneration of her
life; and the muddy waters represent sexuality and lost love, while pure water
represents her romantic dreams.4 Landscape takes on such a “desirous” form
that it annihilates persons and events, referring to cosmic emptiness.
According to Tony Tanner, mist and water represent Emma’s disintegration.5
Landscape in Madame Bovary is generally coated in lust, longing, and despair.
Like the landscape, her two homes—theone in Tostes and Yonville-l’Abbaye—
both reflect despair and boredom, and the cathedral in Rouen is described as
a boudoir, revealing Léon’s erotic desires. Color also plays an important role in
representing desire. For example, Flaubert uses the word “bleuâtre” (bluish)
over fifty times, most often to describe Emma’s fictitious ideal of love. Hazel
Barnes has reflected on Flaubert’s frequent use of the word “vide” (empty),
claiming that it is a part of a language tinged with desire. One can say that the
symbols coincide with a certain death wish, a wish to vanish or be absorbed by
a greater whole.
Emma’s dream of liberation tends to take erotic paths, since sex seems to
be the only way in which she can realize her romantic dreams. Her dreams of
freedom are captured in the image of her sitting by an open window, immersed
in feelings of hopelessness and melancholy, as she looks longingly at some open
space and wishes that she was somewhere else.6 The erotic symbols, however,
seem to relate most often to a lack of sexuality. When Charles begins to visit
Emma at her home (Les Bertaux), the burned out embers prefigure a marriage
that holds only meager sexuality. Likewise, the burned wedding bouquet indicates
her future unhappy marriage. In contrast, bright fires from an open fireplace,
one of Flaubert’s more cherished symbols, seems to indicate real sexual
desire, as when Emma, in her bedroom, thinks of Léon.7
Religious symbols generally emphasize suffering and decay. For example,
the plaster statue of a priest, which falls off the carriage and smashes into
a thousand pieces during their move from Tostes to Yonville,8 indicates that they
are moving toward a godless existence and, at the same time, foreshadows the
disasters Emma and Charles are about to encounter.
Yonville-l’Abbaye is a wasteland, a place devoid of character, where they
produce the worst cheese in the area and where nothing seems to grow;9 it
becomes a symbol of Emma’s experience of emptiness and boredom. In addition,
her life is cramped; her sitting room has a particular low ceiling, indicative
of a life without mobility.10 The graves in this small town are steadily encroaching
on the available space,11 hinting at Emma’s own tragic death. Thus, in relation
to Madame Bovary, Proust’s statement that there is not a single beautiful
metaphor in all of Flaubert’s writing must be seen in a context of desire turning
everything into ruins.
MINGLING OF THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE
Emma’s initial problem, and basically the cause of her suffering, seems to stem
from her confusion about what to desire. In the Ursuline convent, where she
has been raised from the age of thirteen, she reads romantic novels, which lead
her from pious ideals to romantic ideals as depicted in works of fiction. Her
childhood tendency to merge religious and romantic feelings develops into a
lifelong obsession, and part of her tragedy derives from her inability to distinguish
between these emotions. The first reference to her religious life emphasizes
an inclination toward religious extremism.
Instead of following the mass, she would study, in her missal, the pious illustrations
with their sky-blue borders, and she loved the sick lamb, the Sacred Heart
pierced by sharp arrows, and poor Jesus, stumbling under the burden of his cross.
She attempted mortification, to go a whole day without eating. She tried to think of
some vow she might fulfill.12
Although Emma is quite sincere in her religious feelings, Flaubert indicates that
there is also a certain playful aestheticism in her religious life.
When she went to confession, she used to invent petty sins so as to stay there longer,
kneeling in the darkness, her hands together and her face against the grille, listening
to the murmuring of the priest. The analogies of betrothed, spouse, heavenly lover,
and eternal marriage that she heard repeatedly in sermons excited an unwonted
tenderness deep in her soul.13
This passage also reveals her attempts at the convent to bridge romantic and
religious sentiments ultimately leave her unable to distinguish between them.
In her fantasy mixture of the spiritual and the erotic, Jesus becomes a heavenly
lover.14 The blend of romanticism and Catholicism in Emma’s life is never
separated, although there is a certain development in the direction of a purely
worldly love. A visible shift toward the romantic seems to happen when Emma
is fifteen, at the end of her stay at the convent. She falls increasingly under
the influence of an elderly spinster who stays in the convent for a week every
month in order to mend the linen. This woman, who is a member of an ancient
aristocratic family, tells the girls stories, passes on bits of news, and lends the
older girls novels. The novels were
solely concerned with love affairs, lovers and their beloveds, damsels in distress
swooning in secluded summerhouses, postilions slain at every posting-house,
horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, wounded hearts, vows, sobs,
tears and kisses, gondolas by moonlight, nightingales in woods, and ‘gentlemen’
brave as lions, meek as lambs, unbelievably virtuous, always immaculately turned
out, who weep buckets of tears.15
This exaggerated outline of the content of these books highlights the aged
Flaubert’s ironic attitude toward romantic novels. However, this is precisely the
kind of novel he himself read and believed in as a child, and he even reread all
the books on Emma’s reading list. This passage addresses the issue of childhood
influences, influences that shape Emma’s romantic inclinations to such a degree
that ordinary life must make her unhappy. Madame Bovary is, even more than
in L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), a novel about the effects of education and
learning. Like Frédéric Moreau in L’Éducation sentimentale, Emma’s spiritual
longing focuses on the higher life as depicted in romantic literature. The difference,
however, is that Frédéric only partly believes in the education of the
heart. His cynicism becomes a kind of shield against romantic myths. Emma,
on the other hand, has no cynicism in which to filter her romantic feelings; she
lives for the moment, is incapable of denying her impulses, and never considers
the consequences of her unbridled desires. However, she is strong enough
to change her life by means of her desires, while Frédéric is a passive slave to
desire, incapable of making a mark on the environment. However, Emma must
always reach a certain critical stage of unhappiness before desire is transformed
into action.
Thus, any attempt to identify the source of Emma’s unhappiness should
begin with an examination of her childhood and later role models. First, it is
important to bear in mind that Emma never seems to be able to distinguish
between profane and religious love.16 On the basis of a naïve blend of romantic
and religious sentiments, Emma begins to rebel against convent life, a rebellion
that is attributed to the nuns’ excessive religious practice. They had “so deluged
her with masses, retreats, novenas, and sermons, preached so well the veneration
due to saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice about modesty
of the body and salvation of the soul, that she did as horses do when reined
in too tightly: she stopped dead and the bit slipped from her teeth.”17 It seems
that she even rebelled against the mysteries of the faith. So, when her father,
Monsieur Rouault, comes to fetch his sixteen-year-old daughter, both she and
the nuns are relieved.
After her return home, Emma’s life is governed by sentimental dreams of
adventure, luxury, and noble feelings. The contrast between Emma’s life as the
daughter of a farmer and the luxurious lives of women in romantic novels creates
a chasm in her soul and makes her discontented with life. Not long after
returning to the farm, Emma begins to dislike rural life. She even misses the
convent and thinks of her convent friends from more wealthy backgrounds
who have already married rich and handsome men. She grows disillusioned
and decides that she has nothing more to learn, nothing more to feel.18 In her
first lengthy conversation with Charles, she tells him that she finds rural life
tedious and yearns for life in a town,19 which reveals that her unhappiness is not,
initially, the result of an unhappy marriage. Her role as a depressed romantic
in the heartland of Normandy provides her with few opportunities. Emma
is, however, privileged with regard to the quality of her environment, to the
extent of her education, which in addition to religious instruction include
dancing, geography, drawing, tapestry work, and the piano.20 Nevertheless, her
father, Père Rouault, is far from rich, and due to extravagance, his fortune is
diminishing year by year.21 Like his daughter, he despises the hard labor that
farming requires.
Both Emma and Père Rouault are prone to strong emotions. In addition,
neither of them can manage their money, so both live beyond their means,
becoming poorer by the day. The narrator, however, never explicitly highlights
these common qualities, only indicates them. According to Mary Orr, Emma’s
sentimental religiosity, rue, and depressions are, initially, a heritage from her
father.22
Although Emma is bright—always the first to answer questions on religious
themes (she has even won prizes for her abilities)23—there is no opportunity
for her to live the life she wants. Her father excuses Emma for not being
of much use in the house and thinks she has a too good a mind for farming.24 At
the same time, he sees no use in having her at home. Initially, it is his greed that
makes him choose Charles Bovary as a husband for his daughter. Although he
considers Charles “a bit of a loser,” he senses that Charles is a steady young man,
learned and careful with money; and, most important of all, one who will not
haggle too much over the dowry.25
My conclusion on the sacred and profane theme is that Emma’s background
consisting of being a farmer’s daughter, with no wealth, seeing her father living
beyond his means, helps turn her religious sentiments into worldly dreams of
style and wealth.
EMMA’S ROMANTIC DESIRES
What was there in Emma’s education that turned her into a romantic? The official
education at the Ursuline convent could hardly be called romantic, despite
its slightly Platonic air. Nevertheless, Emma has a tendency to transform
Catholic teachings into romanticism. Gradually, her religiosity seems to fade as
she becomes increasingly preoccupied with an idea of a life of luxury and heroism.
Just before she leaves the convent, all her ideals revolve around tragic or
heroic characters, such as Héloïse, Bayard, Clémence Isaure, and Joan of Arc;
or privileged women such as Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII, and La
Belle Ferronière, the mistress of Françoise I. The royals whom she especially
admires are those who display a special penchant for cruelty, such as Louis XI,
who is famous for his unscrupulous methods for retaining power; and Henry IV
who is famous for slaughtering the French Protestants (Huguenots). All of
Emma’s heroes are people who are out of the ordinary, extreme, and dramatic;
people whose lives least resemble the simple lifestyle in a village and small
town in Normandy. Emma’s ideals are evidence of a woman who is living a life
dissociated with anything in her current environment. To understand such a
chasm between dream and life, it is necessary to examine romantic ideology
more closely.
According to Henri Peyre, the notion of a romantic and sensitive nature
has always existed, characterized by features such as a predominance of passion
over reason, an emphasis on the extraordinary, dissatisfaction with the present,
and a delight in suffering.26 In this respect, Emma is the quintessential romantic.
Other characteristics of romanticism include a longing for death and a taste for
the morbid.27 Romanticism implies a feeling of ennui in relation to everyday life
and the confines of rationality.28 Emotion is set up against reason. Ideal love is
praised, while the inability to love is a source of agony.29 Romantic poems tend
to delight in solitude and in the contemplation of moonlit nights, employing
various metaphors to underline feeling, referring to natural elements such as
sea, trees, sky, dramatic mountains, deserts, and sunsets. Romantics are often
enthusiastic about the Middle Ages and take a keen interest for travel and exotic
places.30 The loss of oneself in something exotic is a typical feature of romanticism.
In keeping with this, Emma thinks that she can achieve happiness as long
as she can travel and discover new places. Paris, in particular, is the place where
all her dreams are centered. Flaubert, however, does not grant her access to the
capital of desire.
Seen from this perspective, Emma fits neatly into the category “romantic.”
An exception is her preference for novels instead of poetry. This preference is
based on novels’ ability to stir her sensations and make her feel fear.31 Moreover,
her view of nature is basically unromantic and very typical of people who live in
rural villages. In her first conversation with Charles, she admits that she longs
to live in a town: “But she knew the country too well; she was too familiar with
bleating sheep, with milking, with ploughing.”32 Nevertheless, if nature could
to stir her emotions and benefit her personally, she would willingly adopt a
romantic view of nature: “She loved the sea only for its storms, and the green
grass only when it grew in patches among ruins.”33, 34
Her preoccupation with madness, another characteristic of the romantic
period, is limited to a certain focus on her own melancholy. With regard to religion,
she is also basically romantic in her emphasis on the emotional elements.
However, Emma did not turn to pantheism, as quite a few nineteenth-century
romantics did, giving up their traditional Christian beliefs in favor of a pantheistic
belief in a God inherent in all creation.35 Nor does she revel in the cult
of Greek religion and ancient Greece, perhaps because she does not have that
kind of academic education and because the French romantics never joined
that movement.36 Unlike the romantics, Emma does not venerate the barbaric
and primitive.37 However, her fascination with the superman, which is strong
in romanticism,38 is clearly one reason why she gradually comes to despise her
husband.
LOVE FOR THE SAKE OF BEING IN LOVE
Emma’s tragedy is partly rooted in her belief in the myths of romantic literature.
Her life, especially at first sight, seems to illustrate perfectly what Denis
de Rougemont describes as “the passion-myth” in our lives. According to de
Rougemont, the passion-myth has, like a cancer, worked its way into the human
breast of every individual in the Western world and created a perverse concept
of love. It magnifies and deifies unhappy, nonsensual love; and is, according
to De Rougemont, a love for nothingness, for death.39 De Rougemont characterizes
this love as narcissistic love, in which the lover’s self-magnification
is emphasized more than the relationship with the beloved.40 The love that is
represented in romance literature is a love gained through obstacles, or even a
love of obstacles. Thus, if there were no obstacles, there would be no romantic
love. So, in reality, there is no love, only love of obstacles. Within the masochistic
realm of love of obstacles, there is a pathological fear of falling in love in a
simple, straightforward manner.41 According to De Rougemont, this myth was
bound to change the Western attitude toward adultery,42 which he considers to
be materialized in contempt for marriage.43
Turning to Madame Bovary, Emma’s initial obstacle is the result of her dissatisfaction
with rural life and longing for a life in style and luxury far beyond
her reach. Looking at Emma’s life from the perspective of obstacles, it may seem
that Emma does not love her husband because he is no obstacle. Admittedly,
Charles does not seem to understand her and is not able to provide her with
a stylish life and great passion, but his status as village doctor lifts her status
somewhat—despite her having got an admirable cultural education in a convent.
The more Charles seems to admire and even worship Emma, the more she
seems to detest him. Her hate is partly self-hate.
Like her, Charles represents the vulgarity of village life. This is highlighted in the vivid contrasts in Part One,
Chapter VIII, when they spend a weekend with the aristocracy of the region;
the party at the chateau (La Vaubyessard) stands in striking contrast to their
own wedding party.
Emma’s dissatisfaction with her husband seems to derive from a number
of sources. Although Père Rouault undoubtedly played a part in encouraging
Emma’s marriage to Charles, she was not forced. As Emma watches Donizetti’s
opera, The Bride of Lammermoor, at the Théâtre des Arts in Rouen, she admits
to herself that she, in contrast to Lucie, the heroine in the play, was full of joy
when she was newly married.44 However, Emma soon becomes bored and feels
confined. There is no hint that she is being mistreated. On the contrary, Charles
is depicted as a caring and loving husband. Emma’s dissatisfaction seems to
arise from a certain vulgarity in his appearance and his lack of ambition.45 This
causes her to long for something else.
From the perspective of modern mainstream psychology, it is possible to,
at least initially, view Emma’s problem as psychological: Her mother died when
she was a little girl, and she seems to have had an unhappy childhood, except
during periods of exaltation. Just after the weekend at La Vaubyessard, before
they move from Tostes to Yonville, Emma’s state of boredom and melancholy
become so serious that she may be considered clinically depressed, verging on
madness.46 However, there are too few textual examples of early mental problems
to determine whether this was an issue. Instead, the textual emphasis lies
on Emma’s extraordinary capacity for imitation.
One may question whether Emma would have been so easily beguiled by
the representations of the noble life in literature if she had not been so discontent.
Her first encounter with the life she has read about and longed to have
for many years is at the weekend at La Vaubyessard where she and Charles are
invited to a party at Marquis d’Andervilliers. Once she has been introduced
to this life and been able to taste the refined atmosphere among the aristocracy,
her preoccupation increases. Everything she sees and experiences at La
Vaubyessard becomes, for the rest of her life, a norm and ideal. For example,
the fact that she vaguely remembers the Marquise calling some girl Berthe leads
her to choose Berthe as a name for her own daughter.47 Shortly after their return
home from the weekend, Emma’s dissatisfaction becomes so strong that she
sinks into a state of depression. The brief glimpses into the world of style and
refinement has made her daily life seem ten times worse than before. Her intensified
discontent culminates in her sacking her maid and hiring a new one who
is required to imitate the service etiquette practiced among the aristocracy.48
Emma projects her feelings of dissatisfaction onto Charles. One of the
reasons why one looks down on Charles is because he is generally depicted
through the eyes of Emma. Thus, Charles is depicted through the eyes of romantic
desire. From other perspectives, a more balanced picture may be obtained:
“His health was good, he looked well; his reputation was firmly established. The
country folk were fond of him because he was not proud. He was affectionate
with children, never went into a bar, and, indeed, inspired confidence by his
morality.”49
Viewing Charles from outside Emma’s desire for success, he becomes one
of the finest persons in the novel. According to Mary Orr, Charles Bovary is
perhaps the character in the whole of Western literature who is most often misunderstood.
He is often viewed as a servile idiot, while, according to the text, he
is generous, hardworking, faithful, and dutiful. Orr goes so far as to say that his
goodness, his selfless concern for others, his kind and respectful humanity, and
his belief in the best of others makes him one of Flaubert’s many saints.50 He is
a good father and extremely loyal toward both his wives. The only hint of any
moral fault in Charles is when he breaks the promise to his first wife to never
again visit the farm where Emma lives. Charles represents the nonmasculine
man without social ambitions. He is the only character in Madame Bovary who
is content with life.51 His lack of desire hinders him in becoming a stereotype,
unlike the other men in Yonville. He also represents an absolute contrast to his
own bragging and brutal father. Nevertheless, Charles is not capable of enhancing
his career as a doctor, and is slightly clumsy and lacking in imagination; seen
through Emma’s romantic lenses, these shortcomings constitute a deadly sin.
Emma is not interested in such a dull relationship. She dreams of seeing
the name Bovary displayed at the booksellers, repeated in the newspapers, and
known throughout France. For her, love is something extreme, a way to experience
the otherworldly. According to De Rougemont, such a dualism regarding
Eros, in which it is simultaneously divine and frenzied, is a Platonic legacy.52
This kind of dualism in love became common in twelfth-century
France in connection
with the emergence of dualistic religion. This sparked a powerful rise
of the cult of love. 53 It was during this period that marriage became an object of
contempt and passion was glorified.54 According to the Cathars, the yielding to
a purely physical sensuality was the supreme and original sin, and to love with
pure passion was the pure virtue.55 According to De Rougemont, the troubadours’
songs of love are also a legacy of this perverted understanding of love.
Our language of passion comes down to us from the rhetoric of the troubadours.
It was supremely ambiguous rhetoric. Its symbols of sexual attraction were the
product of Manichean dogmatics. Little by little, as it was gradually separated from
the religion in which it originated, it passed into manners, and became part of the
common language.56
One of Emma’s heroes is Clémence Isaure,57 who in 1323 founded the first literary
institution in the Western world (Academy of the Floral Games, which revived
a game of verses among troubadours). This linking of Emma’s passion to troubadour’s
love makes De Rougemont’s critique of the concept of love, as elaborated
by the Cathars, relevant to her romantic legacy. Although Emma seems to
develop a more refined literary taste after the weekend at La Vaubyessard—she
begins to read contemporary French novelists such as Sand, Sue, and even
Balzac, who tends to flutter between romanticism and realism—her
underlying
motivation is to find “vicarious gratification for her secret desires.”58 With
regard to literature, Emma is like Don Quixote, who, after having read too many
books on chivalry, becomes mad in that he sees the world through the deeds
of the knight, Amadis of Gaul. Like Don Quixote, Emma’s desires are mediated
through the desires raised by fiction; and like Don Quixote, she is forbidden by
her own family to read romantic novels for a period.59 Although I don’t believe
that De Rougemont is entirely accurate in blaming Western moral decay on literature,
since literature can, as René Girard has shown in Deceit, Desire, and the
Novel, also reveal the illusions of the passion myth. Romantic literature is clearly
a source of great unhappiness for Emma. The question is whether literature is to
blame. A certain desire seems to be a necessary prerequisite for such a reading
since means identifying with the hero however badly his or her deeds afflict the
other. In a way, De Rougemont echoes the prosecutor, Pinard, who, during
the court case concerning whether Madame Bovary should be banned, claimed
that the novel destroyed people’s moral consciousness.60
FROM IDEAS TO RELATIONSHIPS
In order to go further in our investigation on how desire works in Madame
Bovary, it is necessary to shift the focus from ideas to relationships, and to
examine the relationships between the characters. I will therefore gradually
leave De Rougemont’s idea-oriented analysis in order to focus on relationships
more than ideas. This means transferring, from the ideological realm to the
mimetic, and from De Rougemont to Girard. Although offering an alternative
understanding, Girard praises De Rougemont’s theme of obstacles,61 even saying
that De Rougemont is one of the few thinkers gaining Novelistic insight.62
Girard claims that De Rougemont has not only seen the significance of
the obstacle, but has also highlighted the double structure of desire: the same
movement that makes us worship life actually hurls us into negation and
(inner) death. According to Girard, this view of desire, in which negation of life
is depicted as vitality, is De Rougemont’s most masterful insight.63 Girard goes
on, however, to elaborate a more technical device to illustrate the way desire
works, introducing the triangular structure of subject, object, and mediator. He
gently criticizes De Rougemont for not perceiving the third party in the desire
for obstacles.64 According to Girard, De Rougemont has revealed the fundamental
content of desire, but his analysis lacks structure. Desire for obstacles
is, for De Rougemont, a subject-object relationship, and he sees the obstacle
as something within the subject (hero). The object is hindered by the subject’s
own mind, by the deceitful ideas of love created by myths and heretical religion.
As the obstacles are the result of heretical ideas, and not of something concrete
and contemporary, De Rougemont is therefore not able to explain the mechanism
that links myth to mind.
MIMETIC DESIRE
Emma’s desire is constantly mediated by romanticism, transforming it into
what Girard calls metaphysical desire, a desire that has lost its natural object and
instead is mediated by a secondary desire.65 What characterizes both Emma and
the novels she reads is an inability to understand that desire is something borrowed
from the desire of the other, and does not contain some kind of essence
or originality. As a result, she refuses to see the repetitions in her life. The overall
mimetic development in Madame Bovary goes from the real to the unreal. All
relationships tend to move toward the unreal. Her blindness to the fact that her
own desires are being created by the desire of the other is a result of her narcissism
and prevents her from seeing her own clichés.66
Although Emma is strong in the sense that she dares to live out her desires,
she is passive in the initial stages of seduction. She does not act until she really
believes that there is a way out of her unbearable situation, and then she acts
without any sense of the consequences.
Emma’s desires are constantly being mediated by romantic desires, desires
that turn and twist her spontaneity and make her loathe her environment.
Before arriving in Yonville, Emma’s erotic desires have vacillated between
lifeless romantic dreams, on the one hand, and resentment of her husband’s
spontaneous and uncomplicated expressions of love, on the other. In Yonville,
her desperation grows, and her romantic inclinations begin to materialize in
real erotic relationships, although she is, initially, the passive partner in both her
liaisons. Her feelings toward Léon are ignited the first evening in Yonville when
she and Charles have a meal together with some of the locals at the Lion d’Or.
Her rather innocent and platonic love for Léon begins when they converse
about travels, sunsets, music, and romantic novels.67 Their immediate feeling
that they are soul mates derives from the feeling that they are different from and
superior to the others in Yonville. This sense of superiority is partly the result of
their “sentimental education,” which they feel enables them to understand the
finer and more cultivated sides of life. Sentimental or romantic education
becomes a catalyst for difference, facilitating an escape from the dreariness of
rural life. Sentimental education seems somewhat similar to today’s notion of
“cultural capital,” in that it distinguishes certain individuals from the masses.
However, both Emma and Léon reveal a rather shallow concept of culture,
solely based on feeling.
The spark of love is ignited by romantic sentiments and gradually develops
during Homais’s evening gatherings, where Emma and Léon, instead of playing
cards and dominos, look through Emma’s fashion magazines or recite poems.68
However, Léon’s naïvity and timidity, his bourgeois loyalty to good behavior
and his shyness, prevent him from acting in a definitive way. Their relationship
becomes an aching and a longing, with Emma listening daily to his footsteps on
the pavement.
Léon never expected that, when he left her house in despair, she immediately rose
and went to watch him walk down the street. She wanted to know about everything
he did and everywhere he went . . . Emma considered Homais’s wife a most fortunate
being, to sleep under the same roof as him. . . . But the more she became aware
of her love, the more Emma repressed it, to keep it hidden, and also to weaken its
hold. She would have liked Léon to guess her feelings, and she made up fantasies
about coincidences and disasters that might precipitate a revelation.69
The decisive moment in Emma’s feelings of love toward Léon is emphasized by
its occurrence in a moment of acute dreariness, a winter Sunday in Normandy
when Emma, Léon, Charles, and the Homais family are visiting a flax mill. On
this outing, the contrast between Léon and Charles is highlighted. Emma suddenly
turns her gaze from the white wintry sun, to see Charles with his cap
pulled down to his eyebrows; his thick lips are quivering, which makes him look
stupid, and his coat seems to sum up all the banality of his being. Suddenly,
Léon steps forward. For Emma, his good looks and cultivated presence establish
a definitive difference between him and her husband.70
After this very shallow experience of difference, Emma suddenly begins to
change her lifestyle,71 choosing a religious life based on duty and resentment.
There does not seem to be any other reason for this shift from romanticism to
Puritanism, other than her feeling of despair that her love for Léon is impossible.
But she was filled with lusts, with rage, with hatred. That neatly pleated dress
concealed a tempestuous heart, and those chaste lips uttered no word for her
torment. . . . And then the pride, the joy of telling herself: “I am a virtuous woman,”
and admiring herself, in her mirror, in attitudes of resignation, consoled her somewhat
for the sacrifice she believed she was making.72
In this part of the novel, readers gain a marvelous insight into how resentment
works, as Emma’s meekness is revealed as a form of rebellion. Behind her new
Puritanism lies not much more than the admission of the impossibility of her
dreams. In fact, “the mediocrity of her home provoked her to sumptuous fantasies,
the caresses of her husband to adulterous desires. She would have liked
Charles to beat her, so that she could more justifiably detest him, and seek her
revenge.”73
If Charles had shared the combative nature of Emma’s desires, their marriage
would immediately have developed into a sadomasochistic relationship
built on the thwarted desire for the other’s desire. However, Charles never
joins in erotic games based on rivalry. Instead, he adores Emma no matter what
happens. Instead of serious rivalry, which would have suited Emma’s romantic
temperament, her unfulfilled desires turn into rage, and her feelings of dissatisfaction
gradually evolve into depression.
The real affair starts three years later when a more self-assured
and cynical Léon, who has been living in Paris, returns to Rouen. By this time, Emma
has already had an affair with Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger de la Huchette,
a wealthy landowner in Yonville, and is prepared for the physical sides of a
liaison. The affair between Emma and Léon, which takes place in Rouen,
becomes an imitation of the romantic love with which Emma has fed her mind
during the years of boredom. However, Emma has more scruples during this
second encounter than during the first. The narrator reveals that the attraction
and temptation is stronger this time (she has never thought any man as handsome
as Léon) than it was when Rodolphe rather insensitively and brutally
seduced her.74
Léon knows exactly how to undermine Emma’s moral scruples. In order
to persuade her to share a cab with him, he says that a cab ride with a man is
not considered improper in Paris: “Everybody does it in Paris!” Emma, who,
through fashion magazines, novels, and maps, has dreamed of a life in Paris’
high society, is unable to resist such an argument. The cab ride becomes an aimless
tour. It may remind the modern reader of a road movie where desires have
run wild. There is a certain awkwardness, even brutality in the description of
this seduction. The driver’s extreme discomfort seems to reflect Emma’s own
discomfort, and Léon’s repeated angry shouts directed at the driver,75 emphasize
a lack of joy and pleasure. Moreover, the cab is compared to a tomb,76 once
again prefiguring Emma’s tragic death caused by desire.
Both of Emma’s love affairs begin with her being reluctant and passive
initially, and end with her becoming absolutely desperate to continue the relationship,
while her lovers gradually come to fear the extremities of her desire.
This can, of course, be seen in the light of gender: if a married woman in mid-nineteenth
century first gave in to forbidden love, there was no way back. The
other reason, also slightly gender related, is that both Léon and Rodolphe are
only interested in a sexual liaison that will not affect their daily lives. For both
Léon and Rodolphe, careers, comfort, and reputation are more important than
Emma. Emma, on the other hand, feels she has nothing to lose.
Both of Emma’s lovers are disturbed souls, who have grown up without
fathers and are therefore unusually concerned with achieving manliness
by seducing women. However, there is a basic difference between Léon and
Rodolphe; Léon is a weaker, kinder, and more sensitive character, and seems to
treat Emma as a mother substitute, while Rodolphe is a genuinely cynical loner
with good looks and outward charm, and is mainly interested in conquering
women, especially if he can take her from another man. Rodolphe is unable to
develop friendships with men77 and compensates with his many rivalrous affairs.
When Rodolphe enters Emma’s life, he is a good-looking,
vain thirty-four-year-old bachelor, who is in Yonville for the agricultural fair. He decides
to seduce Emma and dump his current mistress, Virginie, who is too plump,78
and he strives to win her over by talking about the mediocrity of all things
provincial. Rodolphe’s romanticism is, at first sight, even loftier than Emma’s,
but closer examination reveals that his romanticism is only a way of hiding his
naturalistic worldview. Rodolphe speaks in such a lofty way in order to attain
sensual pleasures. The situation of Rodolphe in the midst of an agricultural
fair serves to reveal his purely sensual desires toward Emma. The juxtaposition
of Rodolphe’s romantic monologues with Monsieur Lieuvain’s and Monsieur
Derozerays’s speeches on agricultural development aggrandizes Rodolphe’s
animalistic desires.79
If one considers Rodolphe’s naturalistic sensuality in relation to De
Rougemont’s understanding of the passion-myth, the correspondence between
romanticism and naturalism is highlighted. For example, De Rougemont claims
that naturalistic sensuality is by nature the same as romance-desires,
only sublimated to fit into an animalistic ideal.80 He seems to consider animalistic ideals
to be as illusory as romantic ideals.81 It represents the same aspiration for the
sublime, but viewed from the animal side. 82 According to De Rougemont, these
animalistic ideals have been internalized and become a part of modern ideologies,
as well as being prevalent in the mind of men, and have thereby become
a glorification of instinct of the here below.83 Both naturalistic ideology and
romanticism operate with the notion that access to nature and love is straightforward
and direct. Thus, this naturalistic approach is manifest as a belief in
desire without a mediator. For example, in his attempt to seduce Emma, the
figure of Rodolphe may, at first sight, resemble straightforward desire. However,
it gradually becomes evident that everything is mediated by the characters’
sentimental education. Both Leon’s and Rodolphe’s idea of love consists of the
same sentimental education as Emma’s.
When Rodolphe contemplates seducing Emma, he evaluates her as he
would a horse: lovely teeth, black eyes, neat feet.84 These sensual elements,
combined with the fact that there is the air of a Parisienne about her, makes
her irresistible for both the outward romantic and inward naturalistic. In order
to seduce her, Rodolphe needs to present himself and Emma as completely
different from anyone else in Yonville; they are more stylish, their passions
are stronger and more refined, and they belong on another plane of existence.
Rodolphe reiterates exactly the same romantic ideals as Emma, but in an even
more extreme form. In addition, his romanticism, which hides his naturalism, is
much more cynical than Emma’s. The irony is that the reader sees Rodolphe in
the context of the smelly, dirty, and deeply primitive agricultural surroundings,
emphasizing his animalistic desires. Placing this seduction scene right in the
middle of the novel seems to emphasize desire as the novel’s main motif.85
When Rodolphe first seduces Emma, her reluctuant manner is not simply
coquetishness; she expresses genuine moral doubt. Immediately after having
been seduced, however, Emma feels no remorse.
Then she recalled the heroines of novels she had read, and that poetic legion of adulteresses
began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that held her spellbound.
She was actually becoming a living part of her own fantasies, she was fulfilling the
long dream of her youth by seeing herself as one of those passionate lovers she had
deeply envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfying sense of revenge. She had suffered
enough, had she not? But now her moment of triumph was here, and love, so long
repressed, flowed freely, in joyful effervescence. She gloried in it, feeling no remorse,
no anxiety, no disquiet.86
Emma’s feelings quickly go from being embarrassed and frightened, to feeling
that at last her dreams have come true. The mediation of desire through romance
literature has completely transformed her outlook, from initial uneasiness to
fulfillment. Moreover, after the seduction, Emma becomes the active party,
so active and unreserved in her search for love that it makes Rodolphe feel ill
at ease and frightened. The intensity of her desire causes their relationship to
develop in a way that seems to be typical for all of Flaubert’s erotic relationships.
According to Flaubert it is impossible for two people to love each other
at the same time. Desire works in such a way that as love turns one party on, it
simultaneously turns the other off.
Jealousy plays a fairly minor role in Madame Bovary. Instead of jealousy and
rivalry between lovers, one affair follows after the other; and Charles, due to
his trusting nature, never discovers these affairs while Emma is alive. Charles’s
jealousy flares suddenly after Emma’s death when he first finds letters to her
from Rodolphe and then those from Léon, and finally discovers a portrait of
Rodolphe.87 These findings tear Charles apart, physically and mentally. There
is even a scene where he is on the verge of attacking Rodolphe. However, the
scene culminates with him telling Rodolphe, twice, “I don’t hold it against you,”
placing the blame on fate instead.88 By not seeking revenge, Charles is ultimately
able to quench the potential violence generated by Emma’s infidelity. Nevertheless,
the mingled jealousy and sorrow quickly ruin his life. Shortly after Emma’s
death, Charles also dies. The fact that the doctor finds nothing concretely wrong
with Charles89 emphasizes the deadly effect of desire.
Desire in Madame Bovary is a craving for the impossible, causing Emma
to fight obstacles which are both illusory and unnecessary when viewed from
outside the torments of desire. At the same time, the logic of mimetic desire
enables the reader to decipher Emma’s dilemma. For Emma, life becomes more
and more tangled and twisted. As the end approaches, the narrator asks, “Why
did life fall so short of her expectations, why did whatever she depended on turn
instantly to dust beneath her hand?”90
In contemplating her own downfall, Emma seems able to see the paradoxes
in life, in which there is always a negative side to the positive:
Everything was a lie. Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse,
every pleasure brought revulsion, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only a
vain craving for a still more sublime delight.91
In her desperation, Emma perceives the downfall, but not the reasons for it.
Both Emma and Charles blame fate for this downfall,92 thereby displaying a lack
of any great insight. Actually, all the characters in Madame Bovary lack depth of
insight. All with the exception of a little old woman named Cathrine Leroux,
who receives a medal for fifty-four years of hard labor,93 are under the spell of
desire, nurturing some kind of deceit about others and themselves. Thus the
truth of the novel is revealed in the story’s development, not any grand idea or
philosophy.
CONCLUSION ON DESIRE
According to Sartre, the reason why readers so often dislike Flaubert’s characters
is because they are a result of Flaubert’s dislike for himself.94 This lack
of self-esteem, however, seems to enable the author to pull potential heroes
down from their pedestals and present their downfall without taking sides.
Although not completely objective, Flaubert has an impressive ability to keep
to the psychology of the story without giving in to any sentimental conclusion.
The tragic ending of Madame Bovary seems to indicate a deep understanding of
how desire works in peoples’ lives. At the same time, the single-minded
manner in which Emma tries to break out of her bourgeois prison seems to reflect
Flaubert’s sympathy for his main character.
However, if one restricts the analysis solely to the evolution of the novel and
does not consider Flaubert’s letters, the novel’s ideology seems to correspond
to the ideas expressed by Homais, despite being such a limited and tiresome
bourgeois pharmacist. Homais is a parrot of the ideals of the Enlightenment, in
which rationality, science, and progress are highlighted, and romantic feelings
are discounted. His whole identity is based on critique of religion and expressing
liberal values; Homais is an unstoppable networker, always sucking up to the
right people, and somewhat of a charlatan in his work. Nevertheless, he seems
to represent a more successful alternative to romanticism. This rather one-sided
interpretation of Homais, with its focus on his dullness and non-romantic
temperament, which is evident in so many analyses of Madame Bovary, does
not correspond well with the text, especially if one restricts the analysis to the
development of the story: Emma falls into debt, and Homais becomes wealthy;
Emma’s reputation is lost, while Homais becomes relatively famous. It seems
as if the novel parts from any preconceived ideology. In fact, Homais’s success
seems to mark the novel’s conclusion, and everything associated with him and
his family has turned out well. The fact that the enlightened though nondescript
Homais is the recipient of the Legion of Honour while the romantic Emma
commits suicide can be viewed from two perspectives: ironically, in the light of
life’s absurdity; or metaphorically, as representing the victory of rationality and
enlightenment over romanticism.
While those who display greed and materialistic desires in Balzac’s novels
tend to end badly, the materialists in Madame Bovary, such as Lheureux, Maître
Guillaumin, and Homais, seem to succeed. In Madame Bovary, it is those who
turn to romantic love who taste the bitterness of desire most intensely. The relative
success attained by they who misuse the other, is, although not emphasized
in this article, a part of Flaubert’s irony.
If Homais, despite his mediocrity and egoism, represents a concluding
moral in Madame Bovary, there seems to be a certain flaw in the understanding
of desire represented in the main characters. According to Mary Orr’s
critique of masculinity, Homais is one of the novel’s foremost representations
of masculinity, judged on the basis of good reputation and success. From her
perspective of masculine survival and success, desire is motivated by a “more”
in life, and everything centers around the need to outdo others and victimize
anyone who does not desire or strive for this “more.” Charles becomes a prime
scapegoat in the realm of masculinity, due to his submissive attitude, respect
for women, and lack of ambition.95 In this context of male rivalry, where reputation
and success are all and where women are brutally subordinated, the worst
characters become the most successful. The worst of these male figures seem
to be Charles’s father and Lheureux; the former is a brutal braggart while the
latter slowly kills Emma by tricking her into insurmountable debt. The flaw in
Orr’s overall interpretation, despite the precise analyses of the novel’s characters,
is the tendency to demonize everything masculine, thereby creating
a dualism between masculinity and femininity in which the former is all bad
while the latter is all good. In this interpretation, Emma Bovary, although suppressed
by masculine desire, is mostly bad because she acts in a typically masculine
manner. Although there are, in relation to Flaubert’s forced objectivity,
many themes in the novel that lend themselves to analysis in the light of feministic
theory, the theme of desire is so all-encompassing in its very nature that
even the masculinity/feminity theme becomes secondary.
If the concluding chapters in Madame Bovary represent the author’s own
values, Flaubert certainly becomes, ideologically, less prophetic and more
traditional. This is, however, in accordance with Flaubert’s own defence of the
novel, especially in the court case against him. In the court case, he emphasizes
that Madame Bovary is not a novel that propagates immorality but instead highlights
the immorality of infidelity.96 However, the loving way in which Emma is
depicted indicates that the novel is first and foremost a tragedy, not a morality
story. It is a tragedy devoid of any easy consolations, apart from the deeply moving
scene at the end of the novel, in which at Emma’s deathbed, the priest dips
his right thumb in oil, touching the various parts of her body. First the eyes,
then the nostrils, then the mouth, then the hands and lastly the soles of her feet,
as if all these sensual parts of her body have been reconciled to God.97
NOTES
1. Victor Brombert, “The Tragedy of Dreams,” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1988),
25–26.
2. Leo Bersani, “Flaubert and Emma Bovary: The Hazards of Literary Fusion,” in Modern
Critical Interpretations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia:
Chelsea House Publishing, 1988), 28.
3. Corrado Biazzo Curry, Description and Meaning in Three Novels by Gustave Flaubert (New
York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997), 35.
4. Curry, Description and Meaning in Three Novels by Gustave Flaubert, 19–31.
5. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), 320.
6. Brombert, “The Tragedy of Dreams,” 18.
7. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 91.
8. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 79.
9. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 63–64.
10. Brombert, “The Tragedy of Dreams,” 22.
11. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 64–66.
12. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 33.
13. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 33.
14. See Brombert, “The Tragedy of Dreams,” 17.
15. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 34.
16. Stirling Haig, “The Madame Bovary Blues,” in The Madame Bovary Blues: The Pursuit of
Illusion in Nineteenth-Century
French Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1987), 83.
17. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 36–37.
18. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 37.
19. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 22.
20. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 18.
21. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 23.
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Desire in Madame Bovary 95
22. Mary Orr, Madame Bovary: Representations of the Masculine (Vienna: Lang, 1999), 31–34.
23. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 41.
24. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 23.
25. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 23–24.
26. See Henri Peyre, What Is Romanticism? (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 1977.
27. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 24.
28. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 18–19,
73.
29. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 77 ff.
30. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 89.
31. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 75.
32. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 34.
33. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 36–37.
34. This love, however, refers to things she has never seen.
35. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 109–127.
36. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 104.
37. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 98–108.
38. Peyre, What Is Romanticism?, 125–127.
39. Denis De Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 38 ff.
40. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 260.
41. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 267–268.
42. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 276.
43. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 275.
44. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 199.
45. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 55.
46. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 57–61.
47. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 81.
48. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 50, 54.
49. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 55
50. Orr, Madame Bovary: Representations of the Masculine, 193–194.
51. Orr, Madame Bovary: Representations of the Masculine, 170 ff.
52. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 61.
53. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 112.
54. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 71.
55. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 135.
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96 Per Bjørnar Grande
56. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 166
57. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 34.
58. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 52.
59. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 112–113.
60. See Dominick La Capra, “The Trial,” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1988).
61. De Rougemont is mentioned in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel on pages 48, 108, 165, 177–179,
192, 226, 285, 287.
62. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 226.
63. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1965), 287.
64. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 177–178.
65. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Chapter I.
66. Michael Peled Ginsburg, “Narrative Strategies in Madame Bovary,” in Modern Critical
Interpretations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea
House Publishing, 1988), 133, 152.
67. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 72–76.
68. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 88–89.
69. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 96–97.
70. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 90–91.
71. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 94–98.
72. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 96–97.
73. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 97.
74. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 210.
75. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 216–217.
76. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 217.
77. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 123.
78. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 116.
79. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 126–133.
80. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 186.
81. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 186.
82. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 186.
83. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 237.
84. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 116.
85. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part 2, Chapter VIII.
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Desire in Madame Bovary 97
86. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 145.
87. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 304, 309.
88. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 310–311.
89. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 311.
90. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, xxx.
91. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 252.
92. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 138, 311.
93. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 133–134.
94. Hazel Barnes, “The Biographer as Literary Critic: Sartre’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary,”
in Modern Critical Interpretations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, ed. Harold Bloom
(Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1988), 102.
95. See Orr, Madame Bovary: Representations of the Masculine, 212.
96. Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), Chapter 17 (“The Pangs
of Art”).
97. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 289. See also Tony Tanner, “The ‘Morselization’ of Emma
Bovary,” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, ed. Harold
Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1988), 47.
This work originally appeared in Contagion 23, 2016, published by
Michigan State University Press.
98 Per Bjørnar Grande
This work originally appeared in Contagion 23, 2016, published by
Michigan State University Press.
