ABSTRACT
We can observe a battle playing out here between precision and purpose: one part of the novel wants to include the minute and detailed, to see all the portraits and read their gilded labels. But those billiard players using the room want the light for reasons more operative, for their sport and play, and so the lamp is focused on their billiard table and the novel’s sight kept likewise keyed toward the functional, those aspects of narration that push a scene forward in time. The full list of paintings is too “hard to see”; eventually, Emma must move on, to look at other things, have other experiences. Janell Watson suggests that Madame Bovary has been “admired for [its] efficient use of description well integrated into the narrative,”2 and such admiration is not betrayed here.
