Flaubert, Apuleius and Ovid: the Genesis of a Recurring Theme

STEPHEN GODDARD Flaubert, Apuleius and Ovid: The Genesis of a Recurring Theme Abstract: This essay examines the way in which Flaubert uses classical intertexts in his works, and, in particular, how the rewriting often gives rise to a burlesque version of the original. It focuses on the tale of Acteon, as recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses and alluded to by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, and demonstrates how these classical stories are activated in Flaubert’s work. By means of an examination of often striking textual similarities between Flaubert’s work and that of Ovid and Apuleius, this piece shows how a clear pattern of intertex- tual reference emerges in Flaubert’s work, ranging from early “straight” borrowings from the classical texts to later burlesques of certain of their aspects. Numerous commentators have noted the importance of the fairy tale as a point of reference in Flaubert’s work.1 Equally as obsessive, and, of course, also related to a particular fairy tale – that of La Belle et la Bête – is the appearance of the Cupid/Eros and Psyche myth as a point of reference for much of Flaubert’s symbolism.2 So well-known is the latter intertext that the myth emerges in the most unlikely circum- stances: for example, in Gemma Bovery, Posy Simmonds’s cartoon re- 1 See, for example, Anne Green, ‘Flaubert and the Sleeping Beauty: An Obsessive Image’, in New Approaches in Flaubert studies, ed. by Tony Williams and Mary Orr (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), pp. 65-80. 2 The most obvious example is Margaret Lowe’s study, Towards the Real Flaubert: A Study of ‘Madame Bovary’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Lowe openly states: ‘Each of Flaubert’s works is an allegory in the most general sense, a variation on the myth of Psyche and Eros’ (p. xii). 36 Stephen Goddard imagining of Madame Bovary, one of the plot’s peripeteiai surrounds the breaking and symbolic repair of a statuette of Cupid and Psyche.3 The aim of this article will be to demonstrate, much as Anne Green maintains with reference to the Sleeping Beauty image, that there is at the heart of Flaubert’s work a series of topoi surrounding, firstly, the work in which the Cupid and Psyche myth is most famously recounted, Apuleius’s Golden Ass or Metamorphoses; and secondly, a related section of another Metamorphoses, that of Ovid, where the fate of Acteon – a mortal hunter transformed into a stag as a punishment for seeing the goddess Diana bathing, and torn to pieces by his own hounds – is recounted. It will be argued that the Acteon myth may be detected in varying forms in Flaubert’s work from his earliest writings up to and including Bouvard et Pécuchet. It will also be argued that a theme familiar to any reader of Flaubert’s work – one of the key themes in the genesis of his work as a whole, that of curiosity pun- ished – may have been suggested to him by the myths of Acteon, of Cupid and Psyche, and indeed by other aspects of Apuleius’s work. A sensible starting-point would seem to be to investigate briefly the nature and extent of Flaubert’s early acquaintance with the work of Ovid and Apuleius. As so often, his Correspondance should be an invaluable source; however, there appears to be one reference only to Ovid in all Flaubert’s letters: a throwaway allusion in 1853 to the poet’s exile ‘chez les Scythes’.4 Notwithstanding, other sources strongly suggest that Flaubert was familiar with Ovid’s Metamor- phoses from an early age. As one might expect, the nineteenth-century French educational system was simultaneously quite rigid in its pre- scriptions and, like the English system of the time, closely based on the literature of classical antiquity. Students in the 1830s could expect to become acquainted with Ovid’s Metamorphoses during the quatrième – in Flaubert’s case, during the years 1835-36 – when either they or Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics were studied at the end of the school day.5 Circumstantial evidence suggests that Ovid, and not 3 Posy Simmonds, Gemma Bovery (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999). 4 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. by Jean Bruneau, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973-98), II, 455. Unless otherwise stated, all refer- ences to Flaubert’s correspondence are to this edition and are indicated by the abbre- viation Corr. 5 Much information about the curriculum in force during Flaubert’s youth may be found in Jean Bruneau, Les Débuts littéraires de Flaubert (Paris: Armand Colin, .

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