"Ever since early adolescence, Flaubert had regarded bourgeois existence as an immense, indistinct, unmitigated state of mindlessness," pronounces Geoffrey Wall in the Introduction to the Penguin Classics 2003 edition of Madame Bovary. (p. xxx.)
Emma exhibits symptoms of this mindlessness in her choice of reading: romance novels, treated in the book like a decidedly low-class, but highly addictive, drug. Emma's first taste of romance novels comes from the old servant in her convent school, who lent "the big girls, clandestinely, one of the novels she always kept in the pocket of her apron" (p. 34) -- and so the good girl is corrupted by the help.
Despite the interventions of her pious mother-in-law, on whose advice "it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels" (p. 117), Emma's reading continues unabated, with disastrous effect on her correspondence: "in the letters that Emma sent to [Leon], there was a great deal about flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, naive devices of a depleted passion, attempting to rejuvenate itself from external sources." (p. 263.) "As a reader," Geoffrey Wall solemnly condemns her, Emma "only wants what she can incorporate easily into the stereotyped repertoire of her fantasies." (p. xxv.)
Flaubert's ambition, then, was to attack the bourgeois mindset by undermining the complicity books had in perpetuating its existence: "Writing such as [Flaubert's] invites us, delectably, to reinvent our reading." (p. xxxix.)
Flaubert's project seems, in later generations, to have been derailed by psychology, the advent of which postulated that bourgeois existence is not an "indistinct . . . state of mindlessness," but a variegated -- and extremely interesting -- assortment of neuroses. Where Flaubert sought to inspire disgust in the bourgeois mindset, in order to provoke the will to change, psychology reinforced the bourgeois existence by infusing it with fascination. Psychology drained the deadly boredom out of Flaubert's vision of bourgeois existence.
Flaubert himself foreshadows this development. In a book conspicuously devoid of passages depicting self-reflection, or anything but the most perfunctory assertions of the mental states of the characters, the following passage caught my attention:
(p. 93.) The general trend of literature after Flaubert has been to examine closely those pools of rain, forming on the roof behind the blocked gutters, implacably cracking the edifice. But because bourgeois mediocrity has such power that it can transform a potent agent of change, like psychology, into a neutered tool of commercialism, like self-improvement mania -- and because language is itself a poor match for such power ("like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars," (p. 177)) -- Flaubert's abiding mission has yet to see fruition. Notwithstanding the ending Flaubert contrived for her, Madame Bovary lives on.
Emma exhibits symptoms of this mindlessness in her choice of reading: romance novels, treated in the book like a decidedly low-class, but highly addictive, drug. Emma's first taste of romance novels comes from the old servant in her convent school, who lent "the big girls, clandestinely, one of the novels she always kept in the pocket of her apron" (p. 34) -- and so the good girl is corrupted by the help.
Despite the interventions of her pious mother-in-law, on whose advice "it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels" (p. 117), Emma's reading continues unabated, with disastrous effect on her correspondence: "in the letters that Emma sent to [Leon], there was a great deal about flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, naive devices of a depleted passion, attempting to rejuvenate itself from external sources." (p. 263.) "As a reader," Geoffrey Wall solemnly condemns her, Emma "only wants what she can incorporate easily into the stereotyped repertoire of her fantasies." (p. xxv.)
Flaubert's ambition, then, was to attack the bourgeois mindset by undermining the complicity books had in perpetuating its existence: "Writing such as [Flaubert's] invites us, delectably, to reinvent our reading." (p. xxxix.)
Flaubert's project seems, in later generations, to have been derailed by psychology, the advent of which postulated that bourgeois existence is not an "indistinct . . . state of mindlessness," but a variegated -- and extremely interesting -- assortment of neuroses. Where Flaubert sought to inspire disgust in the bourgeois mindset, in order to provoke the will to change, psychology reinforced the bourgeois existence by infusing it with fascination. Psychology drained the deadly boredom out of Flaubert's vision of bourgeois existence.
Flaubert himself foreshadows this development. In a book conspicuously devoid of passages depicting self-reflection, or anything but the most perfunctory assertions of the mental states of the characters, the following passage caught my attention:
Love, [Emma] believed, had to come, suddenly, with a great clap of thunder and a lightning flash, a tempest from heaven that falls upon your life . . . . Little did she know know that up on the roof of the house, the rain will form a pool if the gutters are blocked, and there she would have stayed feeling safe inside, until one day she suddenly discovered the crack right down the wall.
(p. 93.) The general trend of literature after Flaubert has been to examine closely those pools of rain, forming on the roof behind the blocked gutters, implacably cracking the edifice. But because bourgeois mediocrity has such power that it can transform a potent agent of change, like psychology, into a neutered tool of commercialism, like self-improvement mania -- and because language is itself a poor match for such power ("like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars," (p. 177)) -- Flaubert's abiding mission has yet to see fruition. Notwithstanding the ending Flaubert contrived for her, Madame Bovary lives on.
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