Madame Bovary Read Free

more lyrical than the one he let stand. Marcel Proust, for one, writing more than sixty years after the publication of the novel, regretted the absence of metaphor, since he believed, as he said, that “only metaphor can give a sort of eternity to style.” But he admitted that there was more to style than metaphor alone.
    Proust goes on to say that in all of Flaubert there is not a single beautiful metaphor. Yet here is another lovely comparison to a butterfly: after she has given herself to Léon for the first time, in the closed carriage that careens through Rouen, Emma tears up the note of rejection she had uselessly written him, and “a bare hand passed under the little blinds of yellow canvas and threw out some torn scraps of paper, which scattered in the wind and alighted, at a distance, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in bloom.”
    If objective description was Flaubert’s literary method, that objectivity was always imbued with irony. To see and judge a thing with a cool eye was to judge it with the irony that had been a part of his nature since he was a child. His irony pervades the book, coloring each detail, each situation, each event, each character, the fate of each character, and the overarching story.
    It is present in his choice of names: the old rattletrap of a coach called “Swallow”; the many character names, such as Bovary itself, that are variations of the French for “ox”; the evil moneylender Lheureux (“happy one”).
    It is present in the words and phrases in the novel to which he gives special emphasis—in the manuscript he would have underlined them, of course, as he does similar language in his correspondence; in print they are italicized. They appear throughout the novel, starting on the first page with new boy. With this emphasis he is drawing attention to language that was commonly, and unthinkingly, used to express shared ideas that were also unquestioned. Some, such as new boy , are relatively innocuous; others may reveal a malevolent prejudice, such as the comment made by Madame Tuvache, the mayor’s wife, to her maid (reported as indirect speech), when she learns that Emma has taken a walk alone with Léon: “ Madame Bovary was compromising herself. ”
    Flaubert’s irony is present in the eloquent juxtapositions he creates between the “poetic” and the brutally commonplace, with an effect that is sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking, but that always draws us up short, breaks the “mood.” An exquisite passage—often a description of nature—will be undercut, as though here Flaubert is also undercutting his own lyrical impulse, by what immediately follows it, a banal, mundane comparison or action. There are numerous examples.
    Emma, for instance, is lying on the ground in the woods, still tremulous from her first lovemaking with Rodolphe, in tune with the surrounding natural landscape, which is fully and sensuously described; the passage ends with the flat statement that Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, is mending a bridle. Much later in the story, in a boat with Léon, Emma feels a chill at the thought of Rodolphe with other women; the boatman, who has unknowingly upset her, spits into his palm and takes up his oars. Crushingly, pathetically, after Emma’s death, as she is being laid out, one of the women working over her admires her beauty inrather glib terms—how alive she still looks; as if in rebuke, when the woman lifts Emma’s head to put on her wreath, black liquid runs out of her mouth. Flaubert the obdurate antiromantic could not be more clearly in evidence than at this moment.
    As in the above examples, it is the incisive specificity of the poetic details and then the abruptness with which Flaubert “cuts” to the equally specific but disturbing or brutal details that jolts us so.
    Some of these ironic juxtapositions produce not horror, or pathos, but humor.
    For instance, during the scene at the agricultural fair, the poetic and