Weeks 7-8, Gustave Flaubert

CPLT 325 WEEK 7. 03/09. Wed. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary (Author bio. Vol. E, 1084-88, novel parts 1-2: 1088-1227). Read also Section Intro: "Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism in Europe" (Vol. E, 1071-83)

CPLT 325 WEEK 8. 03/16. Wed. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary (Vol. E, 1227-1301).

Balance between the narrator's (a schoolfellow of Charles, it seems) contempt for Emma and Charles and at least some sympathy for them. Concentrate on substantial passages in which Emma's sensualism and aesthetic longings are laid bare, along with Charles' cluelessness and mediocrity.

Augustine – in his case, the aesthetic longing led beyond itself to genuinely spiritual strivings and accomplishments; not so in Emma's case. But why? Perhaps because in her world, that of a well-off peasant woman in mid-century provincial France, nothing leads beyond itself. Her aspirations are a mix of vivid sensations hitched to vague longings for a better life, a life to be filled with fine material things, but with romance and passion and intrigue as well. Are her longings themselves to blame, or should we blame the ruthlessly deterministic crushing of them by her environment? Or both? It seems to me that this environment is one with which we're somewhat familiar: one that's beginning to look rather like Guy de Bord's "society of the spectacle," in which simulacra are constantly served up to us to serve somebody else's interests. What exactly is Emma consuming but fashion magazines, romantic novels, and fine material items from Monsieur Theroux? Who today isn't familiar with a society of easy but ruinous credit, based on certain assumptions about social and economic status and expectations? Sure, we the lenders urge you to buy that million-dollar home in the suburbs even though your income can't sustain it. Everybody's doing it! And so forth. How many people have maxed out their credit cards buying nice things they really don't need? Capitalism thrives on desire, not need. More particularly, it thrives on confounding the distinction between desire and need. Welcome to perpetual retail therapy, with the local mall – in our case the storied U of South Coast Plaza – as Mecca for constantly primed consumer-citizens. And then of course there's the raciness of such a society – we must constantly be thinking about sex because that's mainly what sells products. Emma's erotic longings are at least in part driven by novels, magazines, fine things and the promise of more of them: those things and images fill a void in her spirit that may not be caused by the society in which she lives – I'd say it's instead fundamentally human – but that isn't healed by that society. She hasn't much to work with, in the final analysis. Lack of originality might not be a problem – if, that is, Flaubert is suggesting it is one – if the environment allowed each person to experience the same good things for themselves. But obviously Emma's options are quite limited, given where she's from and where she now is, in provincial France near Rouen, 1840, in the reign of the bourgeois King Louis Philippe.

This is certainly realism with an attitude -- we are let in on Emma's thought processes, but at times in a clinical manner that makes it clear the narrator has little respect for what she thinks are her terrible struggles and wild aspirations. Who is this narrator, anyway, and why is he able to be so dispassionate when he comes from much the same place as Charles? Or was he among the richer students, as there were some of them? That's my assumption since he seems to be able to wrap his mind around Charles and Emma so easily. Well, we might consider by way of challenge to this sarcastic emphasis the extent to which it's actually possible to sympathize with Emma and take her part against everything and everyone ranged against her.

Part 1, Chapter 1

Questions/comments: why start with Charles? Well, I suppose we need to know what's in him. What will Emma have to work with? Not a lot, it seems – the parents are a work of art, with dad a second-rate retailer of Revolutionary primitivist ideals. Charles doesn't measure up even to that nonsense.

Part 1, Chapter 2

Questions/comments: Circumstance, opportunity is almost fiendish in its appeal to the pedestrian instincts of such characters as Charles – they're passive, just take what comes their way.

Part 1, Chapter 3

Questions/comments: Same comment as for Ch. 2 – opportunity accepted. Emma, we see, is budding romantic – this wedding establishes the pattern; she ends up accepting the commonly done thing, the cultural script, custom and tradition.

Part 1, Chapters 4-5

Questions/comments: GF determined to describe everything in minute detail. Why? It's more than authorial pride, I think – he sees realism as a duty. To understand Emma's reality, I suppose, is to know her plight. In this sense, the descriptions of homes and locales, etc. is loaded towards sympathy with her.

Part 1, Chapter 6

Questions/comments: Emma's memories, a precocious aesthete! Emma loves the mystery-suggestive surface of things. I can't really blame her for this – it's just who she is. Mention the Augustinian context: signs leading us onwards to spiritual understanding. But of course it doesn't work that way here – the written influences, etc., just lead to rebellion, dissatisfaction with dull, insightless authority.

Part 1, Chapter 7

Questions/comments: The first of several instances in a pattern of hopes raised and dashed that wears her down eventually. Emma's detached and resentful stance against poor Charles, who has no interiority and can't recognize anyone else's, gives way to hope in the form of an invitation beyond her station: "betters."

Part 1, Chapter 8

Questions/comments: Emma's ecstasy gives way to stark disillusionment, a rage that causes her to mistreat others.

Part 1, Chapter 9

Questions/comments: Neither Charles nor his professor can conceive of a woman having an inner life in anything other than purely "medical" terms: basically, this is like the American Mitchell's "rest cure" about which Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote so well. Pregnancy is brought in in that stark way it often is: a sudden question mark, a game-changer. How will this inflect Emma's emotional path?

Part 2, Chapters 1-2

Questions/comments: Okay, hope-inducer #2: Léon the Naïve. Consider closely exactly what draws Emma and this young man together: what is the ground of their affinity? I'd say they've found in those sentimental books and ideas an objective correlative for their own perfectly unoriginal longings for something better.

Part 2, Chapter 3

Questions/comments: This chapter renders Emma's thoughts about gender – her desire for a male child makes sense. She and Léon cause some rumors to float about – typical small town, everybody knows everybody and people will be talking. Partly that's moralism, partly it's that they have nothing better to do. Flaubert does a good job of delivering to us, especially, just how oppressive life could be in a little town.

Part 2, Chapters 4-5

Questions/comments: More bonding with Léon over that sentimental and idealistic stuff – have a look at some of it. This is a good chapter to examine the psychological process of compensation as denial that GF so often attributes to Emma. Emma is like an actress playing a role, but inwardly she is going crazy with frustration and desire. Monsieur Lheureux's timing is, of course perfect, almost diabolical – he represents the vapidity of materialist culture at its worst: an endless succession of things to which we can attach our desires. But these things don't lead up and out; they just lead in a circle chaining us to our pettiest, objectified desires.

Part 2, Chapter 6

Questions/comments: Church bells – as George Herbert says, "something understood"? No, not in this novel – Emma's old aestheticism comes to a false rescue. The Abbé is truly a one-dimensional man, has absolutely nothing to offer Emma except some dietary advice. Stomachs, not souls, are his concern. This is a savage, almost Voltairean portrait of the Catholic Church at the local level coming from GF.

Part 2, Chapter 7

Questions/comments: Emma relapses into illness, and now we're introduced to a new sort of consciousness: the wily cad Rodolphe. He's a sexual predator, and nothing more, whatever his capacity to cover nature with artifice. A perfect embodiment of the sharklike environment GF is describing: assume others are wicked or shallow, and treat them accordingly. The objectification Rodolphe practices almost makes us appreciate plodding, kind Charles. Almost.

Part 2, Chapter 8

Questions/comments: Well, it doesn't get any better than this – a show! But the boring speeches are masterfully interwoven with Rodolphe's sleazy, slick courting of Emma. Worth looking at for GF's skill with dialogue at cross-purposes. While the pol pitches vapid patriotism, R serves up an enticingly spiced bowl of nothing to Emma.

Part 2, Chapters 9-10

Questions/comments: Focus on the mild resistance and easy seduction scene here. Yet Emma is transcendent, one with her romance heroines after this banal experience. Rodolphe's thoughts are rather interesting, too – the difference between how he processes her appeal, and she his. But Emma's guilt soon reasserts itself – she'll never cut the mustard with Nietzsche!

Part 2, Chapter 11

Questions/comments: Nothing like a botched surgery to liven things up. "Losing!" GF's medical descriptions are impressive. Charles is an idiot, so Emma excuses all her bad behavior – not one of her finer moments in the novel. Nice portrait of a more respectable country doctor – see his matter-of-fact amputation job.

Part 2, Chapters 12-13

Questions/comments: Emma's self-pity is nauseating here, and Lheureux's timing is again impeccable. Focus on how predictably the whole elopement plan falls apart, with Rodolphe's letter-box musings leading him back to the stony narcissism that defines him. Emma suffers he third bout of illness – this time it's quite serious.

Part 2, Chapters 14-15

Questions/comments: Money asserts itself – again, Lheureux's baneful influence. Charles is ensnared, too. Emma's turn to religion is again in vain. And the theater episode simply defies belief – Charles can't figure out why he shouldn't leave a young man alone with his flighty, susceptible wife. The man belongs in a Chaucerian farce, except that he's so nice!

Part 3, Chapters 5-6

Questions/comments: Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! The two lovers are deceiving themselves, sentimentalizing what they’re up to and who they are; the materialization of Emma’s airy fantasies is commodities – fine stuff brought to you directly from the U of SCP, Yonville. Lheureux has a field day now that he suspects her adulterousness. Emma's turn to religion is again in vain, and her tastes run to the corrupt and decadent; even Léon is tired of her. What makes her common is that her efforts tend to go in the most predictable destinations.

Part 3, Chapter 7

Questions/comments: The law closes in on Emma (and Charles), and there’s no help anywhere. Illusions are just about entirely stripped away at this point, with Emma more or less resorting to an attempt at prostitution.

Part 3, Chapter 8

Questions/comments: Consider how accurate the poisoning effects are; Flaubert evidently knew a lot about the subject, did his homework. Emma dies hard, since a heavy dose of arsenic isn’t an easy way to go. Arsenic is a heavy metal like lead and mercury, and the symptoms are horrifying to behold.

Part 3, Chapter 9-11
 
Questions/comments: The ending seems almost sneering in its matter-of-fact handling of the Bovary family’s devolution, downward mobility. It’s hard to forgive Charles for forgiving Rodolphe, and the economic sins and omissions of the parents are visited on Berthe. These final chapters take on the caste almost of an anti-bourgeois Grimm’s fairy tale, as commercial and social reality close in on the Bovarys and finally crush them like ants under someone’s boot. The amoral Homais is the only winner in this situation – he’s too shallow even to have a conscience, and he prospers. He’s a creature of his environment. After Emma’s gruesome death, old patterns reassert themselves for most of Yonville; only Charles seems transformed – I like him the better for it, but of course the change proves to be the death of him. It seems like a bit of a Romantic flourish on Flaubert’s part, but you could also say Charles is merely imitative in his love and admiration for Emma, so much so that he even copies her tastes. Emma’s rejection of the oppressive environment, we might say, makes her, too, a creature of it, but not an adaptable one – her attempts to break out of the mundane world surrounding her, to realize her true individuality or authenticity, come to nothing and she takes her husband and child down with her. In the end, it doesn’t matter. So that’s the upshot of Flaubert’s realist method: to render a banal, materialistic provincial society in exquisite detail, heaping contempt on its values and suggesting that there’s really no way out once you’re born into such a society.


Which brings us to the value of realism – its primary virtue is honesty in representation, an unsparing commitment to craft and to truth in analyzing and describing characters and their environments. Often there’s a political and critical edge to such work – consider George Orwell’s realistic accounts of the Spanish Civil War, or the element of realism in 1984, with its gritty portrayal of a fictional authoritarian regime not unlike the Soviet Union or perhaps Nazi Germany. But as for the mid-C19 realism represented by Flaubert, it has its defenders and detractors. Henry James, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, insisted that people shouldn’t make too many demands on novelistic form or content because it’s the high privilege of novelistic fiction to capture and render life as it is, to embrace the world as best we can determine what it is, how it works. At the other end of the spectrum would be critics such as Oscar Wilde, always the lover of symbolism, comedy of manners, and in general any kind of art not tied to the doctrine that art consists in an “imitation of life.” Wilde can come across as sort of glib about such matters, but his dislike for most realism is insightful: he thought art and literature should help us realize our own imaginings, that it should enrich and ennoble life, give us visions of something and somewhere and someone better – not just show us “the way things are.” What ought they be like? That’s not just smugness or aristocratic posing on his part, or on the symbolists’, either – it’s a view going all the way back to Plato’s distrust of poets as “liars” who just follow their own inspiration or desires rather than rendering for us a vision of beautiful order by which to live. Of course, Plato thought this so-called world of appearances was itself already a pack of lies – even if you copied things as they seem to be, you’d still be lying, as far as he is concerned. But the C19 realist felt committed to describing things as they are, here at the material and social level. They did not idealize or prettify what they saw.

Week 6, Alexander Pushkin

Week 06.  3/02. Wed. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. "The Queen of Spades" (Vol. E, 863-83).

European Romanticism and Pushkin

Pushkin is in a sense a kindred spirit to Goethe; I mean that while both are associated with European romanticism, neither is easily confined to that category. Goethe's work shows him to be something like an historian of romanticism as an international movement and a concept or set of attitudes and beliefs about art and society. Pushkin keeps his distance from romanticism's intuitionism and emphasis on passion as salvational. He befriended Nikolai Gogol', another of Russia's finest writers. All in all, it's difficult to fit Russia's literary productions neatly within pan-European categories except for realism during the mid-to-late nineteenth century with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. On the whole, however you classify the authors, what they produced during the C19 is among the world's greatest literary flowerings, rivalling that of the Elizabethan period's drama and poetry or the British Romantic movement led by Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, with Jane Austen beside them for Regency (1811-20) emphasis. 

Пиковая дама, Queen of Spades

The story "Queen of Spades" certainly casts its characters as driven by various passions, but there's nothing particularly salvational about such deep feelings and obsessions. Instead, a character like Hermann is driven by money; his need to come by a fortune overwhelms any sense of decency or chivalry he might have had, and his relationship to Lisaveta Ivanovna is purely an object-relation. His imagination becomes fixated on those cards.

Genuine religious feeling is replaced by superstition, and love is a construct of social codes, for the most part. The Countess keeps Elizaveta in thrall to her needs.

The old Countess, as the Norton editors point out, is at the center of this kind of society; she is essentially a worn-out, corrupt old woman who followed her own passions and whims in her day, and the truth is that she hasn't changed in that regard. Her prototype seems to have been rather badly dealt with since she was a famous and accomplished woman: Princess Natalya Petrovna Galitzine, née Chernysheva or Chernyshyova (17 January 1741, St. Petersburg, Russia – 20 December 1837).

The fancy card games they play – faro and such – here seem like a metaphor for the vapidity of the characters' lives. They don't do much honest work, but rather spend their time gambling, trading on their established positions to get still more reputation and wealth. Pushkin's view of this world is scathing, which makes sense because he was a reformist and had friends who participated in the so-called Decembrist Uprising against the new Tsar Nicholas I in 1825, who succeeded Alexander I of the Napoleonic Era (1799-1815; Napoleon became First Consul by a coup in 1799, Consul for Life in 1802, and Emperor in 1804; at war with Brits from 1793 onwards, but 1803-15 most intensively).

In a French deck, the Queen of Spades is pictured as the Greek goddess Athena. I suppose Russian aristocrats would have been using a French deck, so the association may be pertinent. The Countess is an impressive figure, an imposing woman who showed genuine independence of spirit in the fashion of the European Enlightenment, during the 1770's, which is the period Pushkin allies her with by her insistence on keeping up that time's fashions.