Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  All the layers themes in the book come together here. With the utmost lucidity we recall the list of parts that made up Charles's, pathetic cap on his first day of school, and the wedding layer cake.

  Madame Bovary the first is the widow of a bailiff. This is the first and false Madame Bovary, so to speak. In chapter 2 while the first wife is still alive, the second one looms. Just as Charles installed himself opposite the old doctor as his successor, so the future Madame Bovary appears before the old one is dead. Flaubert could not describe her wedding to Charles since that would have spoiled the wedding feast of the next Madame Bovary. This is how Flaubert calls the first wife: Madame Dubuc (the name of her first husband), then Madame Bovary, Madame Bovary Junior (in relation to Charles's mother), then Heloise, but the widow Dubuc when her notary absconds with her money in his keeping; and finally Madame Dubuc.

  In other words, as seen through the simple mind of Charles, she starts to revert to her initial condition when Charles falls in love with Emma Rouault, passing through the same stages but backward. After her death, when Charles Bovary marries Emma, poor dead Heloise reverts completely to the initial Madame Dubuc. It is Charles who becomes a widower, but his widowhood is somehow transferred to the betrayed and then dead Heloise. Emma never seems to have pitied the pathetic fate of Heloise Bovary. Incidentally, a financial shock assists in causing the death of both ladies.

  The term romantic has several meanings. When discussing Madame Bovary—the book and the lady herself—I shall use romantic in the following sense: "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature." (Romanesque rather than romanticist.) A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal, is profound or shallow depending on the quality of his or her mind. Emma Bovary is intelligent, sensitive, comparatively well educated, but she has a shallow mind: her charm, beauty, and refinement do not preclude a fatal streak of philistinism in her. Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional; and her passion for luxury does not prevent her from revealing once or twice what Flaubert terms a peasant hardness, a strain of rustic practicality. However, her extraordinary physical charm, her unusual grace, her birdlike, hummingbirdlike vivacity—all this is irresistibly attractive and enchanting to three men in the book, her husband and her two successive lovers, both of them heels: Rodolphe, who finds in her a dreamy childish tenderness in welcome contrast to the harlots he has been consorting with; and Léon, an ambitious mediocrity, who is flattered by having a real lady for his mistress.

  Now what about the husband, Charles Bovary? He is a dull, heavy, plodding fellow, with no charm, no brains, no culture, and with a complete set of conventional notions and habits. He is a philistine, but he also is a pathetic human being. The two following points are of the utmost importance. What seduces him in Emma and what he finds in her is exactly what Emma herself is looking for and not finding in her romantic daydreams. Charles dimly, but deeply, perceives in her personality an iridescent loveliness, luxury, a dreamy remoteness, poetry, romance. This is one point, and I shall offer some samples in a moment. The second point is that the love Charles almost unwittingly develops for Emma is a real feeling, deep and true, in absolute contrast to the brutal or frivolous emotions experienced by Rodolphe and Léon, her smug and vulgar lovers. So here is the pleasing paradox of Flaubert's fairy tale: the dullest and most inept person in the book is the only one who is redeemed by a divine something in the all-powerful, forgiving, and unswerving love that he bears Emma, alive or dead. There is yet a fourth character in the book who is in love with Emma but that fourth is merely a Dickensian child, Justin. Nevertheless, I recommend him for sympathetic attention.

  Let us go back to the time when Charles was still married to Heloise Dubuc. In chapter 2 Bovary's horse—horses play a tremendous part in this book, forming a little theme of their own[*]—takes him at a dreamy trot to Emma, the daughter of a patient of his, a farmer. Emma, however, is no ordinary farmer's daughter: she is a graceful young lady, a "demoiselle," brought up in a good boarding school with young ladies of the gentry. So here is Charles Bovary, shaken out from his clammy connubial bed (he never loved that unfortunate first wife of his, oldish, flat-chested and with as many pimples as the spring has buds—the widow of another man, as Flaubert has Charles consider her in his mind), so here is Charles, the young country doctor, shaken out of his dull bed by a messenger and then proceeding to the farm of Les Bertaux to reset the leg of a farmer. As he approaches the farm, his gentle horse all of a sudden shies violently, a subtle premonition that the young man's quiet life will be shattered.

  We see the farm and then Emma through his eyes as he comes there for the first time, still married to that unfortunate widow. The half a dozen peacocks in the yard seem a vague promise, a lesson in iridescence. We may follow the little theme of Emma's sunshade towards the end of the chapter. Some days later, during a day of thaw when the bark of the trees was glossy with dampness and the snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting, Emma stood on the threshold; then she went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of prismatic silk through which the sun shone illumed the white skin of her face with shifting reflected colors. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could be heard falling with a precise drumming note, one by one, on the taut moire, the stretched silk.

  Various items of Emma's sensuous grace are shown through Bovary's eyes: her blue dress with the three flounces, her elegant fingernails, and her hairdo. This hairdo has been so dreadfully translated in all versions that the correct description must be given else one cannot visualize her correctly: "Her hair in two black bandeaux, or folds, which seemed each of a single piece, so sleek were they, her hair was parted in the middle by a delicate line that dipped slightly as it followed the incurvation of her skull [this is a young doctor looking]; and the bandeaux just revealed the lobes of her ears [lobes, not upper "tips" as all translators have it: the upper part of the ears was of course covered by those sleek black folds], her hair knotted behind in a thick chignon. Her cheekbones were rosy."

  The sensual impression that she makes on our young man is further stressed by the description of a summer day seen from the inside, from the parlor: "the outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the stone floor long fine rays that broke at the angles of the furniture and played upon the ceiling. On the table flies were walking up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with livid blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma sat sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see droplets of sweat on her bare shoulders."

  Note the long fine sun rays through the chinks in the closed shutters, and the flies walking up the glasses (not "crawling" as translators have it: flies do not crawl, they walk, they rub their hands), walking up the glasses and drowning in the dregs of the cider. And mark the insidious daylight that made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace and touched with livid blue the cold cinders. The droplets of sweat on Emma's shoulders (she wore an open dress), mark them too. This is imagery at its best.

  The wedding procession winding its way through the fields should be compared with the funeral procession, with dead Emma, winding its way through other fields at the end of the book. In the wedding: "The procession, at first united like one long colored scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green wheat, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons at its scroll. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell; the children stayed behind amusing themselv
es plucking the fruiting bells from the oak-stems, or playing amongst themselves unseen. Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to lift its hem, and then delicately, with her gloved fingers, she picked off bits of coarse grass and small spikes of thistles, while Charles, his hand unoccupied, waited until she had finished. Old Rouault, with a new silk hat and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands down to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bovary senior. As to Monsieur Bovary senior, who, really despising all these folk, had come simply in a frock-coat of military cut with one row of buttons—he was passing bar-room compliments to a young peasant girl with fair hair. She bowed, blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of their business or played the fool behind each other's backs, tuning themselves up for the coming fun. If one listened closely one could always catch the squeaking [cricket's note] of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields."

  Emma is being buried. "The six men, three on either side, walked slowly, panting a little. The priests, the choristers, and the two choir-boys recited the De profundis, and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and falling. Sometimes they disappeared in the windings of the path; but the great silver cross rose always between the trees. [Compare the fiddler at the wedding.]

  "The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods; each of them carried in her hands a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself weakening at this continual repetition of prayers and torches, beneath this oppressive odor of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was blowing; the rye and colza ["cabbage seed"] were green, dew-droplets trembled at the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gamboling of a foal running away under the apple trees. The pure sky was fretted with luminous clouds; a bluish haze rested upon the huts covered with iris. Charles as he passed recognized each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this, when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to her. [Curiously enough, he does not remember the wedding; the reader is in a better position than he.]

  "The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time, laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave."

  After the wedding our young man's bliss in his daily life is pictured in another subtly sensuous paragraph. And here again we are forced to improve on the poor translations: "In bed, in the morning, by her side, his elbow on the pillow, he watched the sunlight as it touched the golden bloom on her cheeks half hidden by the scallops of her nightcap. At close range her eyes looked strangely large, especially when on waking up she opened and shut them. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, layers of successive colors, which, denser at the bottom, grew lighter toward the surface of the cornea." (A little echo of the layers theme.)

  Nabokov's annotations on Emma's reading in his teaching copy of Madame Bovary

  In chapter 6 Emma's childhood is shown in retrospect in terms of shallow romanesque culture, in terms of the books she read and what she got from those books. Emma is a great reader of romances, of more or less exotic novels, of romantic verse. Some of the authors she knows are first-rate, such as Walter Scott or Victor Hugo; others not quite first-rate, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre or Lamartine. But good or bad this is not the point. Hie point is that she is a bad reader. She reads books emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character's place. Flaubert does a very subtle thing. In several passages he lists all the romantic clichés dear to Emma's heart; but his cunning choice of these cheap images and their cadenced arrangement along the curving phrase produce an effect of harmony and art. In the convent, the novels she read "were all love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, heart-aches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, 'gentlemen' brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed and weeping like tombstone urns. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, sleeked her hands over with the dust of books from old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, under the foils of ogives, pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching the approach of a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields."

  He uses the same artistic trick when listing Homais's vulgarities. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

  Nabokov's notes on the daydream theme in his teaching copy of Madame Bovary

  The theme of Emma's daydreaming has some connections with the whippet, the gift of a gamekeeper, which she took "out walking [in Tostes], for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road.... Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander at random, like her whippet, who ran round and round in the open country, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of some acres of wheat. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, 'Good heavens! why did I marry?'

  "She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would not have been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would have been those unrealized events, that different life, that unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old schoolmates had married. What were they doing now? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses blossom. But her life was as cold as a garret whose dormer-window looks on the north, and boredom, the silent spider, was darkly weaving its web in every nook of her heart"

  The loss of this whippet on the journey from Tostes to Yonville symbolizes the end of her mildly romantic, elegiac daydreaming at Tostes and the beginning of more passionate experiences at fateful Yonville.

  But even before Yonville, Emma's daydreaming romantic image of Paris emerges from the silk cigar case she picked up on that empty country road returning from Vaubyessard,[*] much as in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the greatest novel of the first half of our century, the little town of Combray with all its gardens (a memory) emerges from a cup of tea. This vision of Paris is one of a succession of Emma's daydreams that appear throughout the book. One daydream, shortly destroyed, is that she can make the name of Bovary famous through Charles: "Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of grim and passionate pursuits who work all night deep in their books, and finally at sixty, when the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a cross of honor stitched on their ill-fitting black coat? She wished the name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers', repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition."

  The daydream theme joins quite naturally with the theme of deceit. She hides the cigar case over which she dreams; she deceives Charles from the very first in order to have him take her elsewhere. By faking an illness, she is responsible for the removal to Yonville, supposedly a better climate: "Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep; she envied the lives of stir; longed
for masked balls, for violent pleasures with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield.

  "She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her more....

  "As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.

  "From that moment she drank vinegar to make herself thin, contracted a sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite."

  It is in Yonville that fate will overtake her. The fate of her bridal bouquet is a kind of premonition or emblem of her taking her own life a few years later. She had wondered when she found Bovary's first wife's bridal flowers what would be done to her bouquet. Now on leaving Tostes she burns it herself in a wonderful passage: "One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper petals, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney." In a letter of about 22 July 1852, Flaubert wrote what could be applicable to this passage, "A really good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, something you cannot change, and just as rhythmic and sonorous."