Aaron Burstein, “Subjectivity and Proto-Minimalism in *Madame Bovary* (Part One)"

In his introduction to the Oxford edition of Madame Bovary, Malcolm Bowie states that “Flaubert became famous in his lifetime for the supposed extreme cruelty with which he described his heroine’s downfall and death” (viii). Flaubert’s portrait of Emma Bovary is indeed unflattering in many instances, a fact that is difficult to reconcile with his intense identification with and even erotic attachment to the character. Yet these oppositional facets within the narrative speak to a fundamental aspect of both human behavior and the novel form, the limits of subjectivity.

Wai Chee Dimock, in her considerations of comparative literature, Through Other Continents, briefly summarizes Georg Lukács’ analysis of subjectivity in the novel: “In the epic, totality and subjectivity are fused in the image of a journey, suspenseful, but ultimately completable. In the novel, totality and subjectivity are split apart, the former reduced to an idea, a higher order abstraction not manifest in and not graspable in everyday life” (91). Lukács sees the epic as an objective narrative, relatively disengaged from the interiority of its characters. Dimock’s use of the term “completable” in reference to the epic thereby implies an incompletable element within the novel, which is particularly applicable to realism’s turn from grander narratives and neatly-drawn conclusions to a quotidian world in which readers have reason to suspect the subjective perspectives of characters.  The glaring limitations of Emma’s worldview typifies such incompletableness. Her unhappiness rests on the assumption that her discontent is an aberration, a personal curse of her circumstances: “the stupid petit bourgeois, the mediocrity of life, seemed to her the exception, a freak accident that had befallen her alone, whereas somewhere else, somewhere beyond all this, the vast realm of joy and passion stretched on and forever” (Part I, Ch. 9). She views her dissatisfaction as both a lack of agency and some unfulfilled sense of entitlement for a life “full of drama, masked balls, orgiastic revels, and all the extremes of pleasure that these must surely offer, and that she had never known” (Part I, Ch. 9). The words “must surely…never known” indicate her restricted perspective. Her tangibly inaccessible fantasies reflect the abstract totality toward which Lukács points (in Dimock’s analysis), while her everyday life reflects the social and spiritual incompletability of the realist novel.

Furthermore, Emma’s feelings on what her life ought to be are tellingly derived from her reading habits, at least in part. Bowie notes “If Emma had read better books and read better, [Flaubert] seems to imply, she would not now be in her advanced delusional state” (xvi). The novel even references her tastes for George Sand and Balzac (Part I, Ch. 9). Balzac is a particularly salient figure, since his fiction concerns the sort of high society Emma envies and encounters when she attends the Marquis’ ball. When looking upon her glamorous fellow patrons, Emma “longed to know all about their lives, to penetrate into them, be a part of them” (Part I, Ch. 8). While Balzac’s prose is indeed glamorous, the penetrating aspect of his language also reveals a vast hollowness among the lives of the upper crust (as is the case in “Domestic Peace”). Furthermore, Emma fails to consider the possibility that many of the ball’s attendees may be just like her: ordinary people indulging their fantasies by performing a role. In this regard, Emma’s disaffection with her situation might run even deeper than she realizes. Her fixation on the private misery of simple country life restricts her ability to turn a critical eye toward the abstracted totality her fantasies present.

As a result, Flaubert’s narration shepherds the reader into a reproachful view of Emma. However, this view is a calculated manipulation of the reader’s own subjectivity. By opening the novel with a focus on Charles, Flaubert highlights the personal struggles and insecurities of Emma’s future husband, enabling readers to sympathize with Charles while positioning Emma in an antagonistic light. As characters in a realist novel, Charles and Emma are foils. Both feel they’ve made all the right moves in their pursuit of romance, yet there’s a fundamental difference of expectations. Charles is just happy to have a woman around, considering his appeasement of his previous wife despite her controlling and possessive tendencies. Emma, on the other hand, expects a more revelatory affection: “the desire for change in her life, or perhaps the nervous excitation produced by this man’s presence, had sufficed to persuade her that, at long last, she held within her grasp that marvelous passion which until then had hovered like a great rosy-plumaged bird in the splendor of poetic skies” (Part I, Ch. 6).

However, her move from life in the Norman countryside with her father to life in the Norman countryside with her husband, coupled with an inability to create meaningful change (redecorations, luxurious pursuits, and new locales make little permanent difference in her overall mentality) all leave her in a state of loss. Realism, although committed to ordinary, everyday subjects, does not aspire to a broad, Lukacsian representation of social reality writ large, but rather depicts a distinct condition. Realism thus embodies the incompleteness that Dimock and (as she sees it) Lukács allude to. Flaubert’s realism is a narrative of surface details and material objects of no intrinsic significance, and of characters with desires so abstruse and unarticulated that both they and the reader are left confounded.

To return to Dimock once more, Flaubert’s brand of realism contains certain cross-cultural implications, both in terms of style and subjectivity, which indicate a deep recurrence across human behavior. In contrast to the more extravagant style of realist writers like Henry James or Balzac, Flaubert most accurately speaks to 20^th-century American realism, specifically dirty realism or minimalism. Bowie describes Flaubert’s characters as “little in moral stature, limited in intelligence, stunted in their ambitions, sordid in their private thoughts, and ridiculous in their public prating and posturing” (viii). On the subject of language, Bowie finds Madame Bovary “remarkable for its economy and precision, and throughout [Flaubert] seems intent on vindicating the aesthetic principle ‘less is more’” (xxii). Both these observations could just as easily have referred to writers like Raymond Carver or Bobbie Ann Mason.

All of these authors focus on emotionally and communicatively deficient individuals, generally ranging from lower to middle class, and write with a formal commitment to the notion that “something strange and undeclared is going on” (x). While Bowie suggests “that Flaubert has other than ‘realist’ designs upon us,” his heightened focus on style seems to be an amplification of realist depiction rather than a departure from it. In his sparse and candid treatment of Emma Bovary, Flaubert strives toward an impression of provincial and historicized totality, while nonetheless championing the realist novel after Scott in all its subjective incompletability.