[In the following excerpt, Wing argues that "the division between language and experience is a major concern of [Madame Bovary]." He focuses on the problematic nature of the novel's narrative voice and structure, noting ways in which its "authority," or believability, is undermined.]

—Eh bien! reprit Homais, il faudrait en faire une analyse. Car il savait qu'il faut, dans tous les empoisonnements, faire une analyse . . . (295)

Qu'on n'accuse personne. (294)¹

Flaubert's use of narrative in Madame Bovary demystifies in many ways the desires which motivate Emma's stories, her fantasies, dreams and her extended fictions of escape and romantic love. Emma's narratives, her protonarratives (fantasies and dreams), her letters to her lovers, the account of her financial ruin told to Lheureux, Binet, Rodolphe and others in the last desperate moments of her life, can be read as repeated and unsuccessful attempts to give order to desires which are destabilizing in their effects and ultimately unattainable. Emma's narratives of desire presuppose closure, bringing on, paradoxically, the death of desire, which cannot live on images of fulfillment, but only on displacements and deferrals.

The division between language and experience is a major concern of the novel. Emma's stories oppose the events which constitute her world, yet lack the force to transform that world. One can attribute Emma's difficulties throughout the novel, then, not just to her foolishness and to the mediocrity of her milieu (although Flaubert clearly treats ironically the shop-worn topos of provincial adultery) but to the more general problems of desire and its realization, and of language and illusion.

Throughout the novel desire, narrative and writing in general produce corrosive effects. These are figured most directly and powerfully, perhaps, during Emma's agony, with the likening of the taste of poison to the taste of ink, and later in the same sequence when the narrator describes a certain black fluid oozing from Emma's mouth. Only a very limited reading, however, would link Emma's desires and her narratives unequivocally to an ultimately mortal alienation of the desiring subject and to writing as death. However demystifying its narrative, the novel is a story about desire, with "characters," organized with extraordinary control at certain points of the text by a narrator whose production of fiction must necessarily be interpreted not only as a denial but also a repetition of Emma's relations to narrative and .. . to desire. Once again, what are the possible meanings of that famous statement which Flaubert may or may not have made "Madame Bovary. C'est moi"?

While this chapter focuses on the context and the order of Emma's narratives, it will also re-examine the general problematic of writing in the novel, in the hope that the subject of Emma's narratives will implicate the performance of narrative in the novel itself and, ultimately, the performance of the critical text as well. If Emma is a figure for the writer at a certain point in the history of the novel, this figure does not function exclusively as an uncomplex emblem of the deluded Romantic in an already post-Romantic moment.² It may be suspected that the demystification of Emma's narratives does not in fact validate without reserve the control of an enlightened narrator whose understanding transcends the dilemmas of Romantic subjectivity and Romantic literary stereotypes. In many ways, of course, that control is exercised with remarkable force, yet an omniscient narrator is caught in an intricate web of repetition and difference which includes and radically exceeds the logic of identification between narrator and protagonist; includes and exceeds a simple demystification which would deny altogether the links between protagonist and narrator.

An omniscient narrator in Madame Bovary is only one among several figures through which narrative is articulated. One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is the dispersal and fragmentation of authority for narrative. As Barthes has noted, it is impossible to establish with certainty in any comprehensive sense "who speaks" as narrator in this text or from what "point of view."³ Point of view in Madame Bovary can be characterized only by its instability and indeterminacy. It alternates between an omniscient narrator, who knows the motivations of all the protagonists and the truths of the world in which they are placed; a limited point of view, circumscribed by the thoughts and feelings of a particular protagonist; and the even more limited scope of certain minor figures in the text, spectators who have no immediate connection with the major protagonists. The frequent use of free indirect discourse, with its blurring of distinctions between reported speech and narrative, is another complex amalgam of narrative authority.⁴ The resulting indeterminacy of point of view, as Culler has demonstrated, is one of the major features of the novel.⁵ Those passages which organize narrative according to one or another point of view are countered by others which function in a very different way. The "impersonality" of Flaubert's text, then, is not a distanced objectivity, but a mix of modes of presentation which prevent the reader from identifying a consistent pattern or, to use Rousset's term, modulation. Objectivity is not the absence of narrative authority but a dispersal of that authority which makes it ultimately resistant to recuperative interpretation.

This chapter will question how authority for narrative, both the story of the novel, and Emma's stories framed by the main narrative, is assumed and at the same time problematized. An examination of the composition of Emma's narratives elucidates the ways in which those narratives ironically construct the subject as radically different from what she would be. My assumption is that both narrative form, as well as the stereotypes of narrative content, are necessary to the assertion of desire and intimately related to its failures. The dissolution of the protagonist will be interpreted through perceptible shifts in her relations both to the fictions of desire, the narrative énoncé, and to narrative form, both énoncé and énonciation, as means of ordering and appropriating objects of desire. Finally I will ask how the account and the interpretation of Emma's narratives implicate at once narrators and the reader, as producers of stories: the narratives of desire and the allegories of interpretation.

In a broad sense, Madame Bovary gives considerable attention to questions of reading and writing; it narrativizes the interpretation of narrative. The effects of narrative are never merely limited to an explicit content, a subject's relation to the objects of desire, but always open up the more troublesome problematic of how narratives attempt to organize and control desire, how they interpret and construct "reality" and the desiring subject.⁶ The power of narrative ordering as a means to fulfil desire and attain knowledge is a ubiquitous motif in this novel. That power fails consistently, as I have suggested, for the effects of fiction-making are quite different from those projected by the desiring subject.

The very control which encourages metanarrative commentary is itself problematized, as in the opening pages of the second part of the novel, when a statement, rare for its explicitness, speaks of the aporia of fictions. The comment serves as a sweeping demystification, yet it doesn't simply write off narrative, for it is set in a transition between the first and second parts of the novel and serves as a preface to a major section of the story. Following a realistic description of the countryside and the village of Yonville, just prior to Charles's and Emma's arrival at their new home, the narrator states simply:

Depuis les événements que l'on va raconter, rien, en effet, n'a changé à Yonville. La drapeau tricolore de fer blanc tourne toujours au haut du clocher de l'église; la boutique du marchand de nouveautés agite encore au vent ses deux banderoles d'indienne; les foetus du pharmacien, comme des paquets d'amadou blanc, se pourrissent de plus en plus dans leur alcool bourbeux, et, au-dessus de la grande porte de l'auberge, le vieux lion d'or, déteint par les pluies, montre toujours aux passants sa frisure de caniche.

(68)

There is a curious complex of meanings here, the sort which will interest me throughout this study. First, a narrator announces in a traditional manner that a new story sequence is about to be related. In an equally traditional fashion, the statement is proleptic; it alludes to the conclusion of the story, known to an omniscient narrator who will relate it to the reader. A moment "beyond narrative" is also posited here, when the main story will have been told and events will return to a meaningless repetition of the same (toujours, encore). Narrative, according to this passage, seems to be invested with a significance which is superior to "reality." The world of Yonville after the story, "outside" of narrative, is set against narrative as an endless and seemingly meaningless repetition, which is figured by random motion, the weather vane turning in place, the pennants flapping in the wind, and by the degeneration of the bottled foetuses.

One can also interpret the first sentence of the passage in a very different way, however, as signifying something like: "Events occur, nothing changes." The narrative signified would then be undercut as ultimately insignificant. Thus read, this passage denies the closure of the story about to be told even before it is narrated, as it sets these events against an insignificant post-narrative "reality." While establishing demarcations between story and non-story, the comment problematizes the meaningful difference produced by narrative. I have said that the passage serves as a preface to a section of the novel, and at the same time suggests much about the inconsequentiality of the story; things are further complicated, however, because this is not the beginning of the story, but the opening of the second of three major sequences. Whatever is being said about stories in general must be applied retrospectively to the first part of the novel. The commentary which seems to set itself outside of the main narrative is already framed by the earlier narrative, which can be read as a commentary on the metanarrative statement. What is at issue here is less the knowing control over the story by an omniscient narrator who demystifies the fiction from a privileged position, than the impossibility of narrating and at the same time placing oneself outside of the rhetorical operations of fiction. The passage thus becomes engaged in a crisis of narrative whose terms it reiterates in an inevitable play of repetition.⁷

I have already hinted at some of my conclusions about the operations of desire, narrative and interpretation, which can be ordered tentatively in terms of the two statements quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Both quotations are taken from the last pages of the novel. The first is uttered by Homais, panicked when he discovers that Emma has taken poison: "Eh bien! reprit Homais, il faudrait en faire l'analyse. Car il savait qu'il faut, dans tous les empoisonnements, faire une analyse; . . ." (295). In this moment of crisis, the pharmacist unhesitatingly turns toward his science to determine what action must be taken to save Emma from herself. Rapidly moving events prevent Homais from performing his diagnosis, but the critic faced with unsettling problems of interpretation is not subject to such constraints. If we are to analyze the reasons for Emma's destruction in terms of the workings of narrative and accept the guidance of an ironically illusive and sophisticated narrator, we must also accept the tutelage of the pharmacist, that other patron of the analytic process. The imperative to analyze and to achieve interpretive validity allies us unwittingly, yet unfailingly, with Homais.

The other statement informing my reading is a fragment of Emma's suicide letter, which Charles has torn open as Emma lies convulsed on her bed: "Qu'on n'accuse personne . . ." (294). At the very moment when it becomes a most urgent concern, we are told in a curiously ambiguous fashion that interpretation is to be suspended. In what ways does Emma's statement serve as an antidote to Homais's disastrously inadequate imperative to undertake analysis? What, in fact, are we being asked not to evaluate? the immediate responsibility for Emma's death? her adultery? or perhaps in a more sweeping sense, those wider issues I have raised—the destructive effects of Emma's relations to fiction? This imperative regarding interpretation, however, is literally suspended, broken by deletion marks in the text. I will return later to the interpretive space opened up by those marks, but let us note for the moment that Homais's and Emma's statements, taken together, point to radically different and incompatible positions concerning the finality of fiction and the necessity for interpretation.⁸ The first aims at masterly control and is killing in its effects; the second invites the suspension of judgment and is powerfully productive of interpretation. Inevitably, the reader is engaged by these two imperatives, simultaneously; interpretation circulates between Homais's inept, but nonetheless murderous authority, and Emma's call for the suspension of interpretation.

Learning narrative: a story of one's own

The first part of the novel establishes certain constants in Emma's relation to her desires and the law of the father, which will be repeated throughout the text, and through reiteration, modified. From the outset, Emma's desires are articulated within another's story: paradoxically "her" story is explicitly spoken or already composed by another. In its simplest form, she is the silent and passive object of the story of another's desire, the alienated object of masculine appropriation.

Some of the major preoccupations of the text concerning language and desire, that language is always inadequate to desire, that the language of desire is never unique, but always a common and alienating discourse, are figured early in the novel by the account of Charles's stammering attempts to ask for Emma's hand. This passage marks Emma's entry into the discourse of desire. It is paralleled, as we shall see, by an extensive sequence at the end of the novel which explicitly links the economy of romantic desire with the economy of bourgeois capitalism, when Emma tells the story of her ruin to the men who directly or indirectly contributed to its design. In Part One of the novel Emma undergoes what might be called an apprenticeship to narrative, in which she acquires an individual "voice" for her desires and elaborates them in narrative fictions. Although this section ends with the classic impasse of feminine desire, the "silence" of hysteria, Emma emerges in Part One from the position of a passive voiceless object of desire, to an active fiction making "subject." She theorizes about love, passion and happiness, and composes stories of fulfilled desire. There is an earlier pre-narrative moment, however, which informs all of Emma's subsequent relations to narratives and to desire. Charles attempts to tell Emma's father of his wish to marry her:

Maître Rouault, murmura-t-il, je voudrais bien vous dire quelque chose.

Ils s'arrêtèrent. Charles se taisait.

—Mais contez-moi votre histoire! Est-ce que je ne sais pas tout! dit le père Rouault, en riant doucement. (23, italics added)

The formulation of desire here, early in the text, is associated significantly with the ability to compose a story. Charles, of course, has difficulty with stories throughout the novel, and that is part of the reason why his demand is relayed to Emma by her father. There are further implications of this episode, however, which are worth exploring. Throughout the novel Charles will remain deprived of the status of acting subject in the stories of desire. In terms of Emma's stories, he is the silent institutionalized opponent. There is more at issue, however, than Charles's silence and his ultimate exclusion from the stories of desire. Here the figure of the prospective husband and that of the father are conflated in a manner which Emma never fully overcomes, in spite of the transformations of Charles's role later in the narrative from subject to opponent. The story of feminine desire remains linked consistently with the figure of the father, for the voice of the father always reverberates in the voice of the lover. The "position" Emma occupies here, as determined by the possessive adjective votre, and by her role as the object of a story in which the male formulates desire through the voice of the father, or functions as his symbolic equivalent, remains constant throughout the novel. Even as Emma becomes the teller of stories, she can exercise that role only in imitation of this initial model, within the structure of masculine desire.⁹ The chapter ends with a paragraph in which the first sentence confirms the displacement of Emma as a subject of her desire: "Emma eût, au contraire, désiré se marier à minuit, aux flambeaux, mais le père Rouault ne comprit rien à cette idée." (24, italics added). The sentence derives as much meaning from its syntax as from its semantic content; the adversitive au contraire, which interrupts the verbal structure interrupts the language of Emma's desire, which in asserting itself against the father (lover) becomes disintegrated, deferred.

Shortly after her marriage, at the end of chapter 5, Emma's disappointments take the form of speculation about the full meaning of the words of love; they remain in a pre-narrative mode:

Avant qu'elle se mariât, elle avait cru avoir de l'amour; mais le bonheur qui aurait dû résulter de cet amour n'étant pas venu, il fallait qu'elle se fut trompée, songeait-elle. Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l'on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d'ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres. (32)

From the outset, Emma's experience of desire is linked to the elusive meanings of words; access to pleasure and knowledge will "take place" in language. Language is doubly deficient, however; on the one hand it is always the discourse of the other ("ce que l'on entendait par les mots . . .") never the unique property of the desiring subject. On the other hand, the words mark a radical flaw in the system. Scandalously, they require but utterly lack reference. This dilemma, as critics have shown, is a key element of bovarysm, a desire/writing which maniacally seeks the mot juste without the ultimate guarantee of a reality which would validate the relations of signification. In a general sense, the object of desire in Flaubert's novels retreats under the proliferation of the signs which are necessary to its representation.¹⁰ These words also have a particular relation to narrative: they mark a pre-narrative moment for Emma, in which the signifiers of desire are presented as pure nomination, not yet engaged in a verbal sequence. This moment is in many ways similar to the intransitive position which Anna O., in Breuer's famous analysis, assumes in her reveries, at one stage in her treatment. During her "absences," Anna murmurs the impersonal "tormenting, tormenting." Anna has lost the position of grammatical subject; she repeats an impersonal form with no immediate link to the first person, standing outside any narrative ordering of a fantasm.¹¹ Emma, too, at this point in the story has not yet appropriated a discursive form which will be charged with giving meaning to the signifiers of desire. The experience of desire here is the interpretation of the already spoken or written, which the subject cannot know until she assumes a relation to narrative.¹²

The retrospective account of Emma's emotional formation, in chapter 6 of the first part of the novel, is the story of her first seduction, the seduction by romantic fiction. The terms which refer to Emma's readings have significant erotic implications not simply in their themes, but in reference to the act of reading itself. The narratives of desire are invested with erotic intensity not only because of their content, but also because they are read in secret. Of reading keepsakes it is said: "Il les fallait cacher, c'était une affaire . . ." (35). Erotic transgression thus becomes linked from the outset with concealment and an intimate relation is established between narratives of desire and secrecy.

Emma not only fantasizes by imitating the stereotypes of romantic fiction throughout the novel, but her imaginings imitate the second-rate copy. Her representation of romantic fiction will be associated not only with erotic intensity, but also with the dissolution of energy. The texts which establish the models of desire are themselves set in a structure of destructive repetition. Emma reads the classics of romantic fiction, yet she reads with even greater pleasure the second-rate reproductions of romantic stereotypes; keepsakes and popular novels. By interiorizing the stereotype it becomes a fantasm, which Emma assumes as her personal history. The text does not repress the knowledge of the repetition, which implicates an omniscient narrator as well as the protagonist; it becomes one of the major motifs of the novel. In demystifying Emma's blindness to her engagement in these repetitions, the narrator assumes a largely sadistic role, which we may suspect is the effect of a powerful nostalgia for the lost power of now obsolete stories of desire, still painfully contemporary.

The relation of desire to language here is similar to that discussed above in the context of Emma's wish to know the meanings of the words of bliss, but there are significant differences. Attention shifts from the static paradigm (metaphor) to the mobile syntagmatic order of narrative (metonymy). Desire, when associated with the nouns which serve as its signifier, can only remain virtual, a possibility forever suspended. When it is articulated as the narrative of fulfilled pleasure, however, desire is linked inevitably with the alienating repetitions of the stereotype. The private strategy of concealment only renders more apparent this alienation within romantic narratives.

Other constants of Emma's relation to desire and narrative are also established in this chapter. Desire is experienced as an imperative to appropriate objects for personal profit. Emma's personal narratives will later provide the means for that appropriation, but here the motif of the pleasures of reading and the motif of appropriation are simply contiguous, not yet joined explicitly as they will be later in the novel. Certain links between the personally pleasurable and bourgeois economy, however, are already formed in this chapter:

Il fallait qu'elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profit personnel; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son coeur, étant de tempérament plus sentimental qu'artiste . . . (34, italics added)

Pleasure is set in a system of exchange which conflates the emotional and the commercial, in which the subject seeks to consume the object of desire. Flaubert's correspondence repeatedly underscores implications in this passage that Emma is a perverted emblem of the artist and that her experiences of desire are characteristic of bourgeois sensibility. Desiring, for Emma, is a form of imitation whose object is the recuperation of sense, without difference or loss.

In terms of the novel's narrative order, this chapter is analeptic to the main narrative, its events situated in the protagonist's childhood.¹³ Clearly, chapter 6 provides information about attributes of Emma's "character" which will remain remarkably static throughout the novel. Emma will attain maturity as a "subject," however, only when she actively orders the elements of Romantic narratives according to an economic and sentimental schema already set by these earliest reported experiences of literature.

In the remaining chapters of Part One, Emma's desires are confined to a narcissistic silence. She now spins out her narratives as voiceless fantasies. In the opening lines of chapter 7, Emma composes hypothetical stories of travel to far-away places:

il eût fallu, sans doute, s'en aller vers ces pays à noms sonores où les lendemains de mariage ont de plus suaves paresses! Dans des chaises de poste, sous des stores de soie bleue, on monte au pas des routes escarpées, écoutant la chanson du postillon, qui se répète dans la montagne avec les clochettes des chèvres et le bruit sourd de la cascade. (38)

Moments of daydreaming such as this, as Genette notes in an excellent study of description and narrative in Flaubert, are doubly silent.¹⁴ The protagonists have ceased to speak to each other; Emma turns toward the world of her dreams. The narrative of the novel is also silent here, immobile, interrupted by a fantasy narrative which suspends the sequence of events in the main story. Emma's narratives, although they intrude upon the sequence of the main story, never acquire the power to take over from that story the initiative for ordering events.

Following this passage, the text focuses specifically on the illocutionary context of communication: Emma's needs are formulated less in terms which characterize a specific object of desire than in terms of a discursive situation.¹⁵ She lacks that other, necessary to the circuit of communication:

Peut-être aurait-elle souhaité faire à quelqu'un la confidence de toutes ces choses. Mais comment dire un insaissible malaise, qui change d'aspect comme les nuées, qui tourbillonne comme le vent? Les mots lui manquaient donc, l'occasion, la hardiesse. (38)

This passage opens up questions considerably more complex than the problem posed for Emma by the absence of an interlocutor. On the one hand the role of the other can never fulfill the function which Emma desires, for the other is to be always elsewhere and different from what the subject wishes. The images and the stories of desire, furthermore, are to be located beyond a particular and immediately accessible reality, a particular time and space contemporary to the subject, yet they can be constructed only with the aid of what they attempt to reject: reality . . . another reality. As for the formation of images and stories of pure desire, a further paradox makes itself felt. From the outset, there is a fundamental problem: these things, objects of desire, are lacking, and the elements which might constitute objects are heterogeneous, disparate, incapable of acquiring a stable configuration. Language cannot fix them, nor can they be generated by "reality" to be retrieved by language.¹⁶

Emma's attempts to arouse passion in herself pursue an illusive, provisional and ultimately inadequate solution. She develops theories about desire, narrative explanations of the empty signifiers. She repeats passionate verse in the manner of a sentimental catechism:

d'après des théories qu'elle croyait bonnes, elle voulut se donner de l'amour. Au clair de lune, dans le jardin, elle récitait tout ce qu'elle savait par coeur de rimes passionnées . . . (41)

Theory, for Emma, is auto-erotic, a solitary gesture directed toward narcissistic fulfillment. Knowing pleasure is repeating by heart the language of another's passion.

The major "event" of Part One, the trip to the chateau de Vaubeyssard, the dinner and the ball, appears to provide the occasion or access to the passion about which Emma had mused earlier. She remains excluded, however, from the language of potential partners in communication. What she wishes for most fervently is a passionate interlocutor, yet, in the conversations which take place in this sequence, she occupies an unmistakably marginal position; the language of the people at the chateau is incomprehensible, foreign to her. Emma is excluded because she is ignorant of the meanings of the speaker's words who "causait Italie":

A trois pas d'Emma, un cavalier en habit bleu causait Italie avec une jeune femme pâle, .. . Ils vantaient la grosseur des piliers de Saint-Pierre, Tivoli, le Vésuve, Castellamare et les Cassines, les roses de Gênes, le Colisée au clair de lune. Emma écoutait de son autre oreille une conversation pleine de mots qu'elle ne comprenait pas. (48)

Her alienation is also figured by the space in which she is caught, a space between two centers of desire. Although the swirling movements of her dance with the Vicomte transform the swirling, formless malaise (qui tourbillone comme le vent . . . ) into intense pleasure, Emma is excluded from the verbal articulations of desire which she seeks to know. Two passages specifically underscore the link between silence and the enforced solitude of Emma's desire. In the first, Emma composes a brief narrative about a cigar case of green silk, which Charles finds by the road on their return to Tostes. Emma supposes that its owner is the Vicomte; her fantasy narrative transforms the case into a fetishized object:

A qui appartenait-il? .. . Au vicomte. C'était peut-être un cadeau de sa maîtresse. On avait brodé cela sur quelque métier de palissandre, meuble mignon que l'on cachait à tous les yeux, qui avait occupé bien des heures et où s'étaient penchées les boucles molles de la travailleuse pensive. Un souffle d'amour avait passé parmi les mailles du canevas; chaque coup d'aiguille avait fixé là une espérance ou un souvenir, et tous ces fils de soie entrelacés n'étaient que le continuité de la même passion silencieuse. (53)

A cigar case here, is not "just" a cigar case. Once again, Emma's silent narrative is both erotic and the reproduction of the fabric of another text; she composes her story upon the already woven surface of a fetishized object. Paradoxically, however, in seeking a sense which would attain the continuity of "authentic" passion, meanings become a play of surface effects, incapable of evoking the desired presence. The fiction of desire, quite literally, is a fabrication which affirms distance, not presence; "Elle était à Tostes. Lui, il était à Paris, maintenant; là-bas!" (53). The desired moment of absolute presence (maintenant) is deferred, and metaphorized as spatial disjunction (là-bas).

Emma's taste for stories is not easily satisfied, however, and the inadequacies of this narrative produce more fiction, generated by a word which, in its very emptiness, can accommodate all meaning:

Comment était ce Paris? Quel nom démesuré! Elle se le répétait à demi-voix, pour se faire plaisir; il sonnait à ses oreilles comme un bourdon de cathédrale; il flamboyait à ses yeux jusque sur l'étiquette de ses pots de pommade.

Paris, plus vaste qu'un océan. (53-4)

This passage maintains a certain structural symmetry with the end of chapter 5, in which Emma had speculated on the meaning of the words félicité, passion and ivresse, yet there are meaningful differences between the two contexts which are due to the increasing importance of narrative to Emma's desire. The passages are similar in that each is an act of denomination, the terms in each case being devoid of semantic substance. The word Paris here must be referential, but is meaningful only as a figure. Paris is as empty a signifier as the words of passion, yet a fantasmatic geography has replaced the atopical terms of bliss, and Emma's imaginings move closer to narrative. The term Paris justifies the fantasmatic representation of desire, for it has historical, topographical reference, but it only functions effectively as a signifier which can accommodate the projections of desire when it becomes detached from that reference.

The act of naming is followed by another debauchery of reading, similar to that in the retrospective chapter 6. In the later episode, Emma subscribes to "feminine" reviews and studies descriptions of Parisian decors in E. Sue, Balzac and Georges Sand; "y cherchant des assouvissements imaginaires pour ses convoitises personnelles" (54). The same desire to consume the text and the same relation between desire and writing of both the first (Balzac, etc.) and the second order (le journal de femmes) are asserted as before. Emma takes the realist project literally; if the word is able to represent adequately the essence of things, then that essence is available to appropriation as language. Emma wants writing without difference, a desire figured here by her turning away from the symbolic mode of romantic narratives toward realist description and, beyond that, toward the iconic figure of a map of Paris. She buys a map and traces imaginary walks through the city:

Elle s'acheta un plan de Paris, et du bout de son doigt, sur la carte, elle faisait des courses dans la capitale. Elle remontait des boulevards, s'arrêtait à chaque angle entre les lignes des rues, devant des carrés blancs qui figurent des maisons. (54)

Like Félicité, in "Un Coeur simple," who asks to be shown the house of her nephew on a map of Cuba, Emma's interpretation of the map seeks the real, where there is only the surface of an iconic figure. Her misreading in this passage allegorizes the separation between figures of desire and referents. Emma's finger on this fetishized surface of the map attempts an impossible coincidence between her imaginings and the abstract surface on which desire has been projected.

It is at this time that Emma begins to wear an open house coat, buys paper and a blotter and dreams of Charles becoming a famous writer:

Elle s'était acheté un buvard, une papeterie, un porte-plume et des enveloppes, quoiqu'elle n'eût persone à qui écrire. (56)

Emma fills the space of lack not by writing herself, but by displacing the feminine subject in favor of a masculine proper name, which is to assume phallocentric mastery and circulate within a bourgeois economy:

Elle aurait voulu que ce nom de Bovary, qui était le sien, fût illustre, le voir étalé chez les libraries, répété dans les journaux, connu par toute la France

(58, italics added)

At the very moment when Emma might begin to write, her enclosure by the bourgeois family permits access to writing through the name of the husband, which can circulate only in accordance with the laws of commerce. Emma has effaced feminine difference in favor of the workings of the non(m) propre.¹⁷

Emma has come full circle; having gained access to narrative as the medium of desire she now refuses the role of the writing subject and in her fantasies seeks to give over that role to a man. The "solution" takes the form of denial and displacement; it produces a reemergence of desire in the symptoms of a "nervous disorder": "Elle devenait difficile, capricieuse . . ." "Elle pâlissait et avait des battements de coeur" (62, 63). This sequence, then, repeats regressively the order of Emma's initiation to narrative; from symptom, to fantasm, to the nominal terms (félicité, etc.) to narrative . . . the silenced narratives of desire have been reconverted into the symptoms of hysteria. At the end of Part One of the novel, Emma can give voice to her desire only through the "silent" metaphor by which she is strangled: "Elle eut des étouffements aux premières chaleurs . . ." (59). . . .

Notes

¹ All references to Madame Bovary are to the Garnier edition (Paris: Garnier, 1961). References to Flaubert's other writings are to the Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, "L'Intégrale," 1964).

² Of the many studies which treat the problematic of language and writing in Flaubert, and in particular in Madame Bovary, I have found the following to be most valuable: Charles Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982); Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown, 1976), 89-105; Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Dominick La Capra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982); Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); Alain de Lattre, La Bêtise d'Emma Bovary (Paris: Corti, 1980); Françoise Gaillard, "L'En-signement du réel," in La Production du sens chez Flaubert, ed. C. Gothot-Mersch, Colloque de Cérisy (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 10/18, 1975), 197-220; "La Représentation comme mis en scène du voyeurisme," RSH vol. 154, no. 2 (1874), 267-82; Jean Rousset, Forme et signification (Paris: Corti, 1962), 109-33; Jean-Paul Sartre, L' Idiot de la famille, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 1611-20; III (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 178-201; Naomi Schor, "Pour une thématique restreinte: Ecriture, parole et différence dans Madame Bovary," Litt. 22 (1975), 30-46; R. J. Sherrington, Three Novels by Flaubert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1979), 233-367; Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Gallimard, 1935); Anthony Thorlby, Gustave Flaubert and the Art of Realism (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956). Most of these analyses, in so far as they offer any extended study of Emma's stories, treat them as framed by the narrative of an authoritative narrator. Although that perspective must be taken into account, this chapter will focus more directly on Emma's stories and will trace their effects on a general interpretation of narrative in the novel. Reversing the conventional perspective produces unanticipated effects which lead to a re-examination of framing, desire and the impulses of power in narrative.

³ Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 146: "Flaubert . . . , en maniant une ironie frappée d'incertitude, opère un malaise salutaire de l'écriture: il n'arrête pas le jeu des codes (ou l'arrête mal), en sorte que (c'est là sans doute la preuve de l'écriture) on ne sait jamais s'il est responsable de ce qu'il écrit (s'il y a un sujet derrière son langage); car l'être de l'écriture (le sens du travail qui la constitue) est d'empêcher de jamais répondre à cette question: Qui parle?"

⁴ For a discussion of the combination of impersonal narration and erlebte Rede, or free, indirect discourse in Madame Bovary see Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," New Literary History, II, No. 1 (1970), 7-38.

⁵ Culler, 109-22.

⁶ The troublesome word "reality" will assert itself frequently in my text. I will define my uses of the term here to avoid the repeated intrusion of cumbersome definitions in the course of my discussion. On the one hand, the term will refer to what the fiction designates as real, what is generally understood as an effet de réel See Roland Barthes, "L'Effet de réel," Communications, 11 (1968), 84-9. In other instances the meaning of the term will be closer to what Lacan has called le Réel, which, precisely, cannot be named and resists symbolization. The Real can only be approximated by narrative in asymptotic fashion, as Frederic Jameson has noted: "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Problem of the Subject," Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), 338-95, esp. 383-95. Very often in reading Madame Bovary it is not possible to assert with any confidence which of these two senses is appropriate and much of the force of the novel is generated by this indeterminacy.

⁷ Gaillard, "L'En-signement du réel": "on ne peut triompher de l'écriture qu'en s'absorbant en elle: par un mouvement vertigineux de répétition en abîme, il faut être le livre en recopiant le livre que l'on recopie dans le livre," 201.

⁸ Naomi Schor's very suggestive article, "Pour une Thématique restreinte," discusses the similarities between Homais and Emma, both of whom aspire to be writers. It should also be noted that, as interpreters, Emma and Homais are set in opposition to each other at the end of the novel. On the legal implications of a stable narrative signified see La Capra, Madame Bovary on Trial and the final chapter of this book.

⁹ Luce Irigaray, in Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 9-162, discusses the displacement of a feminine libidinal economy and the imposition of masculine mimetic models of desire in the Freudian theory of sexual difference. In Freud's analysis of the early relation between the daughter and her mother, the young girl's role is determined by that of the male child; the daughter is said to understand her sexual difference as a lack, a defect, an absence of the phallus. The terms in which Irigaray discusses this suppression of feminine difference and its assimilation by the story of masculine desire are strikingly pertinent to this crucial passage in Madame Bovary: "Laissée au vide, au manque de toute représentation, re-presentation, et en toute rigueur aussi mimésis, de son désire (d')origine. Lequel en passera, dès lors, par le désir-discours-loi du désir de l'homme: tu seras ma femmemère, ma femme si tu veux, tu peux, être (comme) ma mère = tu seras pour moi la possibilité de répéter-représenter-reproduire-m'approprier le (mon) rapport à l'origine . . . Mais disons qu'au commencement s'arrêterait son historie, [l'histoire de la fillette] pour se laisser prescrire par celle d'un autre: celle de l'homme père," 47.

¹⁰ See de Lattre's discussion of the "paradox of the image," La Bêtise . . . , 20.

¹¹ Laurent Jenny, "Il n'y a pas de récit cathartique," Poétique, 41 (février, 1980), 1-21. "Cette douleur impossible, c'est celle, pour un sujet, de ne pouvoir se conjuguer au noyau verbal de son fantasme, dans la syntaxe d'une narration," 7.

¹² Paradoxically, Emma seeks a fully expressive, unmediated language of desire by imitating, as if they were "her own," the stories of others' passion. In the most fundamental way, the possibility of appropriating meaning for the self is determined as a process of censorship imposed by discourse. The language of "self-expression" imposes what Pierre Bourdieu has called euphémisation: "toute expression est un ajustement entre un intérêt expressif et une censure constituée par la structure du champ dans lequel s'offre cette expression, et cet ajustement est le produit d'un travail d'euphémisation pouvant aller jusqu'au silence, limite du discours censuré." "La Censure," in Questions de sociologie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 138.

¹³ Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 90.

¹⁴ Genette, "Silences de Flaubert," Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 223-43.

¹⁵ On illocutionary speech acts, see Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1977), 80-1.

¹⁶ de Lattre, La Bêtise . . . , 20-1.

¹⁷ C. Clément, H. Cixous, La Jeune née (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 10/18, 1975), 144-7: Irigaray, Speculum, 165-82. . . .