La Morale De L'art Consiste Dans Sa Beaute Meme, Et J'estime
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In a letter written just before the last installment of Madame Bovary in the Revue de Paris, Flaubert remarked that
[...] la morale de l'Art consiste dans sa beaute meme, et j'estime
par-dessus tout d'abord le style, et ensuite le Vrai. Je crois
avoir mis dans la peinture des moeurs bourgeoises et dans
l'exposition d'un caractere de femme naturellement corrompu, autant
de litterature et de convenances [Flaubert's emphasis] que possible
[...] (1)
In defense of his novel, Flaubert marshals some familiar terms of midnineteenth-century discourse on literature: beauty establishes the morality of art, style is even more important than truth. (2) Surprisingly, he types Emma Bovary as inherently immoral and, despite his detestation of things bourgeois, insists that her portrayal combines the maximum of literature with that quintessential middle-class virtue, respect for the convenances. (3) Why does Flaubert, having just identified the morality of art with its beauty, insist on the proprieties with regard to the exposition of Emma's character? His emphasis on the word smacks of irony, and Yvan Leclerc is led to claire that the letter's use of the term convenances is not cognate with related uses by Flaubert: "Ce qui convient selon les necessites esthetiques n'est pas le convenable de la morale sociale." (4) Yet the proprieties Flaubert has in mind, however ironic the reference, are not merely literary; indeed, the entire phrase--"autant de litterature et de convenances que possible"--firmly links art and propriety, no matter how little faith Flaubert has in the latter. Under a regime of state censorship, furthermore, the opposition between moral and aesthetic propriety can't easily be maintained. Self-censorship, censorship evasion, and Flaubert's pursuit of style combine in complex ways to define the convenances--at once social and literary--of Madame Bovary. Flaubert binds the moral and the aesthetic in ways that have important consequences for his depiction of Emma. In particular, the recourse to euphemism in characterizing her sexuality observes the proprieties but distances Emma from the reader, objectifying her while framing her passion in terms of strong moral judgments.
Some of Flaubert's concern for the proprieties came from fear of the censors. As Rosemary Lloyd points out in reply to Tony Tanner's complaint about the novel's nondescription of the adulterous act itself, the absence of such description "is far less likely to be a textual than a pragmatic strategy." (5) The timing of the letter and its declamatory style suggest an uncomfortable situation with regard to the censoring of Madame Bovary. The letter falls between the largest of the cuts demanded by the editors of the Revue de Paris (19 November 1856) and the novel's criminal indictment (24 December 1856) for "outrage a la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs." Hemmed in by his editorial censors and the state censors they worried about, Flaubert had good reason to reassure friends and supporters of the purity of his intentions. Yet, while Lloyd is undoubtedly correct in reproving Tanner for a lack of historical perspective, an emphasis on the practical reason for Flaubert's reticence implies a fairly sharp distinction between the stylistic and the pragmatic. I argue here that Flaubert's understanding of the proprieties with regard to the representation of Emma's sexuality was guided by stylistic and pragmatic motives that cannot be disentangled. On the basis of the changes Flaubert made at the level of plan, scenario, manuscript, and published texts, we can achieve a reasonably precise mapping of his interrogation of the proprieties and a clearer understanding of how this testing of the convenances shaped the characterization of Emma as "une femme naturellement corrompu."
First, we need to clarify the situation of Flaubert regarding contemporary practices of censorship. Since Madame Bovary ultimately escaped legal condemnation, unlike Les Fleurs du mal, a note of triumph tends to sound in accounts of the victory over the state censors. (6) Flaubert himself contributed to the view of censorship as a zero-sum game played out in the courts by adding to the book version of Madame Bovary a dedication to his defense attorney. Similarly, Flaubert's note of protest over the suppressions made in the Revue de Paris version--"je declare denier la responsabilite des lignes qui suivrent"--can make it seem as though he were the coerced victim of his editors' prudence. (7) In addition, the sheer clumsiness of the legal proceedings, the ensuing (and profitable) notoriety of his novel, and, finally, a persuasive myth about the purity of art have also helped to veil Flaubert's self- censorship. (8) The myth of a pure art beyond the reach of philistine objection, an ideology often professed by Flaubert and sustained by his interpreters, was framed exclusively in the context of state censorship by the Goncourt brothers, who marveled that "il est vraiment curieux que ce soient les quatre hommes les plus purs de tout metier et de tout industrialisme, les quatre plumes les plus entierement vouees a l'art, qui aient ete traduits sur les bancs de la police correctionnelle: Baudelaire, Flaubert, et nous." (9) This assertion of aesthetic disinterestedness establishes the strongest contrast possible between the writers in question and a perversely censorious state apparatus. That these writers would later enjoy fame and even canonization seemingly attests to the victory of art over a narrow-minded, prudish ideology wielded by the state. The fundamental error of this view resides in its disregard of censorship's sometimes creative impact on the very works proclaimed as its victims or conquerors.
In this sense, the best-known contemporary image of censorship, Grandville's cartoon, "The Resurrection of the Censorship," is rather misleading. It shows the Comte d'Argout, chief censor and minister of the interior under Louis-Philippe, rising in Christlike fashion from an open tomb and, with a seraphic expression, clinging to an enormous pair of shears. (10) While mocking censorship's capacity to excise evil and produce angelic texts, the cartoon assumes that the state alone controls the power to wield the scissors. In fact, authors and editors also participated in the censoring process. (11) Armand Bertin, of the influential Journal des debats, remarked about the censorship decree of 1852, "Say what you like about the decree, but not that the author is stupid. This decree constitutes me the overseer of the errors of my own paper and makes me an unpaid civil servant entrusted with preventing attacks against the constitution and maintaining order for the profit of the government." (12) With the role of censor distributed so widely, it would be wrong to think of authorship as a practice subject only to external state censorship.
Unlike their imprisoned or exiled compatriots, Second Empire writers who managed to work within the system while contesting it employed tactics of evasion or misdirection that were encouraged or even demanded by the censors. (13) Reciprocal obsessions emerged on both sides, with Flaubert's concern with le mot juste paralleled by the censors' pointillist scrutiny of details. Although negotiations between writer and censors could be one-sided, the relationship could also result in significant innovations of the kind that Flaubert made for the scene du fiacre. This creative aspect of censorship, the confluence of artistry and evasion that can be described as the text's "bias of anticipated censorship," involved a waltz of negotiation over the scope and meaning of the proprieties--proclaimed by the state and its critical allies, anxiously upheld by editors, and challenged (fitfully) by Flaubert. (14)
Even without the benefit of the correspondence with his editors or the revisions traced in the scenarios, we can see from the novel how Flaubert made Emma the primary vehicle for testing the convenances. By means of indirect discourse as well as by reported speech, Flaubert shows us that Emma and other characters have a well-developed sense of what is right and proper. Just before she joins Leon for the famous ride, she reminds him (and reminds us all), "C'est tres inconvenant, savez-vous?" (15) Earlier, in passages of subtle artistry, the narration had marked the stages of Emma's transgressions. Bored by her commonplace words of love, "Rodolphe apercut en cet amour d'autres jouissances a exploiter. Il jugea toute pudeur incommode. Il la traita sans facon. Il en fit quelque chose de souple et de corrompu" (220). The abstract, nonspecific language ("pudeur," "sans facon," "corrompu") combines with Flaubert's euphemisms ("autre jouissances," "souple") to render Emma's sexual objectification and the violation of her modesty in icily detached terms. She is presented to the reader as the sex puppet of Rodolphe, a thing ("chose") whose feelings we cannot guess. The subsequent paragraph discloses the visible effects of Emma's love life:
Par l'effet seul de ses habitudes amoureuses, Mme Bovary changea d'allures. Ses regards devinrent plus hardis, ses discours plus libres; elle eut meme l'inconvenance de se promener avec M. Rodolphe une cigarette a la bouche, comme pour narguer le monde; enfin, ceux qui doutaient encore ne douterent plus quand on la vit, un jour, descendre de l'Hirondelle, la taille serree dans un gilet, a la facon d'un homme [...]. (220; Flaubert's emphasis) Sexual practices lacking in pudeur lead to bolder glances and freer speech. Flaubert then switches the focalization from Emma's general appearance to the specific improprieties of smoking in public and cross-dressing. (16) Such extreme flouting of conventional behavior--"comme pour narguer le monde"-- easily translates into infidelity, "enfin, ceux qui doutaient encore ne douterent plus." It is not, of course, the reader who has been in doubt but good bourgeois types like Emma's mother-in-law. Flaubert's staging of their awakened certainty serves to underline their reliance on the convenances (rather than insight or imagination). Yet the passage in question does more than mock the bourgeoisie while confirming Emma's moral decline. Despite the apparent contrast between her boldness and Flaubert's prim discourse, the text hints that Emma's sexual habits--euphemistically classed as "sans pudeur"--may correlate in their unconventionality to the visible improprieties of smoking and transvestism. Here we observe the waltz of censorship at work, for if Flaubert's language insinuates the possibility of sexual deviance, nothing is spelled out in the printed text. But the cost of this evasion lies in the depersonalization of Emma, here reduced to a set of visible signs of impropriety.
Flaubert's manuscripts attest to his eventual suppression of dangerous sexual terms and themes. (17) In the form of euphemisms, however, the printed texts manage to invest these themes with a definite earthiness. For example, in part one, chapter five, Charles Bovary, after his wedding night, has "le coeur plein des felicites de la nuit, l'esprit tranquille, la chair contente." Flaubert originally added the phrase, "il s'en allait ruminant son bonheur, comme ceux qui machent encore, apres diner, le gout des truffes qu'ils digerent." Cut by the editors of the Revue de Paris but restored in book form, this phrase was duly seized upon at the trial as an instance of Flaubert's "tour de phrase plus qu'equivoque" (368). Whereas the night's felicites could pass on their own, their ironic reinscription within a gustatory code as a rich meal of truffles was objectionable. Here, of course, it is the editors and censors who are enforcing matters and, as a result, we may easily overlook Flaubert's own deployment of the euphemistic felicites in the first place. Although the banal euphemism serves to play down the simile of earthy (implicitly sexual) flavors, Flaubert's concession to propriety also allows him to suggest the obtuseness of Charles Bovary, smacking his lips over the afterglow of the felicites without giving a thought to Emma or her feelings.
When the novel was first published in installments in the Revue de Paris, it suffered many cuts and alterations. Although Flaubert fought over these changes with the editors, Leon Laurent-Pichat and Maxime Du Camp, he often acceded to their demands. Both before and after the Revue editors had seen the manuscript, Flaubert also submitted it for correction to his friend Louis Bouilhet. Clearly, the line between precensorship and revision is difficult to discern here. Laurent-Pichat called for seventy-one cuts, the lengthiest and most controversial concerning the scene du fiacre, in which Emma Bovary and Leon Dupuis first make love--or seem to. The narration everywhere implies but nowhere describes or otherwise refers unequivocally to the sexual activities within the fiacre. What the text establishes beyond doubt, thanks to Emma's remark noted previously, is that the mere act of entering a vehicle with Leon is already improper. The narration then follows the ride with the details that would alarm Flaubert's editors. Traveling for perhaps six hours through various neighborhoods of Rouen and its environs, the fiacre sometimes moves "au grand galop," at other times "trotta doucement" or "s'elanca d'un bond." Whenever the driver stops, an angry voice urges him on; the coachman
ne comprenait pas quelle fureur de la locomotion poussait ces
individus a ne vouloir point s'arreter. Il essayait quelquefois, et
aussitot il entendait derriere lui partir des exclamations de
colere. Alors il cinglait de plus belle ses deux rosses tout en
sueur, mais sans prendre garde aux cahots, accrochant par-ci
par-la, ne s'en souciant, demoralise, et presque pleurant de soif,
de fatigue et de tristesse. (266)
There is a certain false naivete on the driver's part, given that the use of a fiacre for sex was a well- established visual and literary image. (18) Here Flaubert entices the reader to find another explanation for the phrase "fureur de locomotion," certainly not part of a cabby's lexicon but belonging rather to the indirect narration. The phrase and the parallel hinted at by the sweat-soaked nags come dangerously close to the concealed subject of sex but artfully allow Flaubert to suggest a prolonged and varied lovemaking--without, however, becoming so explicit as to prevent him from denying any such intention.
We could regard the rather Balzacian ambiguity of the scene du fiacre as decorous and tactful or, contrarily, as insinuating and suggestive. Flaubert's editors at the Revue de Paris felt no doubts on this score. Maxime Du Camp wrote shortly before the installment containing this scene would have appeared:
Ta scene du fiacre est impossible [Du Camp's emphasis], non pour
nous qui nous en moquons, non pour moi qui signe le numero, mais
pour la police correctionnelle qui nous condamnerait net, comme
elle a condamnee Montepin [Xavier Montepin, author of Les Filles de
platre, 1855] pour moins que cela[...]. On monte en fiacre et plus
tard on en descend, cela peut parfaitement passer, mais le detail est reellement dangereux, et nous reculons par simple peur du
Procureur imperial. (19)
Although Flaubert agreed to this suppression, the issue of"details" soon resurfaced after the Revue sought additional cuts. Flaubert angrily replied, "Vous vous attaquez a des details, c'est a l'ensemble qu'il faut s'en prendre. L'element brutal est au fond et non a la surface." (20) In connection with the fiacre scene, Flaubert's objection seems misplaced; indeed, the details of the journey give the scene its power and the comic aspect that amused Du Camp and his associates. (21) For my purposes, however, the salient point was overlooked by all concerned. The "element brutal" could not be signified directly, and the Revue's overt fears of the censorship stem from the belief that Flaubert had not been sufficiently circumspect in preventing the surface from indicating too much about the depth. But this imprudence hardly constitutes an artistic failure; on the contrary, Flaubert's anticipation of the censorship and his willingness to test its perceptiveness resulted in a passage of the most subtle duplicity, at once acknowledging and denying the "brutal" sexuality at its depth. (22)
Our reading of Flaubert's scene and, by extension, the rest of Madame Bovary will go awry in one of two ways if we fail to grasp the inevitable contingency the text imposes on interpretation. On one hand, we will join the censors in thinking that the text comprises a string of euphemisms of no value in themselves beyond their concession to prudery. (23) The anonymous editor (most likely Maurice Bardeche) of the Club de l'Honnete Homme edition comes close to this position when he deprecates Flaubert's "laminoir du style" for having glossed over the Shakespearean, Rabelaisean brutality of the scenarios: "Car tout est edulcore, finalement [...] tout devient anodin" (29-32). On the other hand, we will join Flaubert's defenders in refusing to entertain the possibility that what takes place in the vehicle is six hours of cramped, sweaty sex. In this case, as Jonathan Dollimore points out in connection with the censorship trials of Radclyffe Hall, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, "the subtler censorship emanates from the defence rather than the prosecution." (24) Flaubert's attorney, rather daringly one might think, read to the court the original version of the scene in support of his claim that its suppression by the Revue de Paris had wrongly led the censors to suppose that there was something morally objectionable in the passage. Maitre Senard contrasted the scene to its analog in Merimee's novel La Double Meprise, claiming that Flaubert had not provided even a quarter of the detail Merimee had. This claire, technically correct insofar as we are never shown the interior of Flaubert's voiture, occludes profound differences. Merimee's allusion to the sexual encounter itself remains utterly circumspect, and his heroine immediately undergoes what proves to be fatal remorse after her never-to-be-repeated chute: "'Oh! oui, je vous aime,' murmura-t-elle en sanglotant; et elle laissa tomber sa tete sur l'epaule de Darcy. Darcy la serra dans ses bras avec transport, cherchant a arreter ses larmes par des baisers. Elle essaya encore de se debarrasser de son etreinte, mais cet effort fut le dernier qu'elle tenta." (25) From our standpoint, the lengthy conversation between Darcy and Mme de Chaverny, her tears and (brief) physical resistance, her confession of love and subsequent remorse all stand in sharp contrast to Emma's easy capitulation and Flaubert's imposition of almost complete silence on his lovers. Yet by insisting on the importance of visual details and forcing the court toward a crudely mimetic reading of Flaubert's text, Senard could argue, "Ce qu'on ne voit pas, ce qui est supprime ainsi parait une chose fort etrange. On a suppose beaucoup des choses qui n'existaient pas, comme vous l'avez vu par la lecture du passage primitif" (392; my emphasis). This brilliant challenge to the court's willingness to look behind the veil of Flaubert's language captures the very essence of insinuation and the way it permits deniability of the insinuated meanings. To claim the contrary is certainly possible, and the prosecutor remarked that with Flaubert, there is "point de gaze, point de voiles, c'est la nature dans toute sa crudite!" (375). But this is to ignore the very real equivocation of the language, its creative concession to and subversion of the convenances; if it allows some readers "to suppose many things that don't exist," it also allows other readers (even the same readers) to deny many things that do exist.
It would be inaccurate, however, to assume that Flaubert everywhere managed to insinuate potentially objectionable meanings. The scenarios contain many expressions of a crude or shocking nature. (26) Yet almost none of these details survived Flaubert's self-censorship. In a scenario where Emma frightens Leon--"ou avait-elle pris ces raffinements de corruption (donner a entendre qu'elle le succait)"--Flaubert crossed out the parenthetical phrase. One scholar shrugs off the phrase as "une note programmatique synthetisant la gourmandise d'Emma" and asserts that its deletion was "en hommage a l'essence stylistique." (27) By making style the decisive factor, however, we may overlook Flaubert's audacity with regard to contemporary sexual practices (in France the taboo on oral sex remained strong until after World War II). (28) The scenario, the intended recourse to insinuation--"donner a entendre"--and ultimately the erasure of the phrase reflect not only stylistic considerations but also a need to respect the convenances in order to evade censorship. When we turn to the manuscript and the Revue de Paris version, the passage reads, "Elle avait des paroles tendres qui lui enflammaient la chair avec des baisers devorateurs. Ou donc avait-elle appris cette luxure, presque immaterielle a force d'etre profonde et dissimulee?" (my emphasis). (29) Emma's orality and lust are emphasized here, but in the book version we find only an insistence on her corrupt nature: "Elle avait des paroles tendres avec des baisers qui lui emportaient l'ame. Ou donc avait-elle appris cette corruption [...]" (297). Here the connection between Emma's defiance of the conventions and her lusty propensity for oral sex no longer exists, and without the scenario we would not suspect the force of censorship lurking within a conventional phrase like "baisers qui lui emportaient l'ame."
A second example shows even more clearly the stages in Flaubert's self-correction. After the affair with Rodolphe has ended, Emma contemplates Leon as a substitute while he in turn considers approaching her. At the manuscript level, Flaubert has Leon console his frustration by stealing from Emma a yellow glove that he takes to his bed: "Alors Leon cligna les yeux, il l'entrevit au poignet d'Emma, boutonne, tendu, agissant coquettement en mille fonctions indeterminees. Il le huma; il le baisa; il y passa les quatre doigts de sa main droite et s'endormit la bouche dessus" (137). Scenario thirty-one spells out what we are to understand: "Faire comprendre qu'il se branle avec ce gant" (490). (30) Although the manuscript does depict Leon's fetishistic use of the glove, his bedding of it as a substitute for Emma, neither the imagined "mille fonctions indeterminees" nor Leon's actual sniffing, kissing, and wearing of the glove suggests masturbation. Here the "element brutal" remains a private sketch, reaching the manuscript only in a sentimental version--the glove as eroticized keepsake--and disappearing altogether at the level of the printed page. The move from direct expression to euphemism to silence suggests that censorship, although a state function, goes beyond external control; as Francis Barker observes, insofar as censorship polices the production of discourse, "it is one that reaches into the subject itself." (31)
To put this in discursive terms, we might say that the censorship system originates outside the text, outside the author. But this system and the discourse that it generates comprise part of the sociolect known by both writer and reader: certain words, phrases, and situations are censorable by virtue of their sordid, blasphemous, or obscene character. The intertextual appropriation and transformation of the censorable sociolect comprises the writer's idiolect. Thus, as Michael Riffaterre has shown, Flaubert's fiacre was already a well-established metonym of wifely treason that Flaubert daringly transforms from a vehicle to sin into a vehicle of sin, a scandalous extension of the sociolect. (32) But the choice of the fiacre itself, as I have been arguing, still partly colludes with the censorship discourse that mandates not the nonexistence of adultery but rather its nonexplicit representation and visualization. The selection of the fiacre as the scene for Emma's first sexual encounter with Leon does, as Riffaterre argues, help create a powerful "logic of entailments" that marks the adulteress as committed to secrecy (81-83). Nevertheless, the choice of this scene also meant the rejection of other first encounters sketched by Flaubert that, as we will see, were more daring and less predictable.
In three of the scenarios (five, six and nine), (33) Flaubert has Emma's (willing) seduction by Leon take place not in the fiacre at Rouen but back home in Yonville, in a chair in her room: "Coup exquis, emu, fievreux, amoureux surtout, delices d'Emma qui trouve enfin son reve realise, plein" (461). (34) The published text may be said to "show" rather than "tell" their encounter by means of the scene du fiacre; but this apparent gain, both stylistically and in terms of evasion, arguably entails some important losses. First, the removal of the scene from Emma's room to a cab for hire depersonalizes the encounter, renders it less intimate and--supremely important from the standpoint of liability to censorship--no longer invasive of domestic space. For a regime that equated the "moderate virtues of domesticity" with political order, adultery that transpired in the family home would have been intolerably threatening. (35) (Flaubert's audacity reached its limit when he arranged for Rodolphe and Emma to make love in Charles's office, "le cabinet aux consultations" situated not in the house proper but between a shed and the stables [202].) Second, the rejection of the scenario versions robs the lovers of an affective bonding that the scene du fiacre utterly fails to convey. Thanks to its commonplace vulgarity--"Cela se fait a Paris!" proclaims Leon (265)--the published scene anchors Emma to "the lack of originality of her desire." (36) And as Sartre argued, Flaubert's decision to conceal the lovers within a conveyance possessed by "la rage de la motricite" depersonalizes their lovemaking to "l'emportement grotesque et terrifiant d'un objet materiel." (37) In the scenario versions of Emma's seduction, on the contrary, we have a lovemaking that while "feverish" is "especially loving" and that gives Emma more than physical satisfaction. The decline and collapse of a relationship so lyrically and dangerously begun, in contrast to the seriocomic suggestiveness of the fiacre scene, might have resulted in a more tragic story, one perhaps closer to Anna Karenina. (38)
The sociolect is not merely a linguistic code but also a moral one; the writer's appropriations convey his agreement or disagreement with the moral judgments attached to or embedded within certain lexemes, figures, phrases, and scenes. In the letter cited at the beginning of this essay, Flaubert presents himself as an artist who has depicted a "naturally corrupt" woman while respecting the twin demands of art and the convenances. This claim, by opposing the "natural" Emma to the Emma created by art and propriety, locates Flaubert on the side of the censors. Perhaps he identified Emma's innate corruption with the worst of the traits he bestowed on her, as in the rough draft for the scene where she seeks out Rodolphe to pay her debts: "C'est au moment de tirer un coup qu'Emma lui demande de l'argent" (541). If fear of the censors and a sense of literary decorum prevented Flaubert from even hinting at such an action in the published work, this self-censorship seems to allow Emma a few scraps of dignity. In the printed version of her visit to Rodolphe's chateau, the narration judges her prostitution to be self- deceptive and unconscious: "Elle partit donc vers la Huchette, sans s'apercevoir qu'elle courait s'offrir a ce qui l'avait tantot si fort exasperee, ni se douter le moins du monde de cette prostitution" (322). In making the published text nonobscene, Flaubert spared Emma the stigma of deliberately exchanging sex for money. But in labeling her appeal to Rodolphe "cette prostitution," Flaubert retained a hint of his earlier view of Emma while discounting the innocence of her plea for help, here reduced to unselfconscious prostitution. The literal meaning has vanished, replaced by its judgmental and moralizing term from the sociolect.
This revision, whether done out of self-censorship or stylistic sensibility, made Flaubert's heroine seem less cynical while subsuming her behavior under the broadest category of immorality, thereby restricting the reader's sympathy by means of apparently impersonal judgment. Yet there is a potential portrait, implicit in some of the rejected drafts and scenarios, of a less obviously "corrupt" Emma, or at least an Emma whose sexuality was less "brutal" and therefore less in need of literary proprieties. Baudelaire undoubtedly suspected (or wished for) such an Emma, whom he found "surtout pitoyable" in spite of "la durete systematique de l'auteur, qui a fait tous ses efforts pour etre absent de son oeuvre et pour jouer la fonction d'un montreur de marionnettes." (39) Baudelaire attributes Flaubert's lack of pity to absence or detachment, but, as we have seen, authorial distance is also a function of censorship evasion. Flaubert's vaunted "impersonality" and the ingenious style indirect libre that helps to achieve this authorial stance are rooted less in some commitment to the style of realism--an orientation Flaubert denied--than in complex negotiations between aesthetic choice and censorship. (40) From these linked sources, I would suggest, arose not only subtle insinuations and semitransparent eupheraisins but equally "la durete systematique" Baudelaire found in Flaubert's treatment of Emma. In his lectures on Madame Bovary, Vladimir Nabokov insisted on both her "essential hardness" and her "power of idealization." Emma's tragic flouting of the convenances derives simultaneously, as it were, from these seemingly incompatible qualities. That Flaubert's amalgam could emerge with such power from the processes of censorship and self-censorship attests to his successful combination of litterature with respect for the proprieties. The final result is that "artistically modulated" handling of a "crude and repulsive" subject that qualified, in Nabokov's view, as "art [...] the only thing that really matters in books." (41)
Valparaiso University
(1.) Letter to his cousin Louis Bonenfant (12 December 1856), in Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 2: 652.
(2.) See, for example, Sainte-Beuve's remark that "la puderie est une chose funeste en litterature, et que, jusqu'a l'obscenite exclusivement, l'art consacre et purifie tout ce qu'il touche" (Tableau de la poesie francaise au XVIe siecle [Paris: Charpentier, 1843] 4).
(3.) Flaubert's distaste included the bourgeoisisme of other writers: see his letter to Louis Bouilhet (30 May 1855) Correspondance, 2: 576. For the status of the proprieties among the middle class, see Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852-1871, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 128.
(4.) Leclerc refers specifically to the dispute over the suppressions made in the Revue de Paris version of the novel; see his Crimes ecrits: La Litterature en proces au 19e siecle (Paris: Plon, 1991) 177.
(5.) Rosemary Lloyd, Madame Bovary (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990) 171.
(6.) Thus Rene Descharmes and Rene Dumesnil on Flaubert's trial and the "ridicules poursuites dont ses accusateurs devaient rester en definitive les seules victimes" (Autour de Flaubert [Paris: Mercure de France, 1912] 1: 56). (7.) The note appeared in the sixth and final installment of the novel on 15 December 1856 in the Revue de Paris and is reproduced in Correspondance, 2: 653.
(8.) The most accessible account is by Dominick LaCapra, "Two Trials" (Denis Hollier, ed., Harvard History of French Literature [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989] 726-31).
(9.) A classic version of style's hegemony comes from Mario Vargas Llosa: "Style was Flaubert's great obsession, the root of the enormous suffering each book represented to him" (The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and "Madame Bovary," trans. Helen Lane [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986] 204). William J. Berg and Laurey K. Martin conclude that Flaubert's style achieves salvation by reconstituting "the meaningless matter of human experience into a coherent, significant whole." See their Gustave Flaubert (New York: Twayne, 1997) 59-60. For a textually and linguistically sensitive example, see Gisele Seginger, Flaubert: Une ethique de l'art pur (Liege: SEDES, 2000). The Goncourts' journal entry of 27 December 27 1860 is cited in Alexandre Zevaes, Les Proces litteraires au XIXe siecle (Paris: Perrin, 1924) 151.
(10.) The drawing appeared on 5 January 1832 in La Caricature and is reproduced in Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1989) 67, figure 19.
(11.) Their activities were not always coordinated; Roger Bellet reports Julian Lemer, Baudelaire's sometime literary agent, as describing the censorship practiced by editors, often without the author's knowledge, as "castration." Presse et journalisme sous le Second Empire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967) 25.
(12.) Cited in Irene Collins, The Government and the Newspaper Press in France, 1814-1881 (New York: Oxford UP, 1957) 128-29.
(13.) For the more extreme measures taken against writers, see Philip Spencer, "Censorship by Imprisonment in France, 1830-1870," Romanic Review 47 (1956): 27-38.
(14.) Jon Elster develops the concept of anticipated censorship in Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 438. The description of the censorship process as a waltz involving multiple parties and complex moves comes from Odile Krakovitch, Hugo censure: la liberte au theatre au XIXe siecle (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1985) 228. Contrarily, Nicholas Harrison finds the relation of writer to censor "prey
to a disturbing circularity" that may be "complicitous rather than oppositional"; see his Circles of Censorship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 3.
(15.) Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Club de l'Honnete Homme, 1971) 265; page numbers in the text refer to this edition. Dominick LaCapra points out Flaubert's irony in combining Emma's "perennial sense of bourgeois propriety" with her "willingness to be taken in" by Leon's "appeal to her provinciality." See LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982) 163.
(16.) Until the Second World War, women's smoking in public was regarded as a sexual come-on, "une pose d'aguicheuse," as Anne-Marie Sohn points out in her book Du premier baiser a l'alcove (Paris: Aubier, 1996) 192. The significance of Emma's adoption of masculine garb is traced by Diana Festa- McCormick, "Emma Bovary's Masculinization: Convention of Clothes and Morality of Conventions," Women & Literature 1 (1980): 223-35.
(17.) Claudine Gothot-Mersch, in La Genese de Madame Bovary, notes Flaubert's suppression of the manuscript's "manifestations physiques par trop precises qui se produisent chez l'heroine pendant qu'elle danse avec le vicomte," Rodolphe's remark to Emma that she gives him "feu au ventre," and the elimination from the scenarios of words like putain and bordel (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1980) 264-65. See also Gothot-Mersch's astute discussions of Flaubert's softening of details (186 and 268).
(18.) In 1825, the police prohibited the book by M. Velocifere (pseud. J.-P.-R. Cuisin), L'Amour au grand trot, ou, La Gaudriole en diligence, which announced itself as containing "une foule de revelations piquantes de tous les larcins d'amour [...] dont les voitures publiques sont si souvent le theatre" (cited in Fernand Drujon, Catalogue des ouvrages, ecrits et dessins de toute nature poursuivis, supprimes ou condamnes [Paris: Edouard Rouveyre, 1879] 21). Lithographs depicting scenes similar to Flaubert's date from the Restoration (Edme-Jean Pigal) and the July Monarchy (Charles-Joseph Travies and Frederic Bouchot), as noted in Gabrielle Houbre, La Discipline de l'amour: L'Education sentimentale des filles et des garcons a l'age du romantisme (Paris: Plon, 1997) 310. These popular sources go unmentioned in Adrianne Tooke, Flaubert and the Pictorial Arts (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).
(19.) Letter from Du Camp, 19 November 1856, Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 2: 872-73. (20.) Letter to Laurent-Pichat, 7 December 1856, Correspondance, 2: 649-50.
(21.) Berg and Martin, Gustave Flaubert (53-54), astutely capture some of the episode's comedy and note how its suggestiveness relies on puns and double entendres.
(22.) As an instance of the "chronological chauvinism" that trivializes the past, Elisabeth Ladenson cites Vincent Minnelli's 1949 film version that makes enormous concessions to the Hays Office censors while framing the novel as a defiance of the censorship. Accordingly, the film omits the fiacre scene altogether. See Ladenson's Dirt for Dirt's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006) 43-45.
For a close look at the difficulties facing Minnelli, see Mary Donaldson-Evans, "Madame Bovary" at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009) 69-100. On the challenges for illustrators, see William Olmsted, "Improper Appearances: Censorship and the Carriage Scene in Madame Bovary," Efficacite/Efficacy: How to Do Things with Words and Images? Eds. Veronique Plesch, Catriona MacLeod, and Jan Baetens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011) 273-85.
(23.) Patrick Nee argues that the entire text of Madame Bovary is saturated with sexual meaning ("1857: Le Double Proces de Madame Bovary et des Fleurs du mal," Pascal Ory, ed., La Censure en France a l'ere democratique [Paris: Editions Complexe, 1997] 119-43).
(24.) Jonathan Dollimore, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Cambridge: Polity, 2001) 97.
(25.) Prosper Merimee, La Double Meprise, in Theatre de Clara Gazul: Romans et nouvelles, eds. Jean Mallion and Pierre Salomon (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) 665. A scene
by George Sand modeled on this one (the lovers are trapped in a broken-down vehicle) shows slightly more daring: "Tout a coup Amaury vit que Josephine pleurait. Il se jeta a ses pieds; et deux autres heures s'ecoulerent dans une ivresse si complete, qu'ils oublierent tout[....]" (Le Compagnon du Tour de France, in OEuvres de George Sand [Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1885] 2: 71). (26.) Yvan Leclerc lists a series of raw expressions, citing them without specifying their location in the scenarios from Gustave Flaubert (these scenarios are assembled in Madame Bovary: nouvelle edition precedee des scenarios inedits, eds. Jean Pommier and Gabrielle Leleu [Paris: Jose Corti, 1949]). In Leclerc's accumulation, the shock value of the phrases is tremendous but also misleading on account of its radical decontextualization and unification of what are only fragments in Flaubert's scenarios. Here are the naughty bits presented by Leclerc: "L'habitude de baiser la rend sensuelle, coup avec Rodolphe, vie de cul, le coup se tire dans la chambre sur cette causeuse ou ils ont tant cause, noye de foutre, de larmes, de cheveux et de champagne, apres les fouteries va se faire recoiffer, Emma un peu putain, [Leon] prend un gant, regard ca comme hardi, se monte la tete la-dessus, fait comprendre qu'il se branle avec ce gant, le passe a sa main et dort la tete posee dessus, sur son oreiller, toilette putain, montrer deja un bout de cochonnerie; montrer nettement le geste de Rodolphe qui lui prend le cul d'une main. Emma rentre a Yonville, dans un etat de l'ame, de fouteries normales; Rodolphe embete la traite en putain, la fout a mort, elle ne l'en aime que mieux; maniere dont elle l'aimait profondement cochonne; a propos des excitations de cul qu'elle prenait au coit journalier de Charles, elle l'aime comme un godemichet, tour a
tour putain et chaste, selon qu'elle voit que ca lui plait,--et c'est au moment de tirer un coup, qu'Emma lui demande de l'argent" (Crimes ecrits 140).
(27.) Rosa M. Palermo Di Stefano, Le Corset moral (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2003) 168, citing Folio 245 recto.
(28.) Arme-Marie Sohn, Du premier baiser a l'alcove, 99. Here and elsewhere the scenarios provide much evidence for Pierre Bourdieu's claim that Flaubert enjoyed greater "freedom with respect to the moral and humanitarian conformity that constrained 'proper' people" ("Flaubert's Point of View," The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson [New York: Columbia UP, 1993] 209).
(29.) See the note by Claudine Gothot-Mersch in her edition of Madame Bovary (Paris: Garnier, 1971) 425.
(30.) The scenario number is given differently (#36) in Yvan Leclerc's edition; however, the quote in question comes from Folio 19 recto of Flaubert's manuscript. See Gustave Flaubert, Plans et scenarios de "Madame Bovary," ed. Yvan Leclerc (Paris: CNRS, 1995). (31.) Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984) 52.
(32.) Michael Riffaterre, "Flaubert's Presuppositions," Laurence M. Porter, ed., Critical Essays on Gustave Flaubert (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986) 83.
(33.) In Leclerc, ed., Plans et scenarios, the corresponding numbers are 8 (Folio 12 recto), 10 (Folio 10 verso) and 17 (Folio 14 recto).
(34.) From scenario nine; the passage from scenario six lacks the phrase "amoureux surtout"; scenario five lacks the entire phrase preceding "delices," but Leclerc's edition shows that Flaubert revised the location from "salon" to "chambre": "le coup se tire dans le/a salon chambre sur cette causeuse ou ils ont tant cause" (Folio 12 recto).
(35.) Peter McPhee, A Social History of France, 1780-1880 (London: Routledge, 1992) 253. Rosa M. Palermo Di Stefano notes that the violation of the conjugal chamber proposed in Folio 245 recto amounts to the "summum de depravation" (Le Corset moral, 168).
(36.) Michal Peled Ginsburg, Flaubert Writing" A Study of Narrative Strategies (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986) 106.
(37.) Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 2: 1278-79. However, the fiacre is also endowed with "actions quasi humaines ou animales" as noted by Eric Le Calvez (Geneses flaubertiennes [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009] 250 n.29).
(38.) Matthew Arnold contrasted Tolstoi's "compassion" toward Anna with Flaubert's "cruelty" toward Emma, insisting upon the "petrified feeling" that results from Flaubert's "service to the goddess Lubricity" ("Count Leo Tolstoy," Essays in Criticism, Second Series [London: Macmillan, 1903] 202-3). (39.) Charles Baudelaire, CEuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois; 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 1976) 2: 83.
(40.) Like Baudelaire, Flaubert dissociated himself from realism: "On me croit epris du reel, tandis que je l'execre. Car c'est en haine du realisme que j'ai entrepris ce roman" (Letter to Edma Roger des Genettes, 30 October 1856, Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 2: 643).
(41.) Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) 142.
Olmsted, William
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Olmsted, William. "Emma versus the proprieties: censorship, self-censorship, and revision in Madame Bovary." The Romanic Review 101.4 (2010): 765+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 July 2013.
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