Home For Fiction – Blog

Today’s post – “About a Paragraph Found in Madame Bovary” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn and here is his own blog.

As per the translation for Penguin (2011, Vintage series):

Emma Bovary is an avid reader of sentimental novels; brought up on a Normandy farm and convent-educated, she longs for the passion of romance. At first, Emma pins her hopes on marriage, but life with her well-meaning husband in the provinces leaves her bored and dissatisfied. She seeks escape through extravagant spending sprees and, eventually, adultery. As Emma pursues her impossible reverie she seals her own ruin and despair. Exquisite, moving, at times ferociously satirical and always psychologically acute, Madame Bovary remains one of the greatest, most beguiling novels ever written.

Knowing this novel that has made history (given its many film adaptations), I will analyze a paragraph to demonstrate that its superficial simplicity and perfect grammar conceal a creative and magnificent use of language in its powers of characterization, description, abstraction, concreteness and perspective.

We will find a representation of the dissolution of subjectivity through the accumulation of restless anguish, paired with existential reflection in the small actions of everyday life. This will demonstrate the technical mastery with which Flaubert wrote and from which we can learn to produce literature of high emotional impact, even when the scene we describe to the reader seems as static as a Renaissance painting.

A Paragraph Found in Madame Bovary: Textual Considerations

First of all, let’s bring the paragraph itself to the foreground.

But it was above all at meal-times that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the stove that smoked, the door that squeaked, the walls that oozed moisture, the damp paving; all the bitterness of existence seemed to be served up on her plate, and, with the boiled beef’s reek, there rose from the bottom of her soul other similarly nauseating whiffs. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, amuse herself, with the point of her knife, making lines on the waxed cloth.

(Flaubert, 2011, part I, chapter 9, translation by Adam Thorpe, modified by me)

I have slightly modified Thorpe’s translation because it is more accurate to Flaubert’s original French – at least that’s what my friend (who translates French poetry) assured me. For the record, I have adjusted the end of the two long sentences to match the original French syntactic order, but I have not changed Thorpe’s words themselves, just their placement.

A Paragraph Found in Madame Bovary: Analysis

As we saw in the introduction and the blurb for Madame Bovary, Emma is dissatisfied with her marriage with Charles. Thus, this scene, at the last chapter of the first part, supercharges us with her conflicting feelings of marital obligation versus dissatisfaction.

What catches my attention is how Flaubert adds tension to an otherwise static scene, thus creating the illusion of action in it. At the empirical level, very little is happening: Charles is eating slowly, Emma is playing with her food. Yet, the air feels heavy, the ambiance suffocates. What is this “it” that “she could bear no longer”?

Flaubert’s secret: The contrast between what we expect of meal-times (satisfaction, nourishment, communion), and Emma’s feelings at that very situation (frustration, desperation, hopelessness). The “little room on the ground floor” itself seems an agent positioned against her: the stove smokes, the door creaks, the walls ooze moisture, “the damp paving” – let us recall this is a realist novel, from an author at the heart of what we now dub the Realist literary movement, thus, rooms, stoves, doors, do nothing on their own, there is no supposed magic. The secret? Verbs.

The Magic of Verbs

The geometrical allegory tacitly embedded in the passage also intensifies the text: Emma dreams of mansions, but the dining room is “little”, she longs for towers overseeing abundant nature, yet she dines “on the ground floor”, over “the damp paving”. This heightens the perception we grasp from our troubled heroine’s perspective, which comes falling from the heavens of abstract concepts to the very concrete situation she finds herself in: “all the bitterness of existence seemed to be served up on her plate”. It all falls on one dragging phrase.

Such an opening – “all the bitterness of existence” – states a strong sentiment towards life, yet it remains immaterial. Just to be immediately materialized: “seemed to be served up on her plate”. Flaubert follows with a parallel of awful vapors: As there was reek from the boiled beef, so, “from the bottom of her soul”, “there rose other similarly nauseating whiffs”. This is the part of Thorpe’s translation I modified to better match the original French: Flaubert parallelizes the beef’s smell with Emma’s nauseating brain waves, yet Thorpe’s translation finishes with the depths of her soul.

This is masterful writing: tacit allegories (high/big versus low/little), agency given to inanimate objects (the very scenery, the background over which the scene unfolds), parallelism between physical and spiritual odors.

The Cinematic Aspects of Madame Bovary

As if following a camera from Emma’s perspective, we first see the room, then the food, then her interior state. Suddenly, we meet, as if from her eyes, Charles eating slowly. His sheer image is so unbearable, reminding Emma of her conflicting emotions, that we immediately move from him back to her, playing with her food or “making lines on the waxed cloth with the point of her knife” – put simply: distracting herself away from her present.

It is not fortuitous that she plays with a knife, that is, a weapon: in her mind, the absent expensive tablecloth hurts, so she has to defend herself, and her weapon against it is her absence of mind, and her knife against the cheap table covering right in front of her.

Follow the Lead

One of the strongest leads we follow in the paragraph quoted above is Emma’s perspective. All we sense, all we grasp, all meaning derives from her view of the situation. This is done quietly, in third-person narration, yet it frames the scene as if it was written in first-person.

Thus, we reach an opinion while not presented with one. We are guided towards it, led to reach it as if by our own selves – except it is not so. Flaubert masterfully embeds meaning in the sheer description of Emma’s surroundings. For such purpose, Flaubert both shows and tells: “the stove that smoked, the door that squeaked, the walls that oozed moisture” and “all the bitterness of existence” – concrete and abstract,

In the tiniest detail of domestic life, there hides the horror of a life unwanted. Still, the opposite holds as well: the immense feeling that one’s current life is not worth it, one figures it out through one’s contact with daily nuisances.

Yet, what one does not do matters just as much as what one is currently doing, because words make sense by virtue of what they are and what they are not:

Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others […] Everything said about words applies to any term of language, e.g. to grammatical entities. […] in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.

(Saussure, 2011, 114, 116, 120 emphasis in the original)

In this sense, what is absent is also, somehow, present, present by its very absence, and what is stated brings its unstated comparisons with itself, albeit implicitly. Contrasts, thus, make Flaubert’s paragraph exemplary.

The very contrast between how motionless are the characters, yet how jump-cut-like is the description, and how much agency the inanimate objects seem to have in the passage shows that force that enters the stage when the quiet must precede the storm. This injects tension on the scene, especially by hiding the characters’ motivations, while suggesting it from behind the curtains.

Whilst all this happens, none of it leaves the mundane, the worldly level: it is about rooms, doors, stoves, houses, meal-times, marriages, existence in its barrenness. A life as barren as playing with tablecloth instead of breaking dishes on the kitchen’s floor during a heated argument: deafening silence.

Works Cited

Gustave Flaubert. 2011. Madame Bovary. Translated by Adam Thorpe. London: Vintage.

Ferdinand de Saussure. 2011. Course in General Linguistic. Edited by Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. Columbia University Press.