The Cake, Emma’s Romantic dreams, and le bovarysme - part one

Eleanor Gilbert, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an
extract from Madam Bovary in english. Blog post by Professor
Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame
Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated
‘above her station’ alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She
read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent
illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable
fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous
life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village,
comes to the farm to set her father’s broken leg, he falls in love
with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is
not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him.
Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would
have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by
the light of flaming torches). Emma’s wedding cake gives physical
form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly,
Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame
Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery
being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel.
Plot spoiler: it doesn’t end well. At the moment of her wedding,
however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la
passion’ and ‘la félicité’ in married life. For the first chapters
we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see
her mostly from outside through Charles’s gaze: her slim fingers,
her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole
being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her
parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we
will learn later about Emma’s inner, fantasy life; and because it
is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the
impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse
blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply
a way of mocking Emma’s Romantic dreams and social aspirations.
Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did
not reduce pathos (or the reader’s emotional response); on the
contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very
modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and
the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject
to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary,
c’est moi’ and many of us could say as much. Later in the century,
a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le
bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human
capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the
description of Emma’s wedding cake, in French and in English. On
avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les
nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les
choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui
fit pousser des cris. À la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de
carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et
statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées
d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon
en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique,
amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’oranges; et enfin, sur la
plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait
des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de
noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une
escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés
par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read
in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The
tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As
he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and
he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate
confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of
blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides,
porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with
gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made
of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica,
almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost
layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell
boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of
which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret
Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2004),
p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by
Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading:
The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the
website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen):
http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at:
https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot=
Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902)
Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism’, in The Columbia History
of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman
and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006),
pp. 167-70