If Flaubert allows himself the liberty of telling his story in various
ways--with a method, that is to say, which is often modified as he
proceeds--it is likely that he has good cause to do so. Weighing every
word and calculating every effect so patiently, he could not have been
casual and careless over his method; he would not take one way rather
than another because it saved him trouble, or because he failed to
notice that there were other ways, or because they all seemed to him
much the same. And yet at first sight it does seem that his manner of
arriving at his subject--if his subject is Emma Bovary--is
considerably casual. He begins with Charles, of all people--Charles,
her husband, the stupid soul who falls heavily in love with her
prettiness and never has the glimmer of an understanding of what she
is; and he begins with the early history of Charles, and his
upbringing, and the irrelevant first marriage that his mother forces
upon him, and his widowhood; and then it happens that Charles has a
professional visit to pay to a certain farm, the farmer's daughter
happens to be Emma, and so we finally stumble upon the subject of the
book. Is that the neatest possible mode of striking it? But Flaubert
seems to be very sure of himself, and it is not uninteresting to ask
exactly what he means.
As for his subject, it is of course Emma Bovary in the first place;
the book is the portrait of a foolish woman, romantically inclined, in
small and prosaic conditions. She is in the centre of it all,
certainly; there is no doubt of her position in the book. But _why_ is
she there? The true subject of the novel is not given, as we saw, by a
mere summary of the course which is taken by the story. She may be
there for her own sake, simply, or for the sake of the predicament in
which she stands; she may be presented as a curious scrap of
character, fit to be studied; or Flaubert may have been struck by her
as the instrument, the victim, the occasion, of a particular train of
events. Perhaps she is a creature portrayed because he thinks her
typical and picturesque; perhaps she is a disturbing little force let
loose among the lives that surround her; perhaps, on the other hand,
she is a hapless sufferer in the clash between her aspirations and her
fate. Given Emma and what she is by nature, given her environment and
the facts of her story, there are dozens of different subjects, I dare
say, latent in the case. The woman, the men, all they say and do, the
whole scene behind them--none of it gives any clue to the right manner
of treating them. The one irreducible idea out of which the book, as
Flaubert wrote it, unfolds--this it is that must be sought.
Now if Emma was devised for her own sake, solely because a nature and
a temper like hers seemed to Flaubert an amusing study--if his one aim
was to make the portrait of a woman of that kind--then the rest of the
matter falls into line, we shall know how to regard it. These
conditions in which Emma finds herself will have been chosen by the
author because they appeared to throw light on her, to call out her
natural qualities, to give her the best opportunity of disclosing what
she is. Her stupid husband and her fascinating lovers will enter the
scene in order that she may become whatever she has it in her to be.
Flaubert elects to place her in a certain provincial town, full of odd
characters; he gives the town and its folk an extraordinary actuality;
it is not a town _quelconque_, not a generalized town, but as
individual and recognizable as he can make it. None the less--always
supposing that Emma by herself is the whole of his subject--he must
have lit on this particular town simply because it seemed to explain
and expound her better than another. If he had thought that a woman of
her sort, rather meanly ambitious, rather fatuously romantic, would
have revealed her quality more intensely in a different world--in
success, freedom, wealth--he would have placed her otherwise; Charles
and Rodolphe and Homard and the rest of them would have vanished, the
more illuminating set of circumstances (whatever they might be) would
have appeared instead. Emma's world as it is at present, in the book
that Flaubert wrote, would have to be regarded, accordingly, as all a
_consequence_ of Emma, invented to do her a service, described in
order that they may make the description of _her_. Her world, that is
to say, would belong to the treatment of the story; none of it, not
her husband, not the life of the market-town, would be a part of the
author's postulate, the groundwork of his fable; it would be possible
to imagine a different setting, better, it might be, than that which
Flaubert has chosen. All this--_if_ the subject of the book is nothing
but the portrait of such a woman.
But of course it is not so; one glance at our remembrance of the book
is enough to show it. Emma's world could not be other than it is, she
could not be shifted into richer and larger conditions, without
destroying the whole point and purpose of Flaubert's novel. She by
herself is not the subject of his book. What he proposes to exhibit is
the history of a woman like her in just such a world as hers, a
foolish woman in narrow circumstances; so that the provincial scene,
acting upon her, making her what she becomes, is as essential as she
is herself. Not a portrait, therefore, not a study of character for
its own sake, but something in the nature of a drama, where the two
chief players are a woman on one side and her whole environment on the
other--that is Madame Bovary. There is a conflict, a trial of
strength, and a doubtful issue. Emma is not much of a force, no doubt;
her impulses are wild, her emotions are thin and poor, she has no
power of passion with which to fight the world. All she has is her
romantic dream and her plain, primitive appetite; but these can be
effective arms, after all, and she may yet succeed in getting her way
and making her own terms. On the other hand the limitations of her
life are very blank and uncompromising indeed; they close all round
her, hampering her flights, restricting her opportunities. The drama
is set, at any rate, whatever may come of it; Emma marries her
husband, is established at Yonville and faced with the poverty of her
situation. Something will result, the issue will announce itself. It
is the mark of a dramatic case that it contains an opposition of some
kind, a pair of wills that collide, an action that pulls in two
directions; and so far Madame Bovary has the look of a drama. Flaubert
might work on the book from that point of view and throw the emphasis
on the issue. The middle of his subject would then be found in the
struggle between Emma and all that constitutes her life, between her
romantic dreams and her besetting facts. The question is what will
happen.
But then again--that is not exactly the question in this book.
Obviously the emphasis is not upon the commonplace little events of
Emma's career. They might, no doubt, be the steps in a dramatic tale,
but they are nothing of the kind as Flaubert handles them. He makes it
perfectly clear that his view is not centred upon the actual outcome
of Emma's predicament, whether it will issue this way or that; _what_
she does or fails to do is of very small moment. Her passages with
Rodolphe and with Léon are pictures that pass; they solve nothing,
they lead to no climax. Rodolphe's final rejection of her, for
example, is no scene of drama, deciding a question that has been held
in suspense; it is one of Emma's various mischances, with its own
marked effect upon _her_, but it does not stand out in the book as a
turning-point in the action. She goes her way and acts out her
history; but of whatever suspense, whatever dramatic value, there
might be in it Flaubert makes nothing, he evidently considers it of no
account. Who, in recalling the book, thinks of the chain of incident
that runs through it, compared with the long and living impression of
a few of the people in it and of the place in which they are set? None
of the events really matter for their own sake; they might have
happened differently, not one of them is indispensable as it is. Emma
must certainly have made what she could of her opportunities of
romance, but they need not necessarily have appeared in the shape of
Léon or Rodolphe; she would have found others if these had not been at
hand. The _events_, therefore, Emma's excursions to Rouen, her
forest-rides, her one or two memorable adventures in the world, all
these are only Flaubert's way of telling his subject, of making it
count to the eye. They are not in themselves what he has to say, they
simply illustrate it.
What it comes to, I take it, is that though Madame Bovary, the novel,
is a kind of drama--since there is the interaction of this woman
confronted by these facts--it is a drama chosen for the sake of the
picture in it, for the impression it gives of the manner in which
certain lives are lived. It might have another force of its own; it
might be a strife of characters and wills, in which the men and women
would take the matter into their own hands and make all the interest
by their action; it might be a drama, say, as Jane Eyre is a drama,
where another obscure little woman has a part to play, but where the
question is how she plays it, what she achieves or misses in
particular. To Flaubert the situation out of which he made his novel
appeared in another light. It was not as dramatic as it was pictorial;
there was not the stuff in Emma, more especially, that could make her
the main figure of a drama; she is small and futile, she could not
well uphold an interest that would depend directly on her behaviour.
But for a picture, where the interest depends only on what she
_is_--that is quite different. Her futility is then a real value; it
can be made amusing and vivid to the last degree, so long as no other
weight is thrown on it; she can make a perfect impression of life,
though she cannot create much of a story. Let Emma and her plight,
therefore, appear as a picture; let her be shown in the act of living
her life, entangled as it is with her past and her present; that is
how the final fact at the heart of Flaubert's subject will be best
displayed.
Here is the clue, it seems, to his treatment of the theme. It is
pictorial, and its object is to make Emma's existence as intelligible
and visible as may be. We who read the book are to share her sense of
life, till no uncertainty is left in it; we are to see and understand
her experience, and to see _her_ while she enjoys or endures it; we
are to be placed within her world, to get the immediate taste of it,
and outside her world as well, to get the full effect, more of it than
she herself could see. Flaubert's subject demands no less, if the
picture is to be complete. She herself must be known thoroughly--that
is his first care; the movement of her mind is to be watched at work
in all the ardour and the poverty of her imagination. How she creates
her makeshift romances, how she feeds on them, how they fail her--it
is all part of the picture. And then there is the dull and limited
world in which her appetite is somehow to be satisfied, the small town
that shuts her in and cuts her off; this, too, is to be rendered, and
in order to make it clearly tell beside the figure of Emma it must be
as distinct and individual, as thoroughly characterized as she is. It
is more than a setting for Emma and her intrigue; it belongs to the
book integrally, much more so than the accidental lovers who fall in
Emma's way. They are mere occasions and attractions for her fancy; the
town and the _curé_ and the apothecary and the other indigenous
gossips need a sharper definition. And accordingly Flaubert treats the
scenery of his book, Yonville and its odd types, as intensely as he
treats his heroine; he broods over it with concentration and gives it
all the salience he can. The town with its life is not behind his
heroine, subdued in tone to make a background; it is _with_ her, no
less fully to the front; its value in the picture is as strong as her
own.
Such is the picture that Flaubert's book is to present. And what,
then, of the point of view towards which it is to be directed? If it
is to have that unity which it needs to produce its right effect there
can be no uncertainty here, no arbitrary shifting of the place from
which an onlooker faces it. And in the tale of Madame Bovary the
question of the right point of view might be considerably perplexing.
Where is Flaubert to find his centre of vision?--from what point,
within the book or without, will the unfolding of the subject be
commanded most effectively? The difficulty is this--that while one
aspect of his matter can only be seen from within, through the eyes of
the woman, another must inevitably be seen from without, through
nobody's eyes but the author's own. Part of his subject is Emma's
sense of her world; we must see how it impresses her and what she
makes of it, how it thwarts her and how her imagination contrives to
get a kind of sustenance out of it. The book is not really written at
all unless it shows her view of things, as the woman she was, in that
place, in those conditions. For this reason it is essential to pass
into her consciousness, to make her _subjective_; and Flaubert takes
care to do so and to make her so, as soon as she enters the book. But
it is also enjoined by the story, as we found, that her place and
conditions should be seen for what they are and known as intimately as
herself. For this matter Emma's capacity fails.
Her intelligence is much too feeble and fitful to give a sufficient
account of her world. The town of Yonville would be very poorly
revealed to us if Flaubert had to keep within the measure of _her_
perceptions; it would be thin and blank, it would be barely more than
a dull background for the beautiful apparition of the men she desires.
What were her neighbours to her? They existed in her consciousness
only as tiresome interruptions and drawbacks, except now and then when
she had occasion to make use of them. But to us, to the onlooker, they
belong to her portrait, they represent the dead weight of provincial
life which is the outstanding fact in her case. Emma's rudimentary
idea of them is entirely inadequate; she has not a vestige of the
humour and irony that is needed to give them shape. Moreover they
affect her far more forcibly and more variously than she could even
suspect; a sharper wit than hers must evidently intervene, helping out
the primitive workings of her mind. Her pair of eyes is not enough;
the picture beheld through them is a poor thing in itself, for she can
see no more than her mind can grasp; and it does her no justice
either, since she herself is so largely the creation of her
surroundings.
It is a dilemma that appears in any story, wherever the matter to be
represented is the experience of a simple soul or a dull intelligence.
If it is the experience and the actual taste of it that is to be
imparted, the story must be viewed as the poor creature saw it; and
yet the poor creature cannot tell the story in full. A shift of the
vision is necessary. And in Madame Bovary, it is to be noted, there is
no one else within the book who is in a position to take up the tale
when Emma fails. There is no other personage upon the scene who sees
and understands any more than she; perception and discrimination are
not to be found in Yonville at all--it is an essential point. The
author's wit, therefore, and none other, must supply what is wanting.
This necessity, to a writer of Flaubert's acute sense of effect, is
one that demands a good deal of caution. The transition must be made
without awkwardness, without calling attention to it. Flaubert is not
the kind of story-teller who will leave it undisguised; he will not
begin by "going behind" Emma, giving her view, and then openly,
confessedly, revert to his own character and use his own standards.
There is nothing more disconcerting in a novel than to _see_ the
writer changing his part in this way--throwing off the character into
which he has been projecting himself and taking a new stand outside
and away from the story.
Perhaps it is only Thackeray, among the great, who seems to find a
positively wilful pleasure in damaging his own story by open
maltreatment of this kind; there are times when Thackeray will even
boast of his own independence, insisting in so many words on his
freedom to say what he pleases about his men and women and to make
them behave as he will. But without using Thackeray's licence a
novelist may still do his story an ill turn by leaving too naked a
contrast between the subjective picture of what passes through Emma's
mind--Emma's or Becky's, as it may be--and the objective rendering of
what he sees for himself, between the experience that is mirrored in
another thought and that which is shaped in his own. When one has
lived _into_ the experience of somebody in the story and received the
full sense of it, to be wrenched out of the story and stationed at a
distance is a shock that needs to be softened and muffled in some
fashion. Otherwise it may weaken whatever was true and valid in the
experience; for here is a new view of it, external and detached, and
another mind at work, the author's--and that sense of having shared
the life of the person in the story seems suddenly unreal.
Flaubert's way of disguising the inconsistency is not a peculiar art
of his own, I dare say. Even in him it was probably quite unconscious,
well as he was aware of most of the refinements of his craft; and
perhaps it is only a sleight of hand that might come naturally to any
good story-teller. But it is interesting to follow Flaubert's method
to the very end, for it holds out so consummately; and I think it is
possible to define it here. I should say, then, that he deals with the
difficulty I have described by keeping Emma always at a certain
distance, even when he appears to be entering her mind most freely. He
makes her subjective, places us so that we see through her eyes--yes;
but he does so with an air of aloofness that forbids us ever to become
entirely identified with her. This is how she thought and felt, he
seems to say; look and you will understand; such is the soul of this
foolish woman. A hint of irony is always perceptible, and it is enough
to prevent us from being lost in her consciousness, immersed in it
beyond easy recall. The woman's life is very real, perfectly felt; but
the reader is made to accept his participation in it as a pleasing
experiment, the kind of thing that appeals to a fastidious
curiosity--there is no question of its ever being more than this. The
_fact_ of Emma is taken with entire seriousness, of course; she is
there to be studied and explored, and no means of understanding her
point of view will be neglected. But her value is another matter; as
to that Flaubert never has an instant's illusion, he always knows her
to be worthless.
He knows it without asserting it, needless to say; his valuation of
her is only implied; it is in his tone--never in his words, which
invariably respect her own estimate of herself. His irony, none the
less, is close at hand and indispensable; he has a definite use for
this resource and he could not forego it. His irony gives him perfect
freedom to supersede Emma's limited vision whenever he pleases, to
abandon her manner of looking at the world, and to pass immediately to
his own more enlightened, more commanding height. Her manner was
utterly convincing while she exhibited it; but we always knew that a
finer mind was watching her display with a touch of disdain. From time
to time it leaves her and begins to create the world of Homard and
Binet and Lheureux and the rest, in a fashion far beyond any possible
conception of hers. Yet there is no dislocation here, no awkward
substitution of one set of values for another; very discreetly the
same standard has reigned throughout. That is the way in which
Flaubert's impersonality, so called, artfully operates.
And now another difficulty; there is still more that is needed and
that is not yet provided for. Emma must be placed in her world and
fitted into it securely. Some glimpse of her appearance in the sight
of those about her--this, too, we look for, to make the whole account
of her compact and complete. Her relation to her husband, for
instance, is from her side expressed very clearly in her view of him,
which we possess; but there are advantages in seeing it from his side
too. What did _he_ really think of her, how did she appear to him?
Light on this question not only makes a more solid figure of her for
the reader, but it also brings her once for all into the company of
the people round her, establishes her in the circle of their
experience. Emma from within we have seen, and Yonville from the
author's point of vantage; and now here is Emma from a point by her
very side, when the seeing eye becomes that of her husband. Flaubert
manages this ingeniously, making his procedure serve a further purpose
at the same time. For he has to remember that his story does not end
with the death of Emma; it is rounded off, not by her death, but by
her husband's discovery of her long faithlessness, when in the first
days of his mourning he lights upon the packet of letters that betrays
her. The end of the story is in the final stroke of irony which gives
the man this far-reaching glance into the past, and reveals thereby
the mental and emotional confusion of his being--since his only
response is a sort of stupefied perplexity. Charles must be held in
readiness, so to speak, for these last pages; his inner mind, and his
point of view, must be created in advance and kept in reserve, so that
the force of the climax, when it is reached, may be instantly felt.
And so we have the early episodes of Charles's youth and his first
marriage, all his history up to the time when he falls in Emma's way;
and Flaubert's questionable manner of working round to his subject is
explained. Charles will be needed at the end, and Charles is here
firmly set on his feet; the impression of Emma on those who encounter
her is also needed, and here it is; and the whole book, mainly the
affair of Emma herself, is effectively framed in this other affair,
that of Charles, in which it opens and closes. Madame Bovary is a
well-made book--so we have always been told, and so we find it to be,
pulling it to pieces and putting it together again. It never is
unrepaying to do so once more.
And it is a book that with its variety of method, and with its careful
restriction of that variety to its bare needs, and with its scrupulous
use of its resources--it is a book, altogether, that gives a good
point of departure for an examination of the methods of fiction. The
leading notions that are to be followed are clearly laid down in it,
and I shall have nothing more to say that is not in some sense an
extension and an amplification of hints to be found in Madame Bovary.
For that reason I have lingered in detail over the treatment of a
story about which, in other connections, a critic might draw different
conclusions. I remember again how Flaubert vilified his subject while
he was at work on it; his love of strong colours and flavours was
disgusted by the drab prose of such a story--so he thought and said.
But as the years went by and he fought his way from one chapter to
another, did he begin to feel that it was not much of a subject after
all, even of its kind? It is not clear; but after yet another
re-reading of the book one wonders afresh. It is not a fertile
subject--it is not; it does not strain and struggle for development,
it only submits to it. But that aspect is not _my_ subject, and Madame
Bovary, a beautifully finished piece of work, is for my purpose
singularly fertile.