Paysannes: Madame Bovary Part III

What’s the difference between a work of art and a dream? Legendary literary critic Jacques Barzun gives a concise and convincing answer: “the difference between a work of art and a dream is precisely this, that the work of art leads us back to the outer reality by taking account of it.” (Quoted by Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, pp. 190-191.)

Lionel Trilling, also legendary and literary, observes that Romanticism “despite its avowals, was itself scientific, for it was passionately devoted to a research into the self.” (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 182) Literary fantasies are in other words composed by conscious minds, which apprehend dreamlike subject matter from the vantage point of reality and within the context of reality.

But it’s also true that Romantic writers sometimes rebel against reality so fiercely as to misrepresent it without acknowledging the lie—without being aware of it, maybe. There is no more blatant case of such distortion among the English Romantic poets than Wordsworth’s saccharine depictions of peasants. Take, for example, WW’s poem “The Solitary Reaper” about a peasant woman working a Scottish field, cutting and binding grain, and singing while she works. Here is the last stanza:

Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work
And o’er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

Trilling says the Romantics were preoccupied “with children, women, peasants, savages, because their mental life, it is felt, is less overlaid than that of the educated adult male by the proprieties of social habit.” (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 184) That is well-meaning, I guess, if patronizing. Wordsworth was terribly well-meaning, socially progressive, and had a revolutionary and salutary effect on English literature. He didn’t have a particularly easy life either, being orphaned by age 13. But he misrepresents and sentimentalizes the hard work of reaping grain in a way that rings particularly false. He is selling himself the fantasy that peasant girls sing because they live simple lives, free of modern problems. But even a horse has been known to object to manual labor, and I’ve never seen a bucket list with the line item, before I die, I must reap some grain.

What is unfortunately irritating about Wordsworth’s poem is that it’s an extreme sort of fantasy that does not seem to take hardly any account of reality. I will speculate that his mother’s death when he was 7 caused him to wish to idealize suffering women in his poetry and to want to make their suffering disappear in visions of imperturbable beauty and unstained, unstainable virtue. If we could see the ground of real suffering out of which this keening hallucination sprang—that is, if the fantasy poem took some slight account of the difficult realities underpinning it, it would be more artistically successful. As such, it’s too insubstantial for me to swallow.

The irony is that the associations and etymology of the very word peasant completely undermine the airy, patronizing, Wordsworthian fantasy of the carefree singing Solitary Reaper. Peasant comes from paysanne in French, which comes from pays, meaning land. WW has tried to fill his peasant girl with helium and untether her from the hard material ground that gave peasants their earthy name. Gustave Flaubert, who effected a rebellion against the excesses of literary romance, by contrast weighs his peasants down with crude, unflattering reality. To juxtapose “The Solitary Reaper” and this passage from Madame Bovary about a naïve peasant woman being honored at the Yonville Agricultural Show is to puncture the Wordsworthian fantasy in a comic way:

Then to the platform came a frightened-looking little old lady who seemed shrunken in her shabby garments. On her feet were heavy wooden clogs and around her hips a large blue apron. Her scrawny face, framed by a borderless cap, was more wrinkled than a shriveled apple, and bony knuckles dangled from the sleeves of her red bodice. They were so encrusted, roughened, and gnarled from barn dust, soapsuds and grease from sheep’s wool that they seemed dirty even though they had been washed in clean water. They remained half bent from having worked so long, humble witnesses of so much suffering. The expression on her face was of an almost nunlike inflexibility. Having lived in the company of animals, she had acquired their muteness and placidity. This was the first time that she found herself in the midst of such a numerous group, and inwardly frightened by the flags and drums, by the gentlemen in frock coats, and by the counselor’s Cross of Honor, she remained stock-still, not knowing whether to move forward or run off, nor why the people were pushing her and the examiners smiling. There, before these expansive townspeople, stood this half-century of servitude.
“Come forth, venerable Catherine-Nicaise-Elizabeth Leroux!” said the counselor, who had taken the list of winners from the president’s hands. “Come up, come up,” he repeated in a paternal tone, alternately looking at the sheet of paper and the old woman.
“Are you deaf?” said Tuvache, hopping up from his chair.
He began to shout in her ear: “Fifty-four years of service! A silver medal. Twenty-five francs. For you.”
Madame Bovary, Signet Classics trans., pp. 153-154

Flaubert’s hilarious description of the peasant lady crushed and compacted by a lifetime of menial labor is a far cry from the fairy-creature singing in that Scottish field with her magic sickle. The counselor figure in the above passage seems to satirize Wordsworth in his unseeing fantasy. It’s funny; but in the pairing you can also see a tectonic movement in literary history. There is Romanticism—and in particular Wordsworth’s denial of death mixed with Rousseau’s rebellion against the starched aristocratic order—giving way to a later generation’s rebellion in the form of a radical modern realism.

The Allagash Rule of Perpetual Motion and Brouillard dans la tête: Madame Bovary Part II

Flaubert shows the reader early on that Madame Bovary’s flight from one place to another brings her no relief, for her complaint is with no particular place but the universe itself. She runs like a rat in a maze, finding each new place as damned and disappointingly real as the one before. She can’t stop looking to the next horizon, however, in a way I find touching despite her famously off-putting egoism and ruthless vanity. Again and again Flaubert writes stuff like this: “She was filled with temptations to run off with Léon, somewhere, far away, to try a new destiny” p. 119. Emma continues to dream of moving away to a foreign land or to Paris—as if there were no problems in Paris!

When she actually does leave home for other places and other men like Rodolphe and Léon, she never seems to arrive at her intended destination. Rather she looks to new fantasies, new lovers, or new romantic settings for her present affair. Her despair causes her to seek escape in a mirage of happiness that’s always a moving target. During one scene that dramatically equates romance with travel, she has sex on an interminable carriage ride through Paris, displaying a “rage for locomotion” (fureur de la locomotion p. 234). It calls to mind the opening pages of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, in which the narrator cites “the Allagash rule of perpetual motion.” His shallow friend Tad Allagash never has more than one drink per bar because “Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are.”

Place, as in the opening of Bright Lights, Big City—as in every case of despair, maybe—is in Madame Bovary a method of escaping reality and a crucial substrate of dreams. As such, Flaubert’s many beautiful landscape descriptions tend to involve naturalistic symbols of dream: fog (brouillard), haze (brume) and mist (vapeur). Flaubert’s landscapes are like old movie stars photographed with Vaseline on the lens in order to create a candle-like glow that obscures imperfections and welcomes the imagination to fill in the obscure blanks as it pleases.* The fog, like the Vaseline, clearly serves and represents the mind’s will to distort and obscure what it really sees. It’s there because Madame Bovary has unwittingly put it there. Her mind is a romantic fog.

Flaubert makes this link explicit when the housemaid Félicité observes that Madame Bovary suffers from a brouillard dans la tête—“a fog in the head” p. 119. But Madame Bovary doesn’t understand that her head is befogged with corrupt “unrealistic dreams” (rêves trop haut p. 118) that prevent her from accommodating herself to reality. She imagines that the mélancholies de la passion stem from her accursed inability to satisfy those passions and to realize her fantasies. She never guesses that it’s in fact the other way around—that melancholy attaching to the difficulties of civilized life in the real world could cause her to seek relief in a fog of childish fantasies. But that is exactly the nature of her brouillard dans la tête and the nature of all those dreamy, adulterous affairs Woody Allen writes about so incessantly.

Woody Allen generally writes about brouillard dans la tête as though it were inevitable, and Flaubert might agree, though Sigmund Freud’s oeuvre is based on the opposite idea—that human beings not only can see clearly if they dispel their defensive illusions but must dispel those illusions if they want to be free of the vicious cycle of despair. For that is what brouillard dans la tête really is: depression, and all the mind’s most inadequate and infantile romantic remedies for it.

With the possible exception of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Madame Bovary in fact lays bare the intricacies of depression better than any other novel. Because Madame Bovary’s melancholy arises from within and follows her wherever she goes, because it’s psychological in nature and not geographical, her efforts to erase it through fantasy escapes and affairs are all doomed to fail. Each one must be followed by another in endless pursuit of mirages of happiness that lie just there on the horizon. This leads to “her flighty airs” (ses airs évaporés p. 132) and “her continually youthful illusions” (ses illusions toujours jeunes p. 191). She cannot address her problems in the real world because she can’t look at the real world long enough to see herself naked of her vain dreams. Such is the “invasion of reverie” in her life (l’envahissement de leur rêveries, as is said of Emma and her lover Rodolphe, p. 194) that she remains always a child, dreaming, running, unconsciously fleeing and thinking all the while that she’s going to make the melancholy go away once and for all. Madame Bovary is cruel, yes, but she’s also suffering in earnest. She is overcome by guilt, self-hatred, and melancholy, “by an immense regret that stimulated passion, instead of suppressing it” p. 277. The roaring passion to escape leads to more damage and more self-loathing in a death spiral from which Flaubert won’t allow us to avert our eyes.

Emma Bovary is like many people, maybe, as she sits in the opera in a fog, dreaming of another more perfect, more romantic, more glamorous life. “She bemoaned love, and yearned to have wings. Emma, too, would have wanted to escape from life and fly off in an embrace” p. 215.

In the end Madame Bovary, who is often described as having her eyes only half-open, is like Flaubert’s blind beggar, who cannot see even with his eyes open wide. It’s a perfect novel and a perfect cautionary tragedy that draws inspiration from those tales of blindness by the ancient Greek dramatists. It whispers to us what the Delphic oracle did: know thyself….

*When master portrait photographer Philippe Halsman began his career in Paris in the 1930s, the prevailing style of portrait involved this sort of romantic distortion using filters and manipulation of the images. Halsman was one of a new generation who would make realistic photographs, only manipulating the images through lighting and exposure.