Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction

Marco Wan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134843879
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

How do lawyers, judges and jurors read novels? And what is at stake when literature and law confront each other in the courtroom? Nineteenth-century England and France are remembered for their active legal prosecution of literature, and this book examines the ways in which five novels were interpreted in the courtroom: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Paul Bonnetain's Charlot s'amuse, Henry Vizetelly's English translation of Émile Zola's La Terre, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. It argues that each of these novels attracted legal censure because they presented figures of sexual dissidence – the androgyne, the onanist or masturbator, the patricide, the homosexual and the lesbian – that called into question an increasingly fragile normative, middleclass masculinity. Offering close readings of the novels themselves, and of legal material from the proceedings, such as the trial transcripts and judicial opinions, the book addresses both the doctrinal dimensions of Victorian obscenity and censorship, as well as the reading practices at work in the courtroom. It situates the cases in their historical context, and highlights how each trial constitutes a scene of reading – an encounter between literature and the law – through which different forms of masculinity were shaped, bolstered or challenged.

Chapter 1
The Madame Bovary trial: the lascivious painting of Flaubert’s androgyne

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary occupies a central place in the history of modern fiction; it is both a quintessential nineteenth-century ‘realist’ novel and a precursor of the early twentieth-century ‘modernist’ novel. This duality would play an impor tant role in the obscenity trial of 1857, which took place because of the novel’s alleged lasciviousness. Flaubert was admired by some of his contemporaries as the master of realism, an artistic vision characterised by a resolute focus on contem poraneity, a turn away from classical models and high personages in favour of the representation of ordinary people and experiences, a commitment to truthful depictions of reality and an interest in the immediate and the transitory over the eternal or the universal.¹

Literature and visual art are closely related in French realism: intellectual and personal exchanges between artists and writers were frequent; similar subjects from the less aristocratic walks of life recurred in the novel and the visual arts, and realist fiction was frequently compared with paintings in the mid-nineteenth century. The parallels between realist fiction and art are so strong that Peter Brooks has suggested that realism should be understood as a representation that ‘turns crucially on its visuality’.² As we will see, the critique of the visuality of realist fiction formed the crux of the prosecution’s argument in the trial.

Flaubert himself was strongly averse to being labelled a ‘realist’ writer: ‘I execrate what is commonly called “realism”, even though I’m regarded as one of its high priests’.³ He wanted Madame Bovary to be ‘dependent on nothing external’ and for it to be ‘held together by the internal strength of its style’.⁴ The novel’s focus on style over content and its textual independence from ‘external’ reality arguably gives it a more distinctively modernist echo. Moreover, Flaubert’s style indirect libre – a mode of storytelling whereby the narrative viewpoint shifts between the thoughts and impressions of the characters and of the narrator without any signposting – looks forward to the turn towards interiority characteristic of the modernist novel: in his lectures Vladimir Nabokov identifies Flaubert as a key influence on Franz Kafka, and speculates that: ‘without Flaubert there would be no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland’.⁵

As I will show, Flaubert’s defence lawyer would advance an argument which foregrounded the novel’s modernist style. Madame Bovary’s position as simultaneously the epitome of mid-nineteenth-century realism and a curiously anachronistic instance of literary modernism makes it an apposite starting point for a study of literary trials and literary-legal relations in the modern period.

In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which Madame Bovary was read in the courtroom, and combine historicist and psychoanalytic approaches to investigate the construction of gender in both fiction and the law. The first section focuses on the novel and interprets it as the site of mobile, indeterminate gender identi fications whose textual effects challenged the conventional notions of gender in mid-nineteenth-century France. Central to this section is the notion of androgyny: the novel’s construction of the androgyne can be understood as one cause of the obscenity trial in that it threatened to undermine the entrenched distinctions between masculinity and femininity of the period.

The second section studies the ways in which Madame Bovary was read in a legal setting; it brings the method of close reading usually associated with literary criticism to bear on the text of the trial transcript, focusing on the courtroom rhetoric to explore the ways in which the law attempted to contain the novel’s subversive force. It argues that the prosecution presented the novel in visual terms in an attempt to arrest its free play of gender identifications through the dynamic of fetishism. The defence, on its part, paradoxically adopted the radical mobility of gender in the novel as the basis of its counter-argument by demonstrating the same mobility on the level of form. It was this intertextual reasoning that determined the outcome of the trial in Flaubert’s favour; the novel’s very radicality that led to legal censure in the first place was also the element which secured Flaubert’s acquittal.

(I) Two kinds of androgyny: reading Madame Bovary

French androgynies

Madame Bovary appeared in six instalments between October and December 1856 in the Revue de Paris, a liberal publication founded by, amongst others, Flaubert’s friend Maxime Du Camp.⁶ Even though Du Camp kept the promise to publish the novel which he had made to Flaubert five years previously, he was attuned to the pressures of censorship and advised the author to allow his text to be ‘pruned’ by the editors: ‘Be brave, close your eyes during the operation, and have confidence – if not in our talent, at least in the experience we have acquired in such matters and also in our affection for you’.⁷

Flaubert was furious at this intervention; he scrawled ‘Gigantesque!’ on Du Camp’s letter, threw it into a drawer and did not deign to reply. There were further disputes between the two friends, and eventually a compromise was reached: the novel would be published, but a long passage about a cab journey through the streets of Rouen, in which the movement of the vehicle was suggestive of the love-making of Emma and her lover Léon inside it, would be omitted. As serialisation proceeded, however, the Revue became increasingly worried by complaints amongst its subscribers about the novel’s immorality, and also learned that the government censor had initiated proceedings against the magazine and Flaubert for breaching the obscenity laws of the Second Empire. The editors expunged another passage from the December instalment and advised Flaubert to make further cuts. Flaubert refused to do so on the basis that such excisions would only ‘weaken’ the novel: ‘I will not make a correction, not a cut; I will not suppress a comma; nothing, nothing!’⁸

The disagreement intensified to such a degree that Flaubert insisted on the cancellation of the final instalment, but it eventually reached its readers with a preface in which Flaubert disclaimed responsibility for the published version. The Revue’s efforts ultimately did little more than antagonise the author and failed to pre-empt the legal proceedings: on 30 January 1857, Flaubert, along with representatives from the Revue, appeared before the Tribunal Correctionnel in Paris charged with having committed an ‘outrage against public and religious morals, or against decency’ (outrage à la morale publique et religieuse, ou aux bonnes moeurs) under a law originally passed on 17 May 1819. Ernest Pinard, the deputy prosecutor at the imperial court, represented the French Government, and Jules Sénard represented the author and the publisher.⁹

In his perceptive analysis of the Madame Bovary trial, Dominick LaCapra argues that the court ‘processed as ordinary crime what was, in significant and special ways, ideological or political “crime” ’.¹⁰ In other words, even though the allegation ostensibly concerned the outrage to public morality and religion which Madame Bovary incited, the real issue at stake was the ways in which the novel challenged ‘the validity of the norms, categories, and criteria tacitly assumed by the trial as the basis of understanding and judgment’.¹¹ LaCapra identifies three inter-related components to the “crime”: the novel dismantled the opposition between marriage and adultery, it undermined the difference between the sacred and the profane, and it provided no reliable or coherent centre of narration. It is this final, stylistic, element of the novel which receives the most sustained analysis in LaCapra’s reading.

The style indirect libre of Madame Bovary has received much critical attention.¹² LaCapra’s contribution lies in identifying the political and ideological significance of Flaubert’s style in the context of the trial. He argues that since Emma’s story is told in ‘a dual mode involving both proximity and distance – empathy and irony – in the relation of the narrator to the character or narrated object’, it becomes impossible to tell whether the author is critical or sympathetic of his heroine’s behaviour.¹³ In the words of Pinard, the prosecution lawyer: ‘Who is able condemn this woman in the book? Nobody. Such is the conclusion. In the book there is not one character that is able to condemn her’.¹⁴ The absence of a clear authorial stance gives rise to two incompatible interpretations of Madame Bovary, as represented by the opposing sides in the trial. For the prosecution, Pinard argued that Flaubert was sympathetic to Emma, read the novel as a glorification of infidelity, and claimed that it ought to be subtitled ‘History of the Adulteries of a Provincial Woman’.¹⁵

For the defence, however, Sénard interpreted the novel as a cautionary moral tale and argued that Emma’s suffering was a warning to its readers not to succumb to illicit desire. In response to Pinard’s accusation that Flaubert had written ‘adulterous poetry’, Sénard contended that the writer aimed to cultivate virtue by instilling a horror of vice.¹⁶ The exculpating interpretation which Sénard posited is a familiar one in the history of literary realism: the preface to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) provides a similar justification of the novel’s depiction of criminal and immoral behaviour by explaining that giving ‘the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real history of it will bear, to illustrate and give a beauty to the penitent part’. It is ‘the moral’ that wicked action will not go unpunished, rather than ‘the fable’ of the action itself, which is the point of the tale.¹⁷

The preface itself makes reference to the history to this defence when it notes that the ‘advocates for the stage have, in all ages, made this the great argument to persuade people that their plays are useful’.¹⁸ Sénard interpreted Madame Bovary as a moral tale by reproducing this ‘great argument’, and Pinard interpreted it as the glorification of licentiousness by positing the absence of authorial condemnation as a narrative endorsement of her behaviour. The novel was thus presented to the court as both ‘poison and antidote to the larger sociocultural complex’ of mid-nineteenth-century France.¹⁹

LaCapra rightly identifies indeterminacy and undecidability as the central problem in the trial, but his exclusive focus on the narrator’s morality – on how the narratorial presence fails to present itself clearly as ‘a centre of value and judgment’ – leaves unexamined the link between gender identity and Flaubert’s style indirect libre, as well as the ways in which the construction of gender via the novel’s mode of narration could constitute another political or ideological ‘crime’.²⁰ LaCapra’s analysis thus provides the starting point for a further discussion, which brings into focus the subversive potential of the novel’s representation of gender.

A number of critical works have productively analysed Emma Bovary’s gender under the rubric of hysteria, a focus which is no doubt influenced by Freud’s speculations on the subject and also by the famous appellation of Emma as an ‘hysterical poet’ by the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire in his review published in L’Artiste.²¹ However, as Jan Goldstein notes in an influential article, Baudelaire only ‘slips in’ the category of hysteria towards the end of his review.²² She further points out that the central paradigm in his review is not hysteria, but androgyn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: legal interpretation, gender and the novel
• 1 The Madame Bovary trial: the lascivious painting of Flaubert’s androgyne
• 2 The Charlot s’amuse trial: onanism and the scandal of naturalist fiction
• 3 The Henry Vizetelly trials: Émile Zola’s obscene patricide
• 4 The Oscar Wilde trials: reading sodomitical texts in court
• 5 The Well of Loneliness trials: lesbianism and the return of the repressed
• Bibliography
• Index