ABSTRACT
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary occupies a central place in the history of modern fiction; it is both a quintessential nineteenth-century ‘realist’ novel and a precursor of the early twentieth-century ‘modernist’ novel. This duality would play an important role in the obscenity trial of 1857, which took place because of the novel’s alleged lasciviousness. Flaubert was admired by some of his contemporaries as the master of realism, an artistic vision characterised by a resolute focus on contemporaneity, a turn away from classical models and high personages in favour of the representation of ordinary people and experiences, a commitment to truthful depictions of reality and an interest in the immediate and the transitory over the eternal or the universal.1 Literature and visual art are closely related in French realism: intellectual and
personal exchanges between artists and writers were frequent; similar subjects from the less aristocratic walks of life recurred in the novel and the visual arts, and realist fiction was frequently compared with paintings in the mid-nineteenth century. The parallels between realist fiction and art are so strong that Peter Brooks has suggested that realism should be understood as a representation that ‘turns crucially on its visuality’.2 As we will see, the critique of the visuality of realist fiction formed the crux of the prosecution’s argument in the trial. Flaubert himself was strongly averse to being labelled a ‘realist’ writer: ‘I
execrate what is commonly called “realism”, even though I’m regarded as one of its high priests’.3 He wanted Madame Bovary to be ‘dependent on nothing external’ and for it to be ‘held together by the internal strength of its style’.4 The novel’s focus on style over content and its textual independence from ‘external’ reality
indirect libre – a mode of storytelling whereby the narrative viewpoint shifts between the thoughts and impressions of the characters and of the narrator without any signposting – looks forward to the turn towards interiority characteristic of the modernist novel: in his lectures Vladimir Nabokov identifies Flaubert as a key influence on Franz Kafka, and speculates that: ‘without Flaubert there would be no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland’.5 As I will show, Flaubert’s defence lawyer would advance an argument which
foregrounded the novel’s modernist style. Madame Bovary’s position as simultaneously the epitome of mid-nineteenth-century realism and a curiously anachronistic instance of literary modernism makes it an apposite starting point for a study of literary trials and literary-legal relations in the modern period. In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which Madame Bovary was read in the
courtroom, and combine historicist and psychoanalytic approaches to investigate the construction of gender in both fiction and the law. The first section focuses on the novel and interprets it as the site of mobile, indeterminate gender identifications whose textual effects challenged the conventional notions of gender in mid-nineteenth-century France. Central to this section is the notion of androgyny: the novel’s construction of the androgyne can be understood as one cause of the obscenity trial in that it threatened to undermine the entrenched distinctions between masculinity and femininity of the period. The second section studies the ways in which Madame Bovary was read in a legal
setting; it brings the method of close reading usually associated with literary criticism to bear on the text of the trial transcript, focusing on the courtroom rhetoric to explore the ways in which the law attempted to contain the novel’s subversive force. It argues that the prosecution presented the novel in visual terms in an attempt to arrest its free play of gender identifications through the dynamic of fetishism. The defence, on its part, paradoxically adopted the radical mobility of gender in the novel as the basis of its counter-argument by demonstrating the same mobility on the level of form. It was this intertextual reasoning that determined the outcome of the trial in Flaubert’s favour; the novel’s very radicality that led to legal censure in the first place was also the element which secured Flaubert’s acquittal.
