Research ProposalThe following study is a revisitation of classic novel with a focus on protagonist, relying on the premise that the main emotions generated by story are organized around fictional personae. The critical approach taken requires clarification in terms of its fundamental assumptions, since it goes somewhat against the grain of current mainstream criticism. A character is, for this study, the representation of a conceptualized human being, not a purely textual structure embodying thematic motifs.
While the character still defined as a structural element, instead of the autonomous (and thus a priori) entity conceived by the humanistic tradition, at this point, definition nevertheless foregrounds a distinction between human and non-human agency.[1] Furthermore, study acknowledge the reader’s intervention in the construction of character not only, by way of the cumulative act of memorizing textual information, but also by way of the inferences and expectations that derive from both the text itself and the reader’s repertoire of lived and imagined experiences.This scrutiny minimizes the importance of the emotions inspired in the reader by the various characters, which this study sees as a fundamental way of gaining reader’s interest, attention and active participation in the story being told. Thus tendency to discount the importance of characters in narrative fiction seems to be the result of two factors, both highly significant: first, the undermining of emotions, seen as antithetical to reason; second, an aesthetic attitude that is deeply anti-mimetic.
[2]Study’s position is that the reader’s response to fiction necessarily contains an emotional element. This is especially true when texts engage us in recognizing and judging certain values and forms of behavior. Furthermore, this emotional component is necessarily embedded in a specific cultural context, which is as much a part of the textual construction of the character as a portion of the reader’s own repertoire. In countering the argument that narrative representations and their individual characters do not reflect the real but only confer order and meaning on an endlessly chaotic universe, there is an implicit narrative structure both in individual and social human existence.
[3]To suggest that at certain moments artists took it upon themselves to imitate aspects of an historically contingent reality according to no less contingent perspectives is not, in any way whatsoever, to ignore the conventionality of art. Similarly, an anthropomorphic concept of character does not imply, that one mistakes fiction for life, as long as the fictional nature of the character is not put in question, and as long as its undeniable mimetic quality is not equated with the concept of a universal and essentially unchangeable reality.[4]Before closing these explanations we need to mention other significant elements related to the kind of literary analysis will be proposing. First, this paper want to emphasize the tendency in many areas of study to reevaluate emotions, recognizing in them a cognitive component which previously has not been given much attention.
Then, this study would like to stress the importance of a works, which have persistently argued for the very powerful role artistic fiction plays in the development of the readers’ moral and emotional sensibility, by expanding and diversifying their ethical and emotional experiences.In this analytical study of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert focus is put primarily on the fictional characters’ and the reader’s emotional response. This nineteenth-century novel present the world its heroine inhabit largely from her point of view, thereby inviting a parallel study of narrative analysis applied to a common subject matter.[5] The paper base such a analysis on the construction of the main characters’ emotions, demonstrating how and to what extent they may be manipulated by narratorial voice, and noting the reactions they evoke in the interested reader.
The objective is thus to analyze the ways in which the intersection of the textual world with the reader’s personal experience, both of life and of fiction, influences one’s participation in the act of plotting and reader’s attitude toward these protagonists.Although not meaning to dwell on a subject fully attested to in scholarship, the study cannot avoid touching briefly upon a few of its implications – those more directly linked to the specific issues to be addressed here. It is indeed well known that Flaubert strove to find a form of writing committed to an objective view of the world, implying the need to observe human experience from an external perspective, as much as possible unencumbered by a conspicuously judgmental narrator.[6] Such concern appears to have been a main factor in determining the impressive reduction of psychological commentary in Madame Bovary.
On the other hand, Flaubert himself came to acknowledge the impossibility of eliminating the observer’s viewpoint in literary art, having likewise recognized imagination, intuition and the ability to empathize as essential tools for the fiction writer. According to him, to observe in literature means to feel people and things viscerally.[7] Thus, emotion could not possibly be absent from Flaubert’s work. It does, however, appear oftentimes under inconspicuous guises, which the paper will analyze in the following pages, as it examines the heroine’s emotional life and the reader’s affective response to her.
PrécisThe purpose of this paper is to foreground the role of emotions in the reading of literary fiction. In Madame Bovary this frame of reference is particularly significant, since it also constitutes one of this novel’s recurrent motifs. It is contended that, in order to derive such a notion from the reading of Madame Bovary (although this complex work’s resistance to a simplistic recuperation of any theme is one of the premises of my discussion), one must respond to the text, and it is impossible to eschew emotion from the reader’s response.This paper will illustrate the more characteristic forms in which our emotions are effectively involved in the reading of this book.
This paper, therefore, propose that Madame Bovary strongly commits us emotionally, despite its narrator’s efforts to discourage the reader’s affective investment in a tale apparently meant to be contemplated as an artifact rather than an object of sentimental appropriation. Furthermore, paper argues that the narratorial irony concerning Emma’s empathetic way of reading is only one among various textual strategies designed to draw our attention to larger issues, like the articulation between language and emotional experience.Within this framework, a primary concern in this paper is to demonstrate that the emotionally engaged reading is fundamentally different from Emma’s way of reading fiction. Secondly, paper attempts to offer evidence that, even if the Flaubertian narrator appears imbued with enlightened preconceptions, like the Stoic distinction between pure art and the emotional investment in it of both its producers and its receptors, Madame Bovary does engage its readers’ emotions in several ways.
What happens, though, is that its narrator, unlike the novel’s heroine, is extremely conscious of the contrast between the limitations of language and the infinite range of human emotions.He is also convinced of the human capacity for self-deception, manifest in our ability to fabricate emotions through verbal language or other forms of turning experience into appearance. Therefore, another central objective of this paper is to demonstrate the shortcomings of human language as a means to express emotions-be it through the overly-articulate Emma or the abysmally inarticulate Charles Bovary – in order to show how this lack of an adequate correspondence between feelings and their verbal expression may influence our own emotional responses to the novel’s heroine. Emotions and Language in Madame Bovary”Writing such as this invites us, delectably, to reinvent our reading”,(Geoffrey Wall, Introduction to his English translation of Madame Bovary, 1992).
Undoubtedly, the reader’s response to fiction necessarily contains an emotional element. This is especially true when texts engage us in recognizing and judging certain values and forms of behavior. Furthermore, this emotional component is necessarily embedded in a specific cultural context, which is as much a part of the textual construction of the character as a portion of the reader’s own repertoire. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, in this sense can be considered as the rapport between the heroine’s sentimental life and the various forms of the reader’s allegiance to her.
This paper’s distinctive features have to do with the salience of the reader’s emotional response to literary fiction as a leitmotif in the Flaubertian novel itself.In Madame Bovary this topic assumes particular prominence in as far as the heroine’s affective relationship with fiction turns out to be a determining factor of pivotal events in her story. Being blamed for turning romantic novels of her time into mediators of her own desires, Emma Bovary is accused of unwittingly reducing emotions to their clichéd expression. By dint of her imagination, she equates human aspirations with sensorial gratification, and she transfigures mystic experiences into erotic ones, while looking for sentimental love in its external manifestations.
In other words, a number of common expressions of inner life like certain ways of dressing and speaking, romantic rhetoric, exotic places and so forth, stand in her view for authentic, deep feelings.Emotions and Physical ImageryEmotions are present throughout Madame Bovary in those objects, which are granted a life of their own as a way of rendering the feelings of the characters who touch them, and of conveying, almost materially, those feelings to the readers. Emma breathes anima into a cigar-case which in her fantasies she persuades herself of having belonged to the Viscount she met at The Vaubyessard ball: “Perhaps it was a gift from his mistress. (.
..) A breath of love had passed through the meshes of the canvas; each stitch of the needle had fixed a hope or a memory, and all these threads of intertwined silk were but the continuation of the same silent passion”) (74).” Leon’s infatuation with Emma is reflected upon her clothes: “Her dress (.
..) was spreading out to the floor. When Leon occasionally felt himself stepping on it, he would jump away as if he were stepping on someone” (110).
One of Lheureux’s marketing techniques consists in making inanimate objects acquire forms somewhat close to life: “Occasionally, as if to brush of the dust, he would flick with his fingernail the silk of the scarves, (…) and they would quiver with a light rustle” (114).
But it is especially within Emma’s emotional life that objects and feelings appear inextricably intertwined: “The fleshly appetites, desire for money, and the melancholy grip of passion combined into one agony. (…
) She would (…) whimper about the velvet she didn’t have, about the happiness she missed, about her unrealistic dreams, her cramped house” (118).
As for us, even if we tend to follow the narrator’s implicit lead in treating Emma’s confusion of material goods with inner feelings as one of her puerilities, this persistent reference to an emotional world embedded in a tangible reality offers us a sharper perception of both.1In Madame Bovary, we frequently come across similes where the external world is used to convey states of mind, allowing for the establishment of links between concrete and abstract dimensions of human experience.2 After Emma’s return from the ball at la Vaubyessard, her trip there is said to have caused a gap in her life “like one of these great crevices that a storm sometimes carves out in the mountains in a single night”) (73). The use of our mind’s eye in the reconfiguration of these “great crevices” allows us both to imaginatively feel the impact of that trip on Emma’s emotions and to anticipate its effect on her life thereafter.
In other words, an inner happening is figuratively represented by a physical circumstance, which helps the reader to see how a single night may have become a literally earthshaking event in the heroine’s whole existence.3According to David Gervais, besides revealing an “extraordinary, almost hallucinatory, gift for rendering Emma’s emotions through physical imagery”, Flaubert’s narrator brings us closer to her while doing so, since “much of our compassion springs from her vivid presence.”4 One especially touching example of that form of bringing “us closer to her” occurs while we contemplate her dejection after she returns from the ball at la Vaubyessard: “She resigned herself, forever; reverently she packed away in the chest of drawers her lovely dress and even her satin slippers, whose soles had yellowed from the floor wax. Her heart was like them; the wealth had rubbed off on her, something that could never be erased” (73).
Even if one is to find some subtle irony in Emma’s pious reverence for a mere outfit, it is hard to escape a sense of impending doom caused by her visit to “marquis d’Andervilliers”.5 More to the point, the striking image of the inexorable branding of her heart is bound to elicit compassion, despite our awareness that its cause was simply a transient association with material wealth. Also noteworthy is the fact that the heart, as the traditional source of emotional life, is objectified, being figuratively given the properties of matter when the narrator compares its encounter with the wealthy to the contact of Emma’s slippers with the dance-floor.6The use of narrated monologue, that is, the use of a technique, which fuses narratorial and figural languages, as means to render her emotions, brings the character closer to us.
7 We know that she is daydreaming and belaboring in her usual illusions, since she has no factual basis to imagine her classmates living the sort of existence she would love for herself. A negative narratorial assessment may even be implied in the disclosing of her conviction that the hum and light of city life are enough to “expand hearts”.8 Still, we are not prevented from putting ourselves in her place and seeing Emma’s life from her personal angle-the viewpoint of a very young woman who believes she has definitely missed out on all the opportunities she once had hoped for, and that others may be enjoying in her stead. The narrator does not attempt to sway our reasoning and our emotional response at this point.
9 And it is precisely within this particular context that the lack of light and warmth in her existence is emphasized through the arresting image of an attic that looks north. The reader will be receptive to the negative connotations of that simile’s suggestion of despondency if, for a moment, she allows herself the vicarious experience of Emma’s frustrations.10As shown in the aforementioned examples, the privilege given to concrete imagery as a means to render intimate experience has yet another corollary: the entanglement of thoughts and feelings with sensations. This form of objectifying subjectivity fosters in the reader emotional ties to the narrated mind, presumably in a more immediate way than abstract statements would allow for.
One paradigmatic case of the merging of sensations and emotional states occurs during the scene of the “Cornices Agricoles”.11 Emma is allowing herself to be carried away by the joint impact in her mind of past and present longings, elicited by visual stimuli.12 Her affective memory is first awakened by the perfume of Rodolphe’s hair. It reminds her of the Viscount at la Vaubyessard from whose beard a similar odor of vanilla and lemon emanated.
Then she glimpses in the distance the old Hirondelle, which brings Leon to her consciousness since, according to her recollection, ” It was in this yellow carriage that Leon had so often come back to her and by that road that he had left forever!” (150).Emma keeps traveling through those wistful memories resurfacing in the present:She had a vision of him across the way, at his window, then everything seemed to be topsy-turvy, clouds passed over her; she seemed to be still turning to that waltz in the viscount’s arms-Leon was not far off, he was going to come-and yet she did not stop being aware of Rodolphe’s head beside her. The sweetness of this sensation mingled with her old desires, and like grains of sand when the wind blows, they were tossed about in the subtle gusts of perfume settling on her soul” (150).Except for Rodolphe’s presence, Emma is clearly oblivious to her surroundings-contrary to the narrator who will soon turn his attention to the outside world.
Before that change of the narrative focus, though, the reader will have engraved in her mind Emma’s total inattention to everything but her inner visions, described in vivid detail despite the confusion they seem to create in her mind. This conflation of mental associations experienced by Emma at this moment is a psychic syndrome common enough to be recognized by the reader who can easily relate to it. The narrating voice yields to the figural thoughts and feelings, avoiding explanatory comments that would give away his cognitive privilege.13Finally, it may be said that the last quoted sentences epitomize the narrating consonance with the character in this entire passage.
The image of Emma’s old desires mingling with the scent of Rodolphe’s perfume, and settling on her soul, embodies a perfect closeness between inner happenings and external stimuli. It also brings the reader back to a context of affective memory, or to something she may be able to recollect as a fictional fact, or as a personal experience, and thus identify with.Emotions and SilenceIt goes without saying that the reader’s emotional responses to Emma are affected by textual inflexions. And if it is true that this heroine can spur us into putting blame on her, or inspire at times our open contempt, she can also win our sympathy.
Those reactions do not necessarily alternate; they may occur simultaneously. Instrumental in such an effect on the reader are shifts from empathy to irony, contained in the narrative itself. Examining Madame Bovary in this light, several episodes come to mind where one deeply sympathizes with the central character.Curiously enough, the reader feels closer to her when she is unable to verbalize her feelings or even to define them in any concrete form.
Early in her marriage, while she is already daydreaming of exotic places supposedly “producers” of happiness, we may understand her well-specified frustrations without being able to empathize with her.14 In contrast, one can partake of her despair in those moments where she is not desiring nor expecting anything in particular, as when she is sharing her meals with Charles: “Mealtime was the worst of all in that tiny room on the ground floor, with the smoking oven, the creaking door, the damp walls, and the moist flagstones” (80). The iterative mode stressing the infinite repetition of such everyday occasions, and the relentless enumeration of that room’s rather dismal features, help us to imagine the oppressive atmosphere. The description of Emma’s state of mind follows a symmetric pattern, her emotions being the perfect echo of her surroundings: “all the bitterness of her existence seemed to be served up to her on her plate, and the steam from the boiled beef brought up waves of nausea from the depths of her soul” (80).
The parallelism between the room and the character’s frame of mind is, so to speak, made tangible. The walls transpire, the oven smokes, the beef gives off steam, the door creaks, the floor exhales its dampness. Everything seems to secrete some sort of unpleasant substance, as if exuding a kind of nausea like the one ascending from the “depths of her soul”.15 The emotional force of this tableau, mainly springing from the specificity of its concrete details, is heightened by our sense of unbearable tedium, captured in a sequence of cadenced sentences that evince the sluggish passage of time, Charles’ incredible unawareness of his wife’s discomfort, the irrelevance of her gestures and, above all, the total incommunicability of this mismatched couple: “It took Charles a long time to eat; she would nibble a few hazelnuts or, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself by drawing lines on the oilcloth with the tip of her knife” (80).
After the first time she gives herself to Rodolphe, a crucial event in her life, there is a moment when we may feel inclined to participate in her exhilaration:All was silent; gentleness seemed to emanate from the trees; she could feel her heart beating again, and the blood circulating like a milky river through her body. Then she heard, off in the distance of the woods, over the other hills, a vague, prolonged cry, a drawn-out voice to which she listened in silence as it mingled like music with the waning vibrations of her throbbing nerves (162).The reader’s attention is thoroughly riveted on Emma’s emotions. Or, rather, it is drawn to the physiological manifestations of her present feelings-her heart beating, her blood circulating, her throbbing nerves.
We will probably be unable to completely empathize, considering that physical reactions are not easy to mimic, but our memory of personal or fictional episodes where we have responded in similar ways will certainly help us in our reconfiguration of her rapture.16 Our call is not to analyze the character’s experience, since we are confronted with her feelings not her fantasies about it. No words of hers, either spoken aloud or in her mind, mediate the reader’s participation in the scene. Silence is paramount, Emma does not utter a sound, nor does she make a single movement.
(Unless one counts as such her inward heartbeats, or the vibrations of her muscles.)17 She is too involved in the passing moment to even think of turning it into words. Caught unaware by major physical and emotional forces, she has no time to voice her feelings, which would, no doubt, trivialize them, given her proclivity to use clichés. Her reticence, in this case, narrows the gap between her and the reader.
18But the most illustrious occasion where the narrator gives his verdict on the shortcomings of language regards Rodolphe’s diffidence concerning Emma’s love talk. Having often heard similar words from other women’s lips, Rodolphe believes passion cannot escape the endless repetition of the same formulae and the same lexicon.19 As if exasperated by the narrowness of such a view, the narrator explicitly steps in, shifting from Emma and Rodolphe to an all encompassing nous, and offering another perspective:This man, who was so experienced in love, could not distinguish the dissimilarity in the emotions behind the similarity of expressions. (.
..) as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors. No one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, or conceptions, or sorrows.
The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars”) (188).Indeed, Rodolphe’s dismissal of Emma’s verbal expressions of love helps to prevent him from realizing that he somehow cares for her. It is for being “wedded to the idea of himself as a sensual brute” – to borrow McCarthy’s words-that he fails to acknowledge his own feelings when he tells her good-bye forever.20 Although ” his heart began to beat so wildly that he had to lean against a tree to keep from falling” (196), he only allows himself to regret, in an affected, condescending tone, the loss of a “pretty mistress”.
21This might be read as the opposite of the preceding claim that speech acts invariably as an amplifier of sentiments. In fact this second indictment of language is aimed at the incapability of using the same expressions to articulate the most diverse experiences. The point is that language falls short of being a reliable vehicle of communication “since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, his thoughts or his sorrows”.22 During the episode examined earlier where Emma and Leon were remaking their past selves, language was also on trial as we witnessed the characters’ attempts to take sentimental experience to false lengths, simply by artificially stretching their words, as they expressed trite feelings.
23It is probably the awareness of such a cleavage that explains the narratorial choice of presenting a silent Emma in the gravest circumstances of her life. This happens, for instance, when she is told she has just given birth to a daughter, instead of the hoped for son on whom she had centered all her dreams. Then, at a loss for words to express her disappointment, she simply turns her head and faints.24 Later, after the failure of her projected flight with Rodolphe, she falls ill and speechless for an indefinite amount of time.
Finally, while bound to come to terms with her emotional and financial insolvency, her only outlet is to inflict death upon her body, thus condemning it to eternal silence. From the reader’s point of view, all these passages bear comparison to those examined earlier, where Emma, similarly overwhelmed by the sheer force of her emotion, is quieted, that is, prevented from trivializing them. Those are the moments where narratorial deflating irony is withdrawn, allowing us to draw closer to the heroine and feel some of her pain or pleasure.The Opacity of Language and the Expression of EmotionsBoth Charles and his wife draw our attention to the deficiencies of human speech.
As a firm believer in the ability of verbal language to mirror empirical reality, Emma is prone to suffer from the profound gap separating one from the other. In turn, Charles, deprived of the words that might somehow match the richness of his feelings, illustrates the insurmountable distance between experience and its articulation, thus ultimately following his wife’s lead in exposing the impossibility of ever reconciling life and language. In other words, even if, arguably, Emma Bovary is a mere vehicle of “borrowed ideas and stock sentiments,” whereas her husband stands for the notion that “sincerity if it exists is inarticulate”, in the final analysis they are both victims of a “despair of language and its incapability of communicating adequately the private perception of experience.”25In Madame Bovary, the relationship between language and experience, in particular when it comes to emotions, is one of the thematic nuclei around which the fictional world in question is organized.
Having closed the book after its last page, we may even feel inclined to endorse the notion that “language refers to nothing beyond its own impersonal (and discouraging) virtuosity,”26 but we are still left with the underlying paradox of a novel that subverts the reliability of words while resorting to them as a means to convey their very unreliability.Certainly, it is possible to establish a parallel between this very paradox and contention that, despite all the rhetorical skills used to discourage the reader’s emotional investment in this text, affect still prevails as mediator of this novel’s reading. Our affective involvement is, nonetheless, different from those excitations passions Emma experiences.27 She is a naive reader insofar as she sees fiction as a faithful copy of reality.
A reality she never encounters but which she never loses hope of finding some day. She not only believes in art imitating life but also in the likelihood of life imitating art. Her faith in a traditional concept of mimesis is of course extended to language. That is why she never questions her lovers’ conjuring tricks of rhetoric – nor her own for that matter.
28That is also why she is utterly unable to guess her inarticulate husband’s feelings. What she never realizes is the fabricated nature, that is to say the fictionality, of those dreams and wishes that render her quest for an ideal love both trite and vaguely Utopian at the same time.29 The decision to approach Madame Bovary through the scope of the reader’s emotional response to the novel’s characters is not, after all, in conflict with the narrator’s indictment of Emma’s empathetic readings, considering that the kind of reader imagined is not deluded by any sort of real effect. On the contrary, such a reader is consistently aware of her participation in the building of an artifact.
30In such a construction, fictional characters play a central role, since in characters are fictional analogues of human agents. Despite its structural dimension, a character can be (and usually is) anthropomorphic and capable of inspiring emotional responses in the readers. Therefore, one cannot dismiss any potential correspondence between fictional characters and human beings, nor the possibility of an affectively engaged reading of fiction. Fiction, however, should never be mistaken for life – a warning that Emma Bovary chooses to ignore with dire consequences impressed upon us as we make our way through the novel.
ConclusionAs reader of Madame Bovary, one is prevented, mainly through the constant use of irony, from repeating Emma’s blunders. “By keeping us at a critical distance, the narrator checks our emotions and freezes our illusions. (..
.) we are thus denied the pleasure of emotional involvement but are given instead the intellectual pleasure of sharing the narrator’s superior position from which all is viewed critically.”31 Yet, even this kind of pleasure is not merely intellectual; it includes a strong dose of our narcissistic sense of detachment. We are definitely denied the flights of fancy Emma indulges in, that is to say, the uncritical ways of empathizing with a fiction she refuses to acknowledge as such.
Nevertheless, we still respond emotionally to the characters of Madame Bovary, sometimes condescendingly, other times feeling anger, compassion, or frustration. Finally, tracing the characters’ means of expressing or of silencing their emotions, while at the same time being aware of the narrator’s and our own feelings toward them, can give us the kind of insight needed for the act of plotting.32Madame Bovary dramatizes the possible destructive power of sentimental writing and reading, or of engaging in any sort of misleading dialogue. In doing so, it deconstructs language, mostly through narratorial irony.
Evidence was offered here that such an irony is at times connected to larger issues than Emma’s sentimentality; it has to do with her unawareness of insurmountable gaps between language and emotions, and between art and life. But, inasmuch as it concerns her habits as a reader of fiction, it does not disparage other potential forms of an emotionally engaged reading. The aforementioned deconstruction of language has after all the constructive purpose of keeping its readers critically detached from sentimental fiction and from a sentimental heroine, while inevitably activating their affective response to her and to her narrated story.Endnotes1 Edward Gallagher, “Narrative Uncertainty in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary”, Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 53, 5 (1998): 312-317.
2 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978)3 Bijoy Boruah, Fiction and Emotions (Oxford: Charendon Press, 1988)4 David Gervais, Flaubert and Henry James: A Study in Contrasts (London: MacMillan Press, 1978). 76-775 Dacia Maraini, Searching for Emma. Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998)6 Margaret Lowe, Towards the Real Flaubert: A Study of ‘Madame Bovary’ (New York: Oxford UP, 1984)7 Cohn 100-1018 Gallagher 3159 Boruah10 Maraini11 Rosemary Lloyd, Madame Bovary (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990)Lloyd12 Murray Smith, “Altered States: Character and Emotional Response in the Cinema”, Cinema Journal 36, 4 (Summer 1994): 34-5613 Cohn 10914 Lloyd 3515 Sarah Goodwin, “Emma Bovary’s Dance of Death.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 19, 3 (Sping 1986): 20316 Bruce Fleming, “An Essay in Seduction, or the Trouble with Bovary,” The French Review 62, 5 (1989): 764-77317 Maraini18 Lowe19 Gallagher20 Mary McCarthy, Introduction to Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (New York: New American Library: 1964) xvi21 Lloyd 4522 Gallagher23 Gervais24 Gallagher25 McCarthy xv26 Leo Bersani, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1970) 14427 Boruah28 Lowe29 Maraini30 Cohn 98-931 Inge Wimmers, Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988) 7832 CohnBibliographyBoruah, Bijoy H.
Fiction and Emotions. Oxford: Charendon Press, 1988.Bersani, Leo. Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction.
New York: Oxford UP, 1970Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978.Flaubert, Gustave.
Madame Bovary. English translation, New York: New American Library, 1964Fleming, Bruce E. “An Essay in Seduction, or the Trouble with Bovary,” The French Review 62, 5 (1989): 764-773Gallagher, Edward J. “Narrative Uncertainty in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary”.
Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 53, 5 (1998): 312-317.Gervais, David. Flaubert and Henry James: A Study in Contrasts. London: MacMillan Press, 1978.
Goodwin, Sarah W. “Emma Bovary’s Dance of Death.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 19, 3 (Sping 1986): 197-215.Lloyd, Rosemary.
Madame Bovary. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990.Lowe, Margaret. Towards the Real Flaubert: A Study of ‘Madame Bovary’.
New York: Oxford UP, 1984.Maraini, Dacia. Searching for Emma. Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary.
Trans. Vincent J. Bertolini. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
McCarthy, Mary. Introduction to Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. New York: New American Library: 1964, vii-xxiii.Smith, Murray.
“Altered States: Character and Emotional Response in the Cinema”. Cinema Journal 36, 4 (Summer 1994): 34-56.Wall, Geoffrey, trans. Introduction to Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
London: New York: Penguin, 1992.Wimmers, Inge Crosman. Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988. Endnotes[1] Murray Smith, “Altered States: Character and Emotional Response in the Cinema” (Summer 1994)[2] Bijoy Boruah, Fiction and Emotions (Oxford: Charendon Press, 1988)[3] Smith[4] Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978)[5] David Gervais, Flaubert and Henry James: A Study in Contrasts (London: MacMillan Press, 1978)[6] Leo Bersani, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1970)[7] Ibid
