Abstract
At first glance, the resemblance between Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary seems to end with their first name. In almost every nuance of character Flaubert’s Emma is presented as the very antithesis of Austen’s. Her complete destruction is inevitable from the moment of her first appearance in the novel.
Why each is striving, from of old,
To love more deeply than he can?
Still would be true, yet still grows cold?
— Ask of the Powers that sport with man!
They yoked in him, for endless strife,
A heart of ice, a soul of fire;
And hurled him on the Field of Life,
An aimless unallayed Desire.
(Matthew Arnold, ‘Destiny’, 1852)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Editions Garnier, 1960) pp. 65–6. All subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text. All translations are mine.
Martin Turnell, The Novel in France (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) p. 269.
Quoted in Martin Turnell, ‘Madame Bovary’, in Flaubert: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Giraud (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964) p. 111.
Stendhal, ‘Appendice sur Le Rouge et le Noir’, Le Rouge et le Noir (Paris: Editions Garnier, 1960) p. 509.
I am making no attempt to trace in detail the various appearances and functions of these motifs; there have been many studies of this type, notably D. L. Demorest’s L’Expression figurée et symbolique dans l’oeuvre de Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Louis Conard, 1931). I am merely suggesting the role they play in the fate of the imaginative provincial heroine.
Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963) p. 265.
Henri Alain-Fournier and Jacques Rivière, Correspondance, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1937) pp. 269–70.
Flaubert, ‘Letters about Madame Bovary’, in Madame Bovary, ed. and trans. by Paul De Man (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1965) p. 319.
The passage is evocative of Flaubert’s own sensory creation of the scene in the letter to Louise Colet in which he describes the process by which he becomes not only the lovers, but also the horses, the trees, the shrubbery. One is also strongly reminded of the resemblance between Emma and the boy in James Joyce’s short story’ ‘Araby’, in Dubliners (New York: Viking Press, 1958), who, shut up alone in an empty room, whispers over and over to himself, as in a prayer or incantation, ‘O love! O love!’ (p. 31).
One is reminded of Jane Austern’s Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (London: Penguin English Library, 1969), who, trying to recover from a broken heart, ‘reforms’ with characteristically romantic exaggeration. Her sister Elinor smiles ‘to see the same eager fancy which had been leading her to the extreme of languid indolence and selfish repining, now at work in introducing excess into a scheme of such rational employment and virtuous self-control’ (p. 335).
Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, 1970) p. 278.
Matthew Arnold, ‘Count Leo Tolstoi’, in Essays in Criticism: Second Series, ed. S. R. Littlewood (London: Macmillan, 1958) p. 161.
Anthony Thorlby, Gustave Flaubert and the Art of Realism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957) p. 35.
B. F. Bart, ‘Madame Bovary after a Century’, in ‘Madame Bovary’ and the Critics, ed. B. F. Bart (New York: New York University Press, 1966) p. 107.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1987 Elizabeth Jean Sabiston
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sabiston, E.J. (1987). Emma Bovary: Muse in a Shop Window. In: The Prison of Womanhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18804-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18804-8_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-18806-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-18804-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)