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, Flaubertâs 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 âprunedâ by the editors: âBe brave, close your eyes during the operation, and have confidence â if not in our talent, at least in the experience we have acquired in such matters and also in our affection for youâ.7
Flaubert was furious at this intervention; he scrawled âGigantesque!â on Du Campâs 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 LĂ©on inside it, would be omitted. As serialisation proceeded, however, the Revue became increasingly worried by complaints amongst its subscribers about the novelâs 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 âweakenâ the novel: âI will not make a correction, not a cut; I will not suppress a comma; nothing, nothing!â8
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 Revueâs 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 âoutrage against public and religious morals, or against decencyâ (outrage Ă 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 SĂ©nard represented the author and the publisher.9
In his perceptive analysis of the Madame Bovary trial, Dominick LaCapra argues that the court âprocessed as ordinary crime what was, in significant and special ways, ideological or political âcrimeâ â.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 âthe validity of the norms, categories, and criteria tacitly assumed by the trial as the basis of understanding and judgmentâ.11 LaCapra identifies three inter-related components to the âcrimeâ: 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 LaCapraâs reading.
The style indirect libre of Madame Bovary has received much critical attention.12 LaCapraâs contribution lies in identifying the political and ideological significance of Flaubertâs style in the context of the trial. He argues that since Emmaâs story is told in âa dual mode involving both proximity and distance â empathy and irony â in the relation of the narrator to the character or narrated objectâ, it becomes impossible to tell whether the author is critical or sympathetic of his heroineâs behaviour.13 In the words of Pinard, the prosecution lawyer: âWho 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 herâ.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 âHistory of the Adulteries of a Provincial Womanâ.15
For the defence, however, SĂ©nard interpreted the novel as a cautionary moral tale and argued that Emmaâs suffering was a warning to its readers not to succumb to illicit desire. In response to Pinardâs accusation that Flaubert had written âadulterous poetryâ, SĂ©nard contended that the writer aimed to cultivate virtue by instilling a horror of vice.16 The exculpating interpretation which SĂ©nard posited is a familiar one in the history of literary realism: the preface to Daniel Defoeâs Moll Flanders (1722) provides a similar justification of the novelâs depiction of criminal and immoral behaviour by explaining that giving âthe 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 partâ. It is âthe moralâ that wicked action will not go unpunished, rather than âthe fableâ 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 âadvocates for the stage have, in all ages, made this the great argument to persuade people that their plays are usefulâ.18 SĂ©nard interpreted Madame Bovary as a moral tale by reproducing this âgreat argumentâ, 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 âpoison and antidote to the larger sociocultural complexâ 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 narratorâs morality â on how the narratorial presence fails to present itself clearly as âa centre of value and judgmentâ â leaves unexamined the link between gender identity and Flaubertâs style indirect libre, as well as the ways in which the construction of gender via the novelâs mode of narration could constitute another political or ideological âcrimeâ.20 LaCapraâs analysis thus provides the starting point for a further discussion, which brings into focus the subversive potential of the novelâs representation of gender.
A number of critical works have productively analysed Emma Bovaryâs gender under the rubric of hysteria, a focus which is no doubt influenced by Freudâs speculations on the subject and also by the famous appellation of Emma as an âhysterical poetâ by the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire in his review published in LâArtiste.21 However, as Jan Goldstein notes in an influential article, Baudelaire only âslips inâ 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...