In part one, chapter five, describing Charles’s happiness, Flaubert lets Charles ask himself: “Until now what good had he had of his life?” When Rodolphe enters in part two, chapter seven, the rhythm of the “objective” narrative becomes suddenly as terse and brutally direct as Rodolphe himself.

Yet this technique, so crucial to twentieth-century modern literature, did not entirely originate with Flaubert. During their first night of flirtation, Colet read him her translation of The Tempest. Flaubert himself studied, read, and translated Shakespeare, and would return to Shakespeare’s plays throughout his life. He studied Greek and Latin, and read the classics as avidly as the works of his contemporaries. Still, since the eighteenth century, novels had been earmarked by their author’s point of view. Fielding, Defoe, Balzac, Austen succeeded by establishing themselves as “the most credible witness.” The narrator was a wit, a raconteur, a knowing friend, a moralist. But in Madame Bovary, the narrator virtually disappears.

“An artist,” wrote Flaubert to Mlle. Chantepie, “must be in his work like God in creation ... he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen” (Vargas Llosa, pp. 124-125). What Flaubert achieved in Madame Bovary was the imposition of a medieval worldview, in which everything—landscape, people, animals—was alive, and similarly charged, upon a modern story. It is the construction, not the author’s voice, that holds it all together. Despite its bone-deep irony—the daughter of Romantics Charles and Emma will end up in the poorhouse, and cupidity and avarice in the person of Homais will triumph—an experience of poetry and grace pervades the novel.

Reading the Marquis de Sade for the first time at age nineteen, Flaubert wrote in his notebook: “When you have read de Sade and recovered from your dazzlement, you begin to wonder whether it isn’t all true, whether everything he teaches isn’t the truth—and this is because you cannot resist the hypothesis of limitless mastery and magnificent power that he makes us dream of” (Intimate Notebook, p. 27).

Flaubert would finally achieve this mastery through composition. After finishing the scene where Rodolphe and Emma consummate their flirtation, in which Flaubert notes that “something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees” (p. 150), he reported to Colet: “It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly—to no longer be yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and beloved, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the wind, the words my people spoke, even the red sun that made them half-shut their love-drowned eyes” (Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary, p. 330).

In 1861, having dinner in Paris with his friends the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert explained: “The story or plot of a novel is of no interest to me. When I write a novel I have in mind rendering a color, a shade. For example, in my Carthaginian novel [Salammbô, 1862], I want to do something purple. In Madame Bovary all I was after was to render a special tone, that color of the moldiness of a wood-louse’s existence” (Goncourt, The Goncourt Journals, p. 98).

Years later Flaubert would state that the impulse for A Sentimental Education, his next contemporary novel, which set out to “tell the moral history of the men of my generation” around the revolutionary events of 1848, began with a desire to recall a certain shade of peeling yellow paint around a windowsill he had once seen in Paris. The book was attacked and praised by Flaubert’s contemporaries. One correspondent claimed it evoked “a spineless cowering half-baked generation that has produced nothing.” Critics spoke more about Flaubert’s subject matter than the form of the book. Still, A Sentimental Education would influence a new generation of French writers who called themselves the Naturalists and favored description over plot. Most found it depressing. Others memorized it.

“Work,” Flaubert told the Goncourts, “is still the best means of getting the better of life.”


Chris Kraus is the author of the novels I Love Dick, Aliens Anorexia, and Torpor, and a collection of essays, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Writing in Artnet, the critic Giovanni Intra noted that I Love Dick, her first novel, “reads like Madame Bovary if Emma had written it.” Kraus received a B.A. from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and studied performance in New York City with Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, and Louise Bourgeois. She is co-editor, with Sylvere Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti, of the independent press Semiotext(e). She teaches in the graduate program of the San Francisco Art Institute.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

Eleanor Marx Aveling’s translation of Madame Bovary appeared in 1886, six years after Flaubert’s death. It was the first of many English translations of the novel.