An arc is described over the structure of Madame Bovary ,linking ordinary products of provincial life--Charles's contemporaries and the cure--with the radical-turned-reactionary, Homais, the rising star of this society, in an arc which defines the New Age : the arc of the Present . Homais is like a prism, refracting and distorting truth, humanity and moral values, in the pursuit of self-interested social advancement : the very exemplum of New Man .
Self-interest is a recurring trait in the characters of Madame Bovary , and, by definition, it entails a limitation on the human perspective, sensibility and reciprocal endeavour--a limitation of self. The exceptions are Justin, Hippolyte and Dr. Lariviere. The two adolescents are outwith the adult sphere that is being portrayed and criticised. And Lariviere is described thus :L'apparition d'un dieu n'eut pas cause plus d'emoi, which both suggests him as a possible contemporary focal point of Good, while placing him in the sphere of universal human values outwith the restricting arc of provincial life .
To offset what would ultimately have proved to be a boring omniscient-author narrative, portraying a succession of mundane characters and events, Flaubert introduced his point-of-view technique. This endows the characters with an individuality, an ego, a personality, and we follow their actions, moods, thoughts, aspirations and preconceptions with an informed complicity and a curious interest. It follows from this that Flaubert endows the reader with an omniscience none of his characters has : we can weigh the subjective impression with the objective reality. But this omniscience is only apparent, for it is in itself limited in traversing the various viewpoints because we are dealing with the workings of the mind, the knowledge of which, in each individual reader, is confined within a certain degree of tolerance. This paradox gives to Madame Bovary a tension, an ambivalence which emanates from Flaubert's abiding premiss : Ne pas conclure.
The arc described over the structure of the novel defines and contains the New Age within a pocket in Time--the present moment. The narrative terminates in the present tense--Il fait une clientele d'enfer ; l'autorite le menage et l'opinion publique le protege--and in the instantaneous : Il vient de recevoir la croix d'honneur. But the initial class-room scene and the continuum of Charles's ancestry, early life and adolescence are no less a manifestation of the present.
Scientific methodology is the rising star of this present, and those early pages are nothing short of a methodological approach to determining the essence of Charles Bovary, done by a New Man of Homais' ilk, so we are presented with a meticulous account of genealogical data, adumbrated with individual anecdotes and reminiscences. Those initial nous, recounting the trivia about Charles's cap are the contemporaries of Charles who live on into the present New Age. They can recall the realistic trivia of the cap--an attitude on which Baudelaire cast aspersions : une description minutieuse des accessoires--yet they cannot now recall anything else but bathetic generalities on Charles the individual : (il) jouait aux recreations, travaillait a l'etude, ecoutant en classe. Then we have the standard time-worn recollection of an instructor about a former pupil : il etait toujours content de lui, disait que le jeune homme avait beaucoup de memoire. Both types of generalisation have an element of apparent consequence in that they point to Charles's propensity for rigorous application, which was to serve him well at the medical examinations. But they are subjective impressions suggested as determining facets of the ultimate reality--Charles the man--when one could similarly cite evidence of the contrary : les tomes du Dictionnaire des sciences medicales, non coupes , at a time when his career as Officer of Health is well set in motion, and a studious application to the tomes would, judging by his earlier attitude, have been appropriate and expected.
What Flaubert does, then, is that he sets up his point-of-view technique as a contrast to the materialistic determinist approach. The latter denies an insight into the autonomous fluctuations of the intellect--flights of fancy, moods, aspiration, poetic imagination, sensibility. These features are outwith the assiduous grasp of determinism, are necessarily within the individual, and stress both the universal importance of the living personality and the limitations of a functional but soul-less determinism.
The statistical data and the reminiscences in the initial pages lend the impression that an unnamed determinist sociologist is collecting data with a view to something along the lines of Homais' Statistique generale du canton d'Yonville--quite possibly Homais himself, or someone following his example as a means to social advancement. What is certain, though, is that the beginning--Il serait maintenant impossible a aucun de nous de se rien rappeler de lui--and the end of Madame Bovary are in and of the present New Age, and that Flaubert takes his cue from the continuum on Charles in order to take us inside that character's mind, by means of his point-of-view technique. Our range of experience and comprehension expands, to encompass that of Emma, the central character, and then through her to all the other characters who pertain to and influence their lives. Through the subjective-impression technique we see beyond an external reality that purports to describe the essence of a human being, and into an inner reality that may not define, but does extend our comprehension of, what makes for the true essence of that human being : the intellect.
The range of the characters' intellects, then, is of paramount importance in a consideration of Madame Bovary . Emma, the character endowed with a range, however limited, of imaginative sensibility, succumbs, while the tawdry, unimaginative Guillaumin, Lheureux and Homais ultimately preside. But it does not follow that this depressing state of affairs has derived simply from a progressive whittling away of Emma's person and psyche by these unimaginatives. Certainly, Rodolphe, Leon and the lesser stratum of Yonville inhabitants do make inroads on Emma's person and material position, all in the pursuit of self-interest, but Emma is endowed with an imaginative sensibility, and as such has a responsibility to maintain a higher level of social, moral and aesthetic values. In proof, what she does do is constrict her intellect within the confines, the fusty decrepitude of romantic melodrama, projects this world of unreality onto the world of experience and reality, and tries to mould her empirical experiences to those fictional constants. She experiences the real, but does not try to understand or apply her imaginative sensibility to her contemporary situation. Her intellect remains rooted both in a fictional past and, as her range of empirical experience expands, in a composite of fictional and empirical constants, while her unimaginative contemporaries progress at a mundane level of values. This emphasises the extent of her folly--the extent to which she abjured her artistic responsibility to a higher range of values. Emma's is a case of self-immolation, and it is no surprise that Flaubert does not make of her story a heroic conflict between love and tragic destiny. He deflates her recurring moments of romantic grandeur, treats her love as an endless round of frustration and delusion, reduces her destiny to sordid trivialities, and undermines the dignity of conflict by a subtle play of irony. As the character with the widest possibility for range of intellect, Emma receives the lion's share of Flaubert's attention. As the one who forfeits her artistic responsibility, she receives the lion's share of licence, that in proof is licence to fail and fall.
Emma's emotional life is delineated in a series of curves, each rising with longing towards a zenith of apparent achievement, then falling away through a sense of emptiness and monotony to a nadir of disintegration, only to be followed by the artificial whipping up of a new illusion, which sets her off on a new curve. Emotionally Emma is always striving towards an unattainable ideal man, endowed with attributes from her past experience. On the one hand there is Leon, whom she perceives as the gentle Romantic she can mould to her own will. But predominantly on the other is this ogre, an amalgam of manly attributes drawn from Emma's reading of fiction, from her admiration for historical figures who have a certain romantic aura about them, and from the reminiscences of the vieille fille at the convent. Charles is to fall progressively under the shadow of this ogre, and it brings a progressively increasing danger that threatens his married life with Emma. The pacific unassuming Charles could never hope to compete with this amalgam of arbitrarily selected 'ideal' constants.
That series of curves are not delineated on a horizontal base, but are a series of smaller curves delineated on a larger one. Emma's genuine emotional relationships begin with Charles, rise to that silhouette of aristocracy, luxury and mystery, le Vicomte, rise further through the platonic-love world of Leon, with his idees recues and conventional love-platitudes, then further through the beguiling seducer Rodolphe, to the apex--that moment of crisis when Emma is about to hurl herself down from the attic onto the street below. By this point she has run the gamut of a fairly broad range of possible ideal-man types, and has become progressively disillusioned as each did not accord to type. Hereafter it is a downward slope through the same range of men, who are now fallen idols, mere men : the platonic becomes the sensual ; the passionate seducer is revealed in all his bland callousness ; le Vicomte who left her haletante at the ball becomes, just possibly, someone in a passing carriage. Charles is there at the beginning, the peak and the end--the solid,reliable, dutiful, but, for Emma, the unacceptable man. But this is only what Charles presents , for essentially, across Emma's roster of likely men, he is the real Romantic, the only one likely to have a heart broken, the only one definitely to die of a broken heart. Emma's tragedy is that she is so beguiled by fulfilling fanciful notions that she cannot see past and through what Charles presents, to the real Romantic harboured there within .
