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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)READING 30. 8
Q What insights into Emma’s personality are offered
in this brief excerpt? Into Léon’s personality?READING 30. 9
88 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style88
From Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary (1857)
In the end Léon had promised never to see Emma again; and he 1
reproached himself for not having kept his word, especially
considering all the trouble and reproaches she still probably
held in store for him—not to mention the jokes his fellow
clerks cracked every morning around the stove. Besides, he
was about to be promoted to head clerk: this was the time to
turn over a new leaf. So he gave up playing the flute and said
good-bye to exalted sentiments and romantic dreams. There
isn’t a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only
for a day or for a minute, hasn’t thought himself capable of 10
boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little
woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of
every notary’s heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.
These days it only bored him when Emma suddenly burst out
sobbing on his breast: like people who can stand only a certain
amount of music, he was drowsy and apathetic amidst the
shrillness of her love; his heart had grown deaf to its subtler
overtones.
By now they knew each other too well: no longer did they
experience, in their mutual possession, that wonder that 20
multiplies the joy a hundredfold. She was as surfeited with him
as he was tired of her. Adultery, Emma was discovering, could
be as banal as marriage.
But what way out was there? She felt humiliated by the
degradation of such pleasures; but to no avail: she continued
to cling to them, out of habit or out of depravity; and every day
she pursued them more desperately, destroying all possible
happiness by her excessive demands. She blamed Léon for her
disappointed hopes, as though he had betrayed her; and she
even longed for a catastrophe that would bring about their 30
separation, since she hadn’t the courage to bring it about
herself.
Still, she continued to write him loving letters, faithful to the
idea that a woman must always write to her lover.
But as her pen flew over the paper she was aware of the
presence of another man, a phantom embodying her most
ardent memories, the most beautiful things she had read and
her strongest desires. In the end he became so real and
accessible that she tingled with excitement, unable though she
was to picture him clearly, so hidden was he, godlike, under his 40
manifold attributes. He dwelt in that enchanted realm where
silken ladders swing from balconies moon-bright and flower-
scented. She felt him near her: he was coming—coming to
ravish her entirely in a kiss. And the next moment she would
drop back to earth, shattered; for these rapturous love-dreams
drained her more than the greatest orgies.Almost immediately after Madame Bovaryappeared (in
the form of six installments in the Revue de Paris), the
novel was denounced as an offense against public and
religious morals, and Flaubert, as well as the publisher and
the printer of the Revue, was brought to trial before a crim-
inal court. All three men were ultimately acquitted, butnot before an eloquent lawyer had defended all the pas-
sages (including those in Reading 30.8) that had been con-
demned as wanton and immoral.
A similar situation befell the American writer Kate
Chopin (1851–1904), whose novel The Awakeningwas
banned in her native city of St. Louis shortly after its
publication in 1899. The novel, a frank examination of
female sexual passion and marital infidelity, violated the
norms of the society in which Chopin had been reared.
Unlike Flaubert, whose novels convey the staleness and
inescapability of French provincial life, many of Chopin’s
stories deliberately ignore the specifics of time and place.
Some are set in Louisiana, where Chopin lived for twelve
years with her husband and six children. Chopin was suc-
cessful in selling her Louisiana dialect stories, many of
which explore matters of class, race, and gender within the
world of Creole society, but her novels fell into obscurity
soon after her death. The Awakening, whose heroine defies
convention by committing adultery, did not receive posi-
tive critical attention until the 1950s.
While Chopin absorbed the Realist strategies and social
concerns of Flaubert, she brought to her prose a sensitivity
to the nuances of human (and especially female) behavior
that challenged popular Romantic stereotypes (see chapter
28). Her work also reveals a remarkable talent for narrat-
ing a story with jewel-like precision. Her taut descriptive
style reaches unparalleled heights in the short prose piece
known as “The Story of an Hour.” Here, the protagonist’s
brief taste of liberation takes on an ironic fatal turn.Kate Chopin’s “The Story of
an Hour” (“The Dream of
an Hour”) (1894)
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, 1
great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the
news of her husband’s death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken
sentences: veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her
husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he
who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the
railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name
leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken time to assure
himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened 10
to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the
sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the
same, with a paralysed inability to accept its significance. She
wept at once, with a sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s
arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away
to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy
armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical
exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into 20
her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops
of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The
delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a