The Adulteress

The title of Flaubert’s novel “Madame Bovary” has doubtless dissuaded some Americans from reading it. To many of us the term “Madame” has a faintly old-fashion sound to it. A novel about a “madame” doesn’t promise a sensual, provocative and mesmerizing literary experience. “Madame” suggests to us perhaps a dignified, upper class lady, probably of “foreign extraction.” Or else we are inclined to think of a “madame” in connection with some bustle-wearing, heavily perfumed, procuress in Dodge City.

In French “Madame” (accent on the second syllable) simply means “Mrs.” (as in “Mrs. Robinson…”). But if Flaubert’s book were called simply, “Emma,” or, even more candidly, “The Adulteress,” perhaps more contemporary readers would take it up and hang in there long enough to understand why many other writers have called it a “perfect” novel and why Flaubert is considered, in the admiring words of Henry James, “a novelist’s novelist.”

In years past I had started the book numerous times but had given up, doubtless because I felt obliged to read it in French, and after fifty or so pages the effort dragged me down. In the last few weeks, though, I read it in full—in English, which I’m passably good at. And immediately upon finishing it, without even a pause to look around or take a deep breath, I began reading a second time. I can’t say that of any novel I’ve ever read—that I’ve wanted to go right back to page one and do it all over again. I now understand why Nabokov says you haven’t really read a book if you’ve just read it once.

The critic and aesthetic philosopher Walter Pater, who lived at roughly the same time Flaubert flourished (around the middle of the 19th century), talked a lot about the “sensuous material” in a work of art, i.e. the pure sources of stimulus before they’ve been processed in the viewer’s or reader’s or listener’s mind by intellection. This “sensuous material” is for Pater the most important element in a work of art. The aesthetic experience for him is a kind of three-fold process that begins with the sense organs receiving an impression (a sound, a visual image, a tactile or even olfactory stimulus). Then the intellectual process kicks in, analyzing the stimulus and processing the data, comparing it with previously stored experience. This is the cognitive state. Finally a third, synthesizing activity that Pater calls “imaginative reason” goes into action. “Imagination” in the sense that Pater uses it is a higher, more sophisticated process than either mere perception or “mere” intellectual reasoning, being a sort of fusing of both the sensory experience and its intellectual, analytically derived interpretation. If this process is successfully carried out a kind of sublime meta-experience takes place, producing a situation in which the “sensuous material” is experienced as pure form. If I understand him correctly, this then would be the essence of the aesthetic encounter.

So what makes a novel about a restless small-town twenty-something woman and her desperate, sad extramarital love affairs so aesthetically overwhelming, so sublimely satisfying in its merging of “matter” and “form?” And why, upon reading and rereading “Madame Bovary,” does it make me think of Pater and his comments about “imaginative reason?” The answer is probably because Flaubert throughout his life labored so hard to focus on the “sensuous material.” His books are rich with description. They positively teem with it, to the point that you feel like you are eating things, bite by bite and tasting the flavor of every smallest, most exquisitely chosen observation.

An example: Emma’s husband, the tedious, clueless young “doctor” Charles Bovary—he’s not even a doctor, but a kind of lower-level medical practitioner—is performing a blood-letting on a peasant whose master has brought him in sick:

“Bovary began preparing a bandage and a basin…he said to the villager, who was already quite pale: “Don’t be afraid, my boy.”

“Not me,” the other answered. “Go ahead.” And he held out his muscular arm with an air of bravado. The blood spurted out at the prick of the lancet and splattered all over the mirror.

“Hold the basin closer,” Charles exclaimed.

“Look at that!” said the peasant. “You’d swear it was a little fountain the way it runs. Look how red my blood is. Must be a good sign, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” said the doctor, “you don’t feel anything at first and then you faint away. Especially people as healthy as you.”

At these words the man dropped the little box that he had been turning with his fingers. His shoulders jerked so rapidly that they made the back of his chair crack. His hat fell off.

“I thought so,” said Bovary, placing his finger over the vein.
The basin began trembling in Justin’s hands. His knees shook and he became pale.”

Flaubert wrote slowly and agonized every word choice. (Madame Bovary took him five years to write.) Reading this short passage makes you realize that everything that appears in his text was experienced in real life. You don’t simply sit at your desk and imagine such vivid detail—the spurt of the blood against the mirror, the attempted bravado of the patient, the “crack” of the chair as he collapses in a faint and, most telling of all, the “trembling” of the basin full of blood. Does it tremble because the young assistant holding it is also feeling faint and is about to collapse (which in fact he does)? Or does the basin tremble because it’s full to the brim with blood? Perhaps both answers are correct.

Emma marries Charles at a very young age. He has been previously married to an older woman, a jealous, paranoid widow, thin and bony, “whose feet in bed were as cold as ice.” (Flaubert could be cruel and pitiless in how he chose to evoke a character’s qualities.) Emma doesn’t particularly love him. She just wants to escape her boring existence, living alone on a remote farm with her aged father.

Once married, they drift rapidly into a humdrum domestic existence. While she is going out of her mind with boredom and frustration, he is the happiest man on the planet. He is also the most unconscious man on the planet, blissfully unaware of what rapidly become the seething frustrations of his restless and perilously alluring young wife. What little intellectual vivacity he might possess quickly dissolves into a satiated routine of nightly ritual, his heavy dinners, copious glasses of wine, a post-prandial snooze in front of a warm hearth and then bed—into which he flops only to snore loudly. Soon even his lovemaking becomes a part of this routine, no different for him than another course at dinner. While Charles in his clueless stupor thinks himself the luckiest, happiest man alive, Emma is realizing with a horrible shock of despair that she is hopelessly trapped in a tedious, bourgeois marriage to a man who, although he genuinely loves her, is constitutionally incapable of understanding her. They have a child, a little girl. Emma can never really decide whether she loves her or not.

Emma quickly understands that Charles’s passion will never equal the extravagance or romance she’d always imagined in a man. “His effusions had become routine; he embraced her at certain hours. In was one habit among others, like the established custom of eating dessert after the monotony of dinner.”

She is beautiful: small, sensuous, with dark, flashing eyes and long auburn hair that she regularly alters in style, an expression of her unwillingness to submit to the stultifying norms of village life. You are alternately appalled by her and then forced to love her for the life force that thrives inside of her.

Her misery and her raging, unsatisfied sexual appetite finally prod her to incautiously take a lover, Rodolphe, an idle, rich bachelor whom we can safely describe as one of the all-time scumbags in literature.

Rodolphe’s cynicism is so blatant and his flattery so meretricious and vulgar that you wonder that Emma could not pick up on it. He views her as a tender bud just for the plucking—-or, in the crass metaphor Flaubert puts in his mouth, she looks like she is “gasping for love, like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water.” He sizes up her dull, pathetic husband and dismisses him as a cipher and no obstacle to his plan for conquest:

“He’s got dirty fingernails and a three-day growth of beard. He trots off to his patients, and she stays home darning socks.”

Soon enough Emma has fallen completely in love with this selfish fraud of a man who lives by himself in an elegant chateau outside the town. In a scene that is as evocatively fresh and beautiful as it is pathetically desperate we see her waiting until her husband has left on an early medical call and then sneaking out at dawn, “panting with desire” for her lover as she walks rapidly and stealthily the long distance along the bank of a river and over fields to his chateau.

“…she had to walk along the walls beside the water; the bank was slippery; to keep from falling, she would grasp the tufts of faded wallflowers. Farther on, she would turn into the plowed fields, where she would stumble as her thin boots sank deep and filled with mud. Her kerchief, tied around her head, would flutter in the wind of the meadows; she was afraid of the oxen and would arrive out of breath, her cheeks flushed, and her body exuding a fresh fragrance of sap, verdure, and open air. Rodolphe would be still sleeping at that hour, and it was as if a spring morning had come into his bedroom.

“Through the yellow curtains along the windows a heavy light softly penetrated. Emma blinked, groping her way, while the drops of dew on her hair resembled a topaz halo around her face. Rodolphe would laughingly pull her to him and hold her close to his chest.”

The thrill of the writing is in the minutiae of the detail: the mud on her boots, the tufts of grass she has to grab on to in order not to fall into the water, her kerchief fluttering in the morning wind, the “fresh fragrance” of her body, all sweaty and yet cooled by the chilled morning air. “It was as if spring had come into his bedroom.” Is there anything as purely delightful and seductive as this chain of imagery?

To be continued.