C'est Moi: Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is an intricate and compelling tale of a young woman caught in the throes of romanticism, a tale full of rich imagery and authorial allusions to Flaubert’s own life. In fact, he is once quoted as saying, “Madame Bovary c’est moi.” This, however is counterbalanced by his own insistence that “Nowhere in my book must the author express his emotions or his opinions” (Letters 302). Therefore, the reader is left to wonder whether Flaubert has truly managed to keep his emotions and opinions out of his work.

One point of conversion between Flaubert’s life and this novel is the attitude the novel takes towards Romanticism. It is at once playing up the romantic form but is also condescending and critical about those who read it. Emma spends all of her childhood reading romantic novels and, from a young age has a very definite image of the way the world is supposed to work:

When her mother died she cried much the first few days…Emma was pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of delicate lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself meander along the Lamartine, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans…She soon grew tired but wouldn’t admit it, continued from habit first, then out of vanity, and at last was surprised to feel herself consoled, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her brow (Bovary 34).

Emma is in fact pleased at herself for the quality of her mourning, emotions that run only as deep as her skin, as evidenced by the comment about the wrinkles on her brow. She is only concerned with her image, as she openly admits that she continues “out of vanity” to appear the mourning heroine. It is worthwhile to note though that Flaubert’s early work is stereotypical romantic literature. In fact, his work at times becomes so romantic that his friends jeered him and demanded he write something real (Chang). As such, this commentary about Emma’s romanticism becomes much more than a commentary about a realist author against the romantic novel. It has become a commentary on his own work.

This is interesting, because as Paris notes:

“The primary object of Flaubert’s satire is Emma’s romanticism, which is shown to be foolish, derivative, and destructive. Many critics feel that Flaubert sympathizes with Emma’s frustrations, which are blamed on the meanness of bourgeois society, and I think that they are not entirely wrong in sensing that it is not only Emma but also Flaubert who is a thwarted romantic.” (22)

Flaubert’s friends obviously share the narratorial attitudes about the frivolity and uselessness of romanticism. In a flight of romantic fancy, Emma consistently chooses a course of action she believes to hold the greatest passion and intrigue. She throws her wedding bouquet into the fire to symbolize the end of her marriage, just before she becomes pregnant. She carries on affairs, one with a wealthy man, another with a clerk whom she felt she had a connection with and could speak on higher brow subjects, regardless of the accuracy. The clerk, Léon, says

“It is the same with mountainous landscapes…A cousin of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes…and I no longer wonder why a celebrated musician…was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing view.” (Bovary 69)

Léon has never seen these mountainous views, but he interjects this nugget into a discussion on just how beautiful landscapes can be. It shows that no matter how romantic your inclination, if you pretend to have the culture and class that romanticism requires, you often end up just looking silly. For instance, how is one to obtain a piano in the middle of a mountain range? It is illogical and fanciful.

Paris also notes that Emma “is spellbound by the social elegance and material refinements of this world, but Flaubert subverts her view of it by calling attention to its sordid features.” (11) This is nowhere more evident than on page 48 of the novel when she is examining the shoes that she wore to the one ball they were invited to. “The…soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart resembled them: in its contact with wealth, something had rubbed off on it that could not be removed.” Once again, the characters are coming close to the romantic ideal, trying to move among the higher echelons of society, but they only come away with dirt on their noses, or in this case, wax on their heels. And it dirties them; in this case it actually stains her heart.

And this heightened romanticism has blinded these characters to true and real love. In the case of Emma, Charles. Charles is far from a throw-away buffoon in the novel. He is actually in love with the dastardly woman as evidenced by several passages. Just after the couple are married, Charles “reproached himself for not loving her enough; he wanted to see her again, turned back quickly, ran up the stairs with a beating heart…he came up on tiptoe, kissed her back” (Bovary 29). And when Charles is burying his wife, he puts together a funeral fit for a queen, with nesting coffins and statues (259). He fully and truly loves Emma in this world, though he is blind to her faults. If Emma had not been blinded by romanticism, she may have been able to see the reality of love in her own house.

It can be argued that this sort of commentary on Flaubert’s part is poking fun at his friends who criticized the romanticism in his earlier works. He is recognizing that these characters have taken the romanticism in books too far, that their deluded view of love and society have brought them nothing but pain. However, these characters are not experiencing true romanticism. They do not, as the bard says, now understand the full and true meaning of love songs. They simply pretend that they do. In essence, Flaubert is saying that if you pretend to romanticism, you will fail. However, if you abandon yourself to love as Charles does, you will be happier. For, though Charles is simple and does not understand the depths of his wife’s betrayal until after her death, he loves her even then. Charles is the true romantic of the story, willing to overlook faults and capriciousness out of devotion to his love.