In Our Time - Madame Bovary

Episode Date: July 12, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the literary sensation caused by Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. In January 1857 a man called Ernest Pinard stood up in a crowded courtroom and declared, “Art that observes no rule is no longer art; it is like a woman who disrobes completely. To impose the one rule of public decency on art is not to subjugate it but to honour it”. Pinard was no grumbling hack, he was the imperial prosecutor of France, and facing him across the courtroom was the writer Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert’s work had been declared “an affront to decent comportment and religious morality”. It was a novel called Madame Bovary.The story of an adulterous housewife called Emma, Madame Bovary, is a vital staging post in the development of realism. The arguments in court involved a heady brew of art, morality, sex and marriage and ensured the fame of the novel and its author. With Andy Martin, Lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge; Mary Orr, Professor of French at the University of Southampton; Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in January 1857, Ernest Pinaw stood up in a crowded courtroom in Paris and declared, Art that observes no rule is no longer art.

It's like a woman who disroves completely. To impose the one rule of public decency on our is not to subjugate it, but to honour it. Pina was the imperial prosecutor of France, and facing him across the courtroom was the writer Gustav Flaubert. Flaubert's work had been declared an affront to decent comportment and religious morality. The novel was Madame Bovary.

The trial became an argument about art and morality, about sex and marriage. It caused a sensation in Paris and forged Madame Bourbeton's reputation as one of the greatest novels in the French language. With me to discuss the trial of Madame Boverry Andy Martin, lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge, Mary Orr, Professor of French at the University of Southampton,

and Robert Gilday, Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Andy Martin, can you briefly outline the plot and the salient features of Madame Bovary? Yes, I think if Flobo were pitching this story as a movie, he would have to summarise the story as something like one wedding, a couple of adulterous liaisons and a funeral. Emma Bovary gets married to a country doctor, but does not live happily ever after. gets bored, the husband,

Charles, is not only a bad doctor, he's also a useless husband. But for Emma Bovary, the key thing is that reality always undershoots her dreams and expectations. So she comes up with the idea of having a romantic flame, or more than one,

as a kind of quest for excitement. And needless to say, they go badly. And just as her husband's operations are bad, and people end up getting bits and pieces amputated, so she ends up committing suicide. by taking an arsenic cocktail. So you could sort of summarise it as saying

it's pleasure followed by pain, but the pleasures of the rather painful kind, and the pain is extremely painful. So it's dark. When it's called a first realist novel, what does that actually mean? I think it's worth bearing mind that Flobbe himself

might not subscribe to that description. Certainly in a letter, he said famously, that's a novel about nothing. In other words, that it's an excise in style and pure form, floating in the air I think how he would have liked it to be. Of course that's pretty misleading.

I mean, anyone who reads it will appreciate there's a great kind of density to it and a sense of lived experience. It has what Roland Bart called, the reality effect. That's the example he gives is Flobert is saying, oh, look, there's a barometer on the wall.

Now, what does that mean? And Bart says, the significance of the barometer is its insignificance. It's not connected to character. connected to plot. It's just there to say, this is the real thing. Having said that, to my way of thinking, the important thing about Bovary is the unreality effect. That's to say all the sort psychoanalytic side of the novel, the dreams, the illusions, the fantasy. And one of the things

that everyone retains, I think, from reading this book is what became known as the Steele-Anderite Lieb. That's to say that everything in the book is described from a point. point of view that it's seen through a gaze. Free indirect speech, yes. Yeah, I think that's free indirect speech or free reported speech. And an idea of a scientific approach to the novel too, that he should look at things as a scientist might. And this might come from his background, Mary Orr.

Can you tell me something about his family background first? He was born in 1821. Juan at that time was a major second city in France. His father was the chief surgeon at the Hotel Du, which was the major hospital in Rouen. It was a rambling, large building. And Floubert's father was very well connected in Réinolins society. He took it upon himself to train other doctors. So he was very well known within the medical community.

He had in fact married the daughter of a doctor. So Floubert was born into this medical family. he had the opportunity of not necessarily feeling hugely driven to following his father's footsteps. He was his second son. So I think it's a place where as a middle child, he had more of an opportunity to develop his own personality. And he was a voracious reader as soon as he could read. And interestingly, I think, very keen to start writing. And he played lots of imaginative games with his younger sister, Caroline.

And they would have, let's pretend, in this huge rambling building, in the amphitheaters, in the dissection rooms, in and around the corpses waiting to be dissected. So I think we've got this macabre mix of the imaginative, but a sense that because this was everyday experience, but he was slightly distanced from it. Do you think that the idea is it too simplistic to say that playing around in his father's hospital and surgery

and being taken, up by this particular teacher gave him an interest in science, which then, as it were, fed into his fiction. I think that's partly true. I think one also has to look at the ways in which he takes the obvious interest in the current scientific ideas and medical ones at the time, but turns that into an imaginative process. And so there's always an element in Floubert's recreation of scientific or medical,

fact, which is Macabra or part of dream world, and coming back to something that Andy touched on, there is this sense that the real is where there might be greatest unreality in the novel, and those places which seem to be more dreamlike, actually

have a grounding in the medical or other scientific history of the time. Rona itself, can you just give us a brief description of what sort of society there was, or it's a second or third society in France? What sort of society was it? Very much, I would suggest a mercantile society.

Its background and hinterland was agricultural but also in textiles. It was a feeder for the Industrial Revolution by being on the seine. And so Floubert would be very much aware because of his family of the interconnections between industry, agriculture, medicine, science and art. Robert Gilder, can you tell, so we've got something of Flobar as a novelist and we've got something up his background, a little bit of rumour. What about the bigger picture,

the France at the time in the, let's say the 1840s, well 1850s would be easier? Well, France is now the Second Empire, and the Second Empire was a sort of hybrid regime. It was a monarchy, but based on the idea of popular sovereignty. And Louis Napoleon, who was in charge of the Second Empire, became Napoleon the Third,

had a coup d'etat against the Assembly to set up this regime. And one of the big problems was liberty, because although Napoleon III said that he was a friend of liberty and ultimately would allow liberty to flourish, there was a sense that France had to go through a period of dictatorship of constraint, and in the interim there was a notion of sort of bread and circuses. This has appeared a great economic growth.

Pre-trade is introduced. There's an industrial revolution going on. There's the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Houseman, with all those wonderful boulevards and the avenues going out from the Etold. and the Bouda Boulogne. And it's also a regime of great show. So you've got the great exhibitions of the 1850s and 60s. There are two in Paris, there's against one in London.

So it's a kind of modern regime, a dynamic regime, but it's also a regime of tremendous social conformity. There's a kind of alliance between church and state in the 1850s. A lot of the education, particularly education of women, is in the hands of the church. And there is this sort of defence of the bourgeois marriage, a marriage that's less about love than it's about property. It's about keeping the family estate together,

the wife coming with a diary, the succession being kept for the children, and therefore love is extremely constrained. And this is one of the problems with Madame Beauvais. It's within the framework of a portrait marriage, and this is a woman seeking love within the constraints that won't allow her that love. Napoleon, as you've mentioned, there was an alliance with the church,

and there seems to be a sympathy. from, let's call them the working classes, the people who harked back to a rather idealised version of 1789, liberty, galate fraternity. But the chattering classes, or the intellectuals, weren't part of that.

And what was his, so this played a part in this bringing the book to trial. What was Napoleon and his government's view of that? Well, as you say, it's a regime that, in one sense, is a sort of regime of the army, the church, the bureaucracy, which through the process of the referendum, the plebber.

as they called it, makes appeal to the people. So there is that kind of relationship between the emperor and the people over the top of the political class. And the political class is put under wraps. I mean, there's huge censorship in the period of the 1850s, which is where the problem arises, because Flaubert's novel is serialized in a newspaper, and the newspaper gets into trouble.

It's already got into trouble for political opposition, and there's a great danger that newspapers can get closed down. So there's a kind of very difficult relationship between the regime and, as you say, the chattering classes, the intellectuals, the journalists, the lawyers. Mario, Maniomboe, serialises, as Robert said in a journal, this is called the Review de Barry. Didn't the publishers of that review realise they were taking a risk when they did this? Well, Flabar was very aware. He was in fact prophetic in a letter to Louise Colley in 1851 or 52.

He was very aware that the regime was becoming more stringent. and that writers who were not going to be necessarily writing acceptable books stood to have their work scrutinised, and he was very aware that Madame Bovary could bring down the Revue de Paris at the same time where it brought to trial, which of course it was. Andy Martin, it was... Madam Bovry was charged as an affront to decent comportment and religious morality, and Floubert was put in the dock with his publisher and printer in Paris.

you might line the case for the prosecution. What did the state say? It was encouraging adultery in some sense, seemed to be the argument of the prosecution, thus liberating women to do whatever they pleased. Now, I'm actually quite sympathetic to the prosecution case in some sense. I just don't think it was very well made. In some sense, he was too sympathetic to the book, to my

way of thinking. Pinault would pick out various passages from the book and say, isn't that a beautiful? sentence. But consider the fact that it seems to be encouraging an adulterous woman. And the problem is that Monsieur

Flaubert is such a great writer and he actually says this flat out that he will make adultery seem tremendously attractive to women and therefore he's got to be stopped. So he was actually undermining his own

case and in some sense I think he was very influenced by Flobert, and famously Pinaire's supposed to have gone on to have written obscene literature himself. Some pornographic poems, so one feels that in some sense he may have been right that he was corrupted by reading Flobert. What about the defence, Sir Robert Gilday? There was a man called Jules Sena.

I was an old family friend and also a good lawyer, I'm told. Yes, I mean, he was a very good, I mean, Flober chose his lawyer well. He was actually a former... former minister in the Second Republic, a very respectable chap from Rouen. And, of course, one of the things that Sena was supposed to say was that, you know, Flobert came from a very well-established family, and that if Floubert were put in prison or heavily fined for this offence, the department would vote against the regime in the next elections. So, he went into politics. Oh, yeah, he entered into politics. But I suppose he said, from the point of view of morality, he said, this book is not an immoral book. He said it's about what happened when you take a woman who was actually a peasant.

Her father was a substantial farmer, but she'd been sent to a convent school. She started to read novels and get ideas above herself. So what he was pointed... Whether above herself is not as important as the fact that there were ideas which were unreal to her own situation. She fantasised her life of romanticism based on then romantic novels she'd written. This was the life she wanted to lead. This was a life she sought after. It was an unreal life given the context she lived.

It's an unreal life probably anyway, whichever context she lived in. But that is one of the driving things, isn't it, in the novel, that she seeks out for a life which has come from a deep reading, deep in her sense, of romantic literature. And that collides with what she's faced with again and again. And then when she tries to fulfil it, she tries to lead this romantic life, reality is even harsher on her. Yes, but I think there's also a social dimension,

because one of the key moments for Emma is when she, when she's invited to the local chateau for a ball, and she finds herself waltzing around with some Duke or Count. And part of the defence is that you shouldn't educate daughters of peasants above their station. In the 19th century, there was a obsession with this idea of de-classmoe, of people moving out of their social role and towards another social role, which they couldn't actually grasp,

and this led to all sorts of problems. The other point that the defence makes is that this is not an immoral tale. It's actually a salutary moral tale. And the fact that sort of Madame Bowery gets her just desserts shows that it is a moral tale. Don't do it. Andy and then Mary. Yeah, it's just, it strikes me.

And Robert's absolutely right. The crux of the defence is that Floubert is punitive towards the protagonist. He makes us suffer. And anyone who's read the semi-climactic scene of the poisoning over several pages, will appreciate that this is a trial, in a sense,

for the main character for the heroin. But it seems to me, and reading it afresh now, is that case for the defence, now would probably seem like a case for the prosecution, then in fact the author is being tremendously sadistic towards his own heroin. What do Flobeer make it? I think that's a... I would like to return to that point that Anne has made,

but while we're on the case, as it were, What did Flobert make of the case being made against his book? He was shocked because he thought he had written a very moral book. He had thought that he hadn't presented a book celebrating adultery. He thought that this book was quite unequivocal, even though it's not so clear that's part of its ambiguity, that Emma is punished, but she's not punished in any clear-cut sense of good and evil. It is her imagination that arsenic poisoning is going to be short and sweet and swift, which turns out to be very ugly, painful and long drawn out.

And that is not the only punishment, if you like, that happens in the ending of the novel. Charles too, of course, all his property is taken away from him. He has punished by default for allowing this woman to indulge in her shopping in her affairs, of which he has helped her into the arms of her lover. and he becomes paradoxically a great romantic through it. But he is dead. He dies of unknown circumstances in the very garden where Emma has been having her affairs. And their one child, Bert, is left impecunious

and, of course, sent to a cotton mill. Can I just make a point about this adultery because we've been talking about condemning adultery. I mean, this is a society that condemns adultery for women, but it doesn't condemn adultery for men. I mean, men are constantly going to see prostitutes and having and keeping mistresses, and that's fine, because the society didn't see that as damaging the family. If a woman goes outside the family and starts having affairs, it takes the way, as we're seeing it, the family property is dwindles away. And, of course, if she has an illegitimate child, that illegitimate child might have a claim on the family property.

So this is, this is, this is, this is, Flaubert condemns what he calls social hypocrisy. and it's a society that's profoundly built on the double standard. So adultery by men is just part of life. Adultery by women is something completely different. And I think that's what's so interesting about the novel, that it builds that in. The lawyer, Guillermo, to whom Emma goes when she's trying to find the money to pay off these promissory notes,

is in caho, the little businessman who's been selling her all the things to feed her dreams. and Giyoma actually suggests that if Emma becomes his mistress that he might be able to find a way out of her situation and she rises above that and she said I may be to be pitied but I am not for sale so there's some very interesting social investigations going on within the novel about law and this society built on

on who you know and about the way the sexuality and women is portrayed Andy Martin Well, of course, as soon as she says, I'm not for sale, the thing you think is, okay, you're for sale, inevitably. In other words, she's a prostitute. That's how she comes over in the novel. My semi-insane hypothesis about this book is that it's not based on a woman in Normandy, in fact, but a dancing girl in Cairo. You know, before he writes this book, Flobe goes off to Egypt and has these sort of life-changing experiences with Egyptian women who are, of course, all pretending to be an... love with him for a certain exchange of money. And what's so interesting is he comes back and imports that into the provincial novel. And so I think he comes up with this wonderful character who appears on the face of it to be a sort of, you know, Norman housewife. But in fact, is this kind of Egyptian dancing girl character?

Yes, well, I think that's quite an imaginative take on who Emma might be based on. She is by popular belief based on the story of a local doctor whose wife committed adultery and this plot was suggested to Flopat by his best friend Buiye. So there is both this exotic and the sense that the story could have a base in reality in the Normandy area. Sort of hardy-esque thing around, yeah. Well, I mean, I think that there's a difficult, I mean, he, did go on this sort of sexual tourism excapade with his friend Maxim

DuCont, who's later the editor of the review. But I think sex in the Orient is one thing, sex in Normandy is another thing. And I think one of the things that the realist novel does in this case is to plonk this in a society where people can see themselves and see their neighbours represented.

And what is okay in Egypt or Constantinople is certainly not okay in Normandy. So this And one of the things that I think Floube is sort of traumatized by this trial, and what he does is his next novel is set in ancient Carthage

because he says, I've had enough with getting into trouble for painting modern morality and modern society. I'll do a realistic novel, but about a society that vanished a couple of thousand years ago. And in that way, I'll show what a brilliant stylist I am, but no one's going to accuse me

of immorality, because no one cares what happened, you know, sex and violence in the ancient world. Melvin, you know, we tend to think of this novel as a 19th century novel, but I think it's worth remembering that Flobert didn't much like 19th century novels in many ways, and his own favourite reading was largely 18th century. And probably the writer that he refers to most often around this period, certainly frequently, is the Marquis de Sard, in fact. And I can't help but think that this novel is quite influenced by Sard,

as it were, secretly in the margins, that there is a kind of Sardian element to it, And if I can summarize what seems to me the crucial element in Sard, I think anyone reading Madame Bervry will recognize some of the elements of this. You take a woman, you tire up in knots, chena, torment her, torture her, and she is still having pleasure at the end of it. And she has to be punished mainly on account of experiencing pleasure, against herself in some sense, against her better judgment,

but biologically she is driven to have pleasure. Now, Flobeau changes this in some sense because she says, as you've said, that she is mainly influenced by reading too many romantic novels, by going to Donizetti operas and Walter Scott and Shattapwing on Victor Hugo and so on. But nevertheless, the results are the same that you have this kind of string of affairs,

plus you end up with a dead female at the end of the story, and that seems to me classically Sardian. And not only Sardian, I mean Sardian, but it goes through an enormous number of novels, but Floubert captures it for that time, in a... He reinvents it in some sense and also makes it much more real.

I think that's what is so terrifying about it. That's why we... Sir Mayor, you're shaking your finger. I don't know whether you're shaking your finger or wanting to get in and talk. No, I think it's fascinating the way that Floubert does take in that dark, saddy and erotic

into the text because one of the really important parts of the trial was that the text itself was used as the basis for the evidence. And any student going back to those key scenes, the carriage ride, and being asked... People haven't read the novel. There's a ride in a carriage through Rome with one of her lovers and they close the... So no one can see inside it. And we hear a lot about the horses at the front how they're sweating and jostling.

And the coachman is sweating. It's extremely erotic. And it's this... And no one can actually pinpoint exactly where are the offence to public sensibility. might be, that it's all in the imagination of the reader. And most of the scenes of similar ilk in the novel, again, play with that hugely charged eroticism. It's like films,

where you've got a couple just about to enjoy one another's pleasures, and all you see in the camera is the waving grass and the blue sky. Or the train going into the tunnel. Indeed. So Fleabair does exactly that, well before the cinema caught up with it. Can we come back,

to still work around the trial a little, Robert Gilday. What what impact did this trial have? Was it just another thing going on in a court in Paris or would it catch the imagination of the newspapers of the time and so on? What was the impact? Well, I think it was a huge event.

And there were a number of these obscenity trials at the time. And in fact, just later in the same year, 1857, Baudelaire is hauled up for Le Faudiomel and he actually receives a fine, not a very large one, but But Blobara, of course, acquitted.

And we've rather jumped the gun on the end saying Floubeau was acquitted. But after the last two weeks of deliberation, after two weeks of the tribunal retired to consider its verdict. If you'd been considering the arguments, what would your verdict have been? Well, certainly wouldn't have been feeling very sorry for Flobeau, because apart from the fact that he rather enjoyed the trial. And, of course, it made the novel into a huge success.

And also, there is an argument that, in fact, he, brought about prosecution very much by publicizing the cuts that the Review de Paris had made on his knowledge, complaining and thus drawing it to the attention of the authorities. So to some extent, he was conspiring himself in the prosecution. Now, had I been sitting in judgment on the whole thing, I would, of course, in my good liberal way, have let him off, because I don't think books should be banned. But, you know, I think I would secretly have been tutting pretty much because what seemed me really, really interesting, what was the breakthrough after all of this book? It was not really the sex at all. It was rather that he, Floubert, claim to understand

what was going on inside the mind of a woman to speak on her behalf, so to speak. Now, that act of penetration, so to speak, seems to me the crux of the whole thing. Whether or not one has a kind of divine right, a kind of, you know, secret omniscience, particularly, in this it seems to me that male novelists claim all the time, to know what women are thinking.

This is something that arises, I think, in the 19th century especially, and becomes, as it were, the privileged, the distinction of the novelist to know what the woman is thinking. That seems to me strictly dubious. You wanted to come in, Mary. I wanted to come in, really, on... Flobert's position in this trial and if you look at his correspondence

he's very sensitive to the effect on his family and if I were sitting in the waiting to pass sentence on Floubert I would really wonder if it was the best thing that my lawyer put such emphasis at the beginning of the trial on my family and yes that was an extraordinary rhetorical ploy but Floubert didn't you know what was connected very directly to

the bourgeois family from which he came, and that was one of the arguments presented for the morality of the outcome of the trial. And Floubert's novel stood for itself, of course, during that. So yes, I would have acquitted him, but not because of his father. Robert. Yes, I mean, I think one of the interesting things about the parameters of the trial is that actually it's all about morality. The prosecution says this is immoral, and the defence says it's not immoral. There's a lot of argument about who's going to be reading the book. I mean, the argument of the prosecution is that this book will fall into the hands of young women and married women,

and they will be driven to adultery. Whereas the defence says, no, this is a profoundly moral book. The defence does not say this is a profoundly great book. It's great art, it's great writing. We don't care whether it's moral, immoral. They don't say it's just a text. They say they have to fall back on this idea of the fact that it's not immoral. So I think one of the interesting things is the debate happens in a very narrow,

narrow framework is not a debate about art, it's a debate about morality, and there's a contemporary notion that art has to be moral. First Mary then, And then, Andy. Yes, and so many of Flobaz readers, women readers of the novel, were completely taken aback that

he had described something which meshed so particularly with their own experiences, and they were very moral women readers. So almost his book stands for itself as not being an immoral book, but an intensely moral book for a very wide female readership.

Well, there we are. Fleurbaas, Madam Burbriar, has been given the once-over, and a slightly duffing here and there in this programme. It's the last in the current series, is we won't be back until the end of September. Thank you very much to Mary Orr, Andy Martin and Robin Gilday, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com. www.uk forward slash radio 4.