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The Fairest of Them All: Modes of Vision in Madame Bovary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
By revealing Emma’s subjectivity in descriptive, hallucinatory, and auto-scopic modes of vision, Flaubert shows that two false versions of reality dominate her imagination: the marvelous, derived from her reading, and the endoxal, derived from her culture. These modes of vision, which are manifested in a series of mirror images, show Emma incapable of distinguishing between past and present, fantasy and reality, and lead as well to the discovery that her fantasies about all men remain vague and abstract. Emma can only differentiate women in her imagination, and the autoeroticism informing her narcissism finally displaces infidelity as the source of her most erotic experiences. Throughout Madame Bovary, Emma’s subjectivity becomes increasingly associated with the fantastic, until she is seen to have completely lost touch with reality.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978
References
Notes
1 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. 78; hereafter cited in the text by page number only.
2 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1973), p. 121.
3 I am endebted to Christopher Prendergast's fine study of idées reçues in “Flaubert: Writing and Negativity,” Novel, 8 (1975), 197–213. Prendergast offers an elaborate definition of endoxon as it applies to Madame Bovary: “The consensus of received opinion which a given society assumes and offers as Reality ... is what Aristotle called endoxon (‘current opinion‘) and, following Aristotle, we may perhaps call the discourse which repeats and reinforces consensus knowledge the endoxal discourse, the language of common-sense, the language of the stereotype, whose function is to cover a world historically produced with the mantle of the universal and the permanent and of which the classic forms are the maxim, the proverb, the platitude, the idée reçue” (p. 207).
4 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 21.
5 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 426.
6 John C. Lapp explores this congruence in “Art and Hallucination in Flaubert,” French Studies, 10 (1956), 322–44.
7 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance. Supplément, ed. R. Dumesnil, J. Pommier, and C. Digeon (Paris: Conard, 1954), ii, 94–95.
8 Robert Rogers, in A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970), makes a similar observation about Narcissus' self-love (p. 20). He also defines narcissism in a way I have found useful: “Narcissism is a kind of love, but it is misleading to translate the concept into what is known commonly as ‘self-love.’ Self-love in the everyday sense of ‘egotism’ is a metaphorical expression. In narcissism the self-love is literal. The only difference between this kind of love and the erotic love of another person is in the object. Narcissism paradoxically involves a relationship, a relationship of self to self in which one's self is regarded as though it were another person” (p. 18). In addition, Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), contains several outstanding essays that touch on the relationship between narcissism and Romanticism. Bloom's “The Internalization of Quest-Romance” (pp. 3–24) is especially good on the Freudian view of this subject. See also J. H. Van den Berg's “The Subject and His Landscape” (pp. 57–65) and Paul de Man's “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” (pp. 65–77).
9 This is true not only for Emma and her prototype, Don Quixote, but also for Conrad's Lord Jim, Ford's Edward Ashburnham, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Each character's death is closely linked to this aspect of the language of Romanticism. For more on this connection, see my “Ford Madox Ford and The Great Gatsby” in Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1975, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Englewood, N.J.: Microcard Editions Books, 1975), pp. 57–74, and “Escaping the Impasse: Criticism and the Mitosis of The Good Soldier,” Modern Fiction Studies, 21 (Summer 1975), 237–41.
10 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 17. Here is the relevant prose: “How can we take pleasure in a reported pleasure (boredom of all narratives of dreams, of parties)? How can we read criticism? Only one way: since I am here a second-degree reader, I must shift my position: instead of agreeing to be the confidant of this critical pleasure—a sure way to miss it—I can make myself its voyeur: I observe clandestinely the pleasure of others, I enter perversion; the commentary then becomes in my eyes a text, a fiction, a fissured envelope. The writer's perversity (his pleasure in writing is without function), the doubled, the trebled, the infinite perversity of the critic and of his reader.”
11 Jean Pommier and Gabrielle Leleu, Madame Bovary, nouvelle version (Paris: Corti, 1949), p. 129. Quoted in Prendergast.