Table Of ContentImporting Madame Bovary
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Importing Madame Bovary:
The Politics of Adultery
Elizabeth Amann
IMPORTINGMADAMEBOVARY
Copyright © Elizabeth Amann, 2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-7606-2
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
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First published in 2006 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53668-9 ISBN 978-0-312-37614-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780312376147
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amann, Elizabeth.
Importing Madame Bovary: the politics of adultery/Elizabeth Amann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. European fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Adultery in literature.
3. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821–1880. Madame Bovary. 4. Flaubert, Gustave,
1821–1880–Characters–Emma Bovary. 5. Bovary, Emma (Fictitious character) I. Title.
PN3352.A38A43 2006
809.3'93552–dc22
2006046047
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Exhuming Marguerite Gautier 15
2 An Unbridled Bride 65
3 A Marriage Sans-culotte? 95
4 On Tour 125
5 Grafting 175
Epilogue 215
Acknowledgments 239
Notes 241
Bibliography 257
Introduction
Like many of Woody Allen’s heroes, the title character of his short story
“The Kugelmass Episode” is a New York intellectual who is dissatisfied with
his marriage and his psychotherapy. Kugelmass, however, finds a very
unique solution to his problems: he decides to exchange the services of his
shrink for those of a Brooklyn magician, who calls himself “The Great
Persky.” Persky has invented a special cabinet that projects its contents into
the action of whatever book is enclosed with them. For a modest fee, he of-
fers Kugelmass the opportunity to use this mechanism to commit adultery
with the literary heroine of his choice. Glancing at Perksy’s bookshelves, the
two men quickly run through the canon in search of the ideal lover:
“So who do you want to meet? Sister Carrie? Hester Prynne? Ophelia?
Maybe someone by Saul Bellow? Hey, what about Temple Drake?
Although for a man your age she’d be a workout.”
“French. I want to have an affair with a French lover.”
“Nana?”
“I don’t want to have to pay for it.”
“What about Natasha in War and Peace?”
“I said French. I know! What about Emma Bovary? That sounds
to me perfect.” (44)
Kugelmass enters the magic box with a translation of Flaubert’s novel and
instantly finds himself in Yonville with Madame Bovary, who speaks “in
the same fine English translation as the paperback” (45). With her French
manners and refinement, Emma contrasts dramatically with “the
troglodyte who shared his bed” in real life and soon has Kugelmass under
her spell. Having recently been spurned by Rodolphe, Emma welcomes his
advances. As their affair develops, the English translation of the novel be-
comes strangely distorted: “[S]tudents in various classrooms across the
country were saying to their teachers, ‘Who is this character on page 100?
A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?’” (46). At first, the course of true
love runs smooth. After a while, however, Emma tires of Yonville trysts and
begs Kugelmass to take her with him when he returns to the Big Apple.
E. Amann, Importing Madame Bovary
© Elizabeth Amann 2006
2 IMPORTINGMADAMEBOVARY/ELIZABETHAMANN
Once again, Kugelmass resorts to Persky’s help and magically transports
her in the Bovary carriage to Central Park South, where, installed in the
Plaza, she quickly runs up a bill.
Woody Allen’s plot may serve as a metaphor for the literary trend I
examine in this book: the foreign appropriation and rewriting of Flaubert’s
novel in the late nineteenth century. Like “The Kugelmass Episode,” this
book tells the story of how Madame Bovary “got around.” Our tale begins
in 1878, when the Portuguese author José María Eça de Queirós
(1846–1900) published his second novel, O primo Basílio.Almost imme-
diately, critics accused him of plagiarism. The tale he told—the story of an
adulteress whose moral degeneracy and financial difficulties led to her
death—was clearly an imitation of Madame Bovary,and many phrases and
even episodes were translated almost word for word. Seven years later, sim-
ilar accusations were leveled at the Spanish writer Leopoldo Alas
(1852–1901; known by the pseudonym “Clarín”), whose monumental La
Regenta (1884–1885), inspired in part by Eça’s novel, also echoed
Flaubert’s plot and repeated various motifs. Both writers were accused of
being imitative and, therefore, unpatriotic.1 Like Kugelmass, they flirted
with something foreign; their literary flings with Madame Bovarywere in-
ternational affairs.
Paradoxically, both texts now stand at the pinnacle of their respective
national traditions. O primo Basílio is regarded as a masterpiece of
Portuguese realism, and scholars generally concur that La Regenta is, in
Mario Vargas Llosa’s words, “the best nineteenth-century novel [written in
Spain]” (220). Wherever Emma was imported she was given tremendous
import in the national canon. This study attempts to understand what is
at stake in these deliberate and undisguised rewritings. Why did Flaubert’s
novel take hold of the literary imagination on the margins of Europe in the
late nineteenth century? How was it read within these traditions? And why
were such borrowings so often too close for comfort?
By raising these questions, this book addresses a series of theoretical and
literary-historical problems in the study of the nineteenth-century
European novel. On the one hand, the rewritings are a prime example of
one of the most puzzling phenomena of this period: the recurrence of the
plot of female infidelity in nineteenth-century literature and the frequent
canonization of adultery novels. Overlooked in many studies of the genre,
the rewritings of Madame Bovary offer a fresh perspective from which to
consider the social and historical functions of this literary form. At the same
time, these novels are invaluable documents for understanding the recep-
tion of the French masterpiece in its time and, particularly, early readers’ re-
sponses to its innovative textual features such as Flaubert’s fascination with
repetition and jarring forms of citation. Composed themselves of quotations
INTRODUCTION 3
and uncomfortably close repetitions, the rewritings of Madame Bovary
afford a unique vantage point for understanding the function of these tech-
niques and the political meaning contemporaries ascribed to them.
The Politics of Adultery
The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary, O primo Basílio, Anna Karenina, La
Regenta, Effi Briest: a glance at the major titles of the period reveals the
prevalence and importance of the adultery plot in nineteenth-century lit-
erature. Not only do all of these novels deal with female infidelity, but also
each is a canonical work in its respective tradition. As Tony Tanner has
observed, “It is such an obvious and legible phenomenon that many of
those nineteenth-century novels that have been canonized as ‘great’ . . .
center on adultery, that, with some exceptions, few have thought it worth
trying to take the matter further” (11). Tanner’s 1979 study, Adultery in the
Novel: Contract and Transgression,was one of the first to attempt to do so.
In it, Tanner raised a series of important questions about the genre and its
social function: Why did the infidelity plot come to dominate the nine-
teenth-century novel, and what historical circumstances allowed it to take
root? In attempting to understand reactions to Madame Bovary, arguably
the most important instance of the genre, such questions are fundamental.
Studies of the adultery novel have addressed these issues in various
ways. Many critics have taken the adultery plot quite literally, interpreting
the nineteenth-century fascination with infidelity as a reflection of the dis-
contents of bourgeois marriage in the period. Bill Overton, for example,
defines the adultery novel as “a form stemming from social tensions
concerning the role of women in marriage, motherhood, the family and
the transmission of property” (14).2The fact that these works have tradi-
tionally been inscribed within the realist canon has encouraged this type of
assumption. The authors of many of these works consciously set out to
create a mirror of reality, an accurate representation of the social mores of
their time.
As modern criticism of the nineteenth-century novel has shown, how-
ever, it is important not to confuse the project with the product. Despite
their pretensions to objectivity, these novels are generally less transparent
than they seem, laced with allusion and allegory. As art works, they do
not simply reflect but also work, actively interpreting, transforming, and
reimagining the realities they engage. Marital laws and practices (most
notably, the illegality of divorce in France from 1816 to 1884) were
undoubtedly conditions necessary for the emergence of the adultery novel.
4 IMPORTINGMADAMEBOVARY/ELIZABETHAMANN
As an explanation of its appeal or popularity, of the almost obsessive recur-
rence of the plot in novels of the period, however, such accounts are
unconvincing.If the plot merely reflects the frustrations of domestic life
or the vulnerability of bourgeois marriage, it is difficult to understand
why it was repeated so often, what each version could possibly have
added to this critique that would justify a whole new work. In dealing
with a collective obsession of this magnitude, one senses that there must
be more to it, that the commentaries and anxieties underlying these texts
are somehow more complex. Literal or reflectionist accounts of the genre
disappoint because they reduce the meaning of these works to the surface
of their representations.
One of the consequences of this approach to the adultery novel has
been a tendency to view the genre as a unilaterally subversive current in the
literature of the period. If we take these works at face value, after all, most
of them seem to expose the flaws of nineteenth-century social practices.
The best-known exponent of this view—the idea of adultery as critique—
was Tanner, who not only raised important questions about a genre often
taken for granted but also offered penetrating close readings of three ex-
amples of the form. (I will be drawing on his insights on Madame Bovary
in the chapters that follow.)3Tanner’s analysis, moreover, avoided the lit-
eral, sociological interpretation (the adultery novel as a mirror of bourgeois
family life) and worked toward a reading of the genre as a symbolic rather
than reflective form. In the early nineteenth century, Tanner argued, mar-
riage was a metaphor for the social contract, the political bond that was the
basis of bourgeois society. A breach of marital vows, consequently, chal-
lenged the social order at its very core. For Tanner, adultery was a symp-
tom of the disintegration of the mediations that constituted bourgeois
society; with the emergence of the infidelity novel, he claimed, “sexuality,
narration, and society fall apart, never to be reintegrated in the same
way—if, indeed, at all” (14). Tanner’s argument was more satisfying than
most because it recognized that the social significance of the adultery novel
went beyond narrow concerns about marital law or family structure. Its
broad scope and clever readings attracted a wide following.
Like the sociological reading, however, Tanner’s thesis ultimately relied
on a passive notion of reflection: it established a parallelism or homology
between marriage and the state in which a disruption in the former mir-
rored the breakdown of the latter.4This homology was perhaps fitting for
the first work examined in his study, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse.
Written by the father of the social contract, this novel lent itself to Tanner’s
equation. When applied to later works, however, his thesis became less con-
vincing. By the time Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary,adultery was not a de-
fiance of the most fundamental of bourgeois conventions but a convention
