From Frederick Brown's Flaubert

He considered it axiomatic that beauty and ugliness reside not in subjects

but in style, style being all by itself “an absolute way of seeing things.”

These thoughts would leach into the substance of Emma Bovary, who is

seen almost immediately as an anxious soul longing for salvation outside the

wet, rustic world through which men and horses slog and outside the wet

female body in which she feels imprisoned. Outside all of that is her con_

vent school, where the sounds, sights, and odors of the family farm yield to

the perfumed envelopments of chapel service, the whisperings of confes-

sion, the vocabulary of celestial love, the prattle of an old aristocratic dame

marooned in nineteenth-century France with eighteenth—century memo

ries and contraband Walter Scott novels for the lending. “She wished she

could have lived in some old manor house, like those chatelaines in low.

waisted bodices under their trefoiled Gothic arches, spending their days, el

bows on the parapet and chin in hand, peering across the fields for the

white-plumed rider galloping toward her on his black steed. In those days

she worshipped Mary Stuart and venerated other illustrious or ill-fated

women. For her, Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, La Belle Eerronniere,

and Clémence Isaure blazed like comets against the vast dark backcloth of

history.” Already condemned to mimic transcendence, to wear the trap-

pings of grace over an emptiness of belief, Emma leaves convent school, re-

joins her family, and is presently rescued from the farm by a lovesick

country doctor named Charles Bovary, who makes his rounds not gallop-

ing on a black steed but dozing on an old nag. The gluttonous wedding

feast that inaugurates her marriage with barnyard humor, and the preg-

nancy announced at the end of part 1 like a death knell or a brutal non se-

quitur (given her aversion to sex with Charles), show her sinking into,

corporeality before her fall into infidelity To be sure, she briefly plays the

perfect spouse as she once played the perfect neophyte, but she tires of one

as she tired of the other. All is theater. Only in dramatic epiphanies can she

feel real, never in dailiness or routine. Too earthbound for flight, and too

flighty for happiness on earth, she is an actress living life “as if.”

Emma the actress finds a proper stage for her character early in the novel,

at a ball in the chateau of a local blueblood, the marquis d’Andervilliers.

Elaubert escorts her and Charles through the scene brilliantly, participating

in her excitement while depicting events from an ironical remove. It

with their arrival in a one-horse buggy at the mansion, which is a

counterpart to Emma’s convent chapel. She steps across the threshold into

the space of elevation.

Its floor was of marble and its ceiling very high; footsteps and voices echoed

in a church. At the far end rose a straight flight of stairs, and to the left a

facing the garden led to the billiard room, from which a clickety-clack of

balls became audible as one drew near. There, on her way to the salon, Emma

saw grave—faced men gathered around a table with their chins poised on high

cravats; they all wore decorations and smiled silently when wielding their cue

sticks. On the dark wainscot panels hung large gilded frames with names in-

scribed at the bottom in black letters. She read: “jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers

d’Yverbonville, Comte de la Vaubyessard and Baron de la Presnaye, slain at the

Battle of Coutras on 20 October 1587.” And beneath another: “_]ean-Antoine-

Henry—Guy d’Andervilliers de la Vaubyessard, Admiral of the Fleet and Knight

of the Order of St. Michael, wounded at the Battle of Hougue-Saint-Vaast, 29

May 1692, died at La Vaubyessard on 23 January 1693.” She could barely make

out those farther down the line, for the lamps were suspended low over the

green felt of the billiard table. What light shone on the canvases splintered into

fine lines along ridges of cracked varnish, randomly illuminating one feature or

another: here a pale brow, there two eyes trained on the spectator, elsewhere

wigs curling over the powder-flecked shoulder of a scarlet coat, or the buckle of

a garter above a well—turned calf.

This billiard room enshrines Emma’s idea of history as a series of mo-

mentous occasions starring romantic heroes, with dead time in between.

That the portraits illustrating a martial tradition hang ignored in a game

room full of beribboned guests who do battle at a billiard table is the ironic

prelude to her escape from ordinariness, and irony informs everydetail.

Nobiliary particles ——the profusion of “de”s——are all that link past to

present. The great warriors of a heroic age died in battle; the feckless de-

scendants, armed With cue sticks rather than swords or lances, wield them

against ivory balls, their only field of honor being an expanse of green felt.

Indeed, Flaubert’s painted characters exhibit more élan than his live ones.

While the latter, with heads “poised” on high cravats like another set of bil-

liard balls, stand grave—faced around a table, the former move combatively

as light “splinters” against the canvases, over a landscape of ridges, and body

parts leap into view Nothing indicates that Emma can tell the difference.

Where all is theater, all ribbons denote privilege, all particles signify place.

Neither is she disillusioned at another table — a dinner table as heavily

laden as the groaning board of her wedding feast — by the spectacle of an

old duke with red-rimmed eyes got up in a bib to catch the sauce drooling

from his pendulous lips. In much the same Way that Proust’s Marcel repairs

his ideal image of the duchesse de Guermantes after seeing her in the flesh,

blemishes and all, Emma smuggles the duc de Laverdiere out of his senile

incarnation. “Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the

Guermantes had the right of life and death over their vassals; the duchesse

de Guermantes descends from Genevieve de Brabant” is Marcel’s self-

hypnotic litany, and Emma likewise reminds herself that Laverdiere, who

before the Revolution, was rumored to have been Marie-

Antoinette’s lover.

The climactic event is the ball itself, for which Emma, in the bedroom

she and her husband have been assigned, primps “with the fastidiousness of

an actress making her debut.” Sharply rebuked when he plants a kiss on her

bare shoulder and instructed to keep off the dance floor, the extraneous

Charles can play no part in her performance, which will last all night long.

Transported by music, by the glint of diamonds, the scent of jasmine, the

froufrou of satin, the varnish of antiques, the porcelain white of complex-

ions, she enters a second state culminating in vertigo as a titled partner

Waltzes her, spellbound, around the ballroom. Only once does anything of

the real world impinge upon Emma’s consciousness.

From the ballroom, where the air was stuffy and the gaslight dimming, people

began to flow toward the billiard room. A servant stood on a chair and broke

two panes; at the sound of shattering glass she turned her head and saw peasants

in the garden with their faces pressed against the window. Memories of Les

Bertaux [the family farm] sprang to mind. She saw the muddy pond, her father

in his smock under the apple trees and herself in the dairy skimining cream ofi"

the milk churns with her finger. But the fulguration of the present hour dis-

pelled her past life, which had until then been clearly etched in her memory She

came close to doubting that she had ever lived it.

In breaking windowpanes, the servant breaks the mirror at which Emma

had composed herself for the evening. What shatters is the illusion, the

mask, the new being achievable only onstage, in a role. Once open to the

outside world, the ballroom—cum-theater is opened to the gaping face of

history — not the glorious history recounted by patrician portraits but that

which betrays humble origins. Flaubert’s concern with absolutes of interi-

ority and exteriority as they bear upon fictional creation—upon lan-

guage —— thus came to inform a central scene of Madame Bovary,

dramatizing his heroine’s relentless attempts at self-creation. Windows al-

most invariably frame her futility While mirrors befriend the imagination,

windows show her what she is or isn’t, and this adventure ends with Emma

looking through one, in a guest room, after the ball. “The first light of

dawn found her looking at the windows of the chateau and trying to place

behind each one the people she had remarked that evening,” writes

Flaubert. “She would like to have known how they lived, to have pene-

trated their existences, mingled in them.” The window emblemizes a dis-

tance from Being, from la 1/raie 1/ie. When in due course the squire wh0

makes her his mistress jilts her, she will read his letter of farewell at a win-

dow and stop just short of defenestrating herself.