252 GEMMA BOVERY
reads Madame Bovary , but Joubert ruins the ending for her.) Joubert is so convinced
by the associative power between the Boverys and the Bovarys that he only stops dole-
fully predicting Charlie’s demise after Gemma’s death when Charlie reveals his real
name is Cyril. Joubert seems otherwise incapable of seeing the disparities between the
Bovery/Bovary connection, such as Gemma’s childlessness, the lack of a Flaubertian
equivalent to Large, and that Gemma’s desire to go from urban to rural is the inverse
of Emma’s. Conversely, Raymond does not draw out the Flaubertian association as it
would pertain to himself, which would suggest he plays the role of Monsieur Homais,
the duplicitous and fraudulent town pharmacist. By the end of the story, it is implied
that Joubert has not learned his lesson given his interest when the Eyres move into the
house where the Boverys once lived.
In Gemma Bovery , Simmonds satirizes social pretensions. Th e British and the French
have a complex interdependence: the British fetishize France while scorning its people,
while the French condescend to the British even while they rely upon them fi nancially.
Th e stratifi cation of French society is revealed as a sham since the seemingly estab-
lished gentry trace their origins to money made in trade. While all of the wittily drawn
characters gesture toward the satirical representation of certain social types, Simmonds
lavishes the most attention upon Gemma and Joubert. Gemma and Joubert, with their
respective artistic and literary interests, deplore those they view as rightwing bourgeois
and crass new money, even while they are dependant upon them for income. Romanti-
cally inclined, they both chase fantasies of fulfi llment even while reality continually foils
their eff orts: Gemma, through her continual and faddish re-imagining of herself and
her surroundings, Joubert through his bovarystic obsession with literature and his past
attempt at being an intellectual in a commune. Th e search for authenticity is a major
theme in Gemma Bovery , particularly through appetitive and consumerist consump-
tion. Food plays a major role: the infl uence of the slow food movement shows through
Joubert’s loving baking and Gemma’s brief infatuation with the realness of French food;
food is also inextricably linked to sex as another way of attempting to fi nd meaning.
Consumerism also off ers the same illusion, with the British yuppies buying homes in
France to live out the dream of an idyllic existence, and with Gemma’s expensive shop-
ping and redecorating. Gemma’s aspirations lead her to weight problems, debt, and
death.
Th e aforementioned heteroglot format of Gemma Bovery draws attention to the
subjectivity of representations. Despite the dominance of his narrative voice, Joubert’s
unreliability is highlighted by the excerpts from Gemma’s diaries as well as Sim-
monds’s drawings of the narrated events, casting doubt upon his authority to translate
Gemma’s thoughts from English into French as well as his interpretation of events.
Th e failure of Joubert’s narration is also suggested by the hints that there was an aff air
between Charlie Bovery and Joubert’s wife Martine, to which their respective spouses
are oblivious. Finally, the reoccurring image of nature documentaries and their false
objectivity provides an analogue to Joubert’s voyeurism, even as it also implicates the
reader as a fellow voyeur to the tragicomic events.
