9 August 2007
The Trial of Madame Bovary
Posted by Adrian under Culture
You could tell that The Trial of Madame Bovary (audio stream/wiki) was the last edition of the 2006-2007 series when it began with a truly awful joke:
Andy Martin: If Flaubert were pitching this story as a movie today, he would have to summarise the story as something like: one wedding, a couple of adulterers - liaisons, and a funeral.
It was so awful, I didn’t even realise it was a joke until five minutes later. So let’s say that I didn’t have high hopes for this edition. Things got even worse when Melvyn got into an argument (somewhat justifiably) with Andy about whether the book was any good or not, and proceeded to shut down his digression into his theory that there are two different sorts of readers and that reading great literature won’t always be good for you - which sounded quite intriguing, but I suppose there’s only so much time to spend. At this point, Melvyn is clearly looking forward to a well-deserved holiday in the nice, flooded countryside.
I’m a scientist at heart, and I have to admit that I sometimes skip over the ‘culture’ editions of In Our Time. To be honest, I didn’t find the discussion of Flaubert’s style of writing at the beginning of the programme to be interesting at all; perhaps if I’d read the book, I’d feel differently. In any case, I was more drawn to Robert Gildea’s description of France as the ’second empire’:
The second empire is a sort of hybrid regime. It was a monarchy, but based on the idea of popular sovereignty and when the empire was declared, it was put to a popular vote. It was one of those attempts that you get in the 19th century to reconcile the revolutionary tradition with the counter-revolutionary tradition… it was a regime which had a different birth…
One of the big problems with the empire was liberty. Although Napoleon III said that he was a friend of liberty and ultimately would allow liberty to flourish, there was a sense that France had to go through a period of dictatorship, of constraint, that the politicans had to be gagged or disciplined, and that eventually there would be greater liberty - but not for the moment.
What I found most surprising was the notion that in the mid 19th century, marriage was ‘less about love than about property’. I suppose this was the case in most countries (and continues to be the case in many, even now) but, well… you think France, you think romance. So much for that.
The trial itself is fairly predictable. I did enjoy the supposed fact that the prosecutor, Pinard, went on to write obscene literature himself later in life, so impressed was he with Flaubert’s novel. Also good was Andy’s summary of one of the defense’s points, that:
…this marriage was an arranged marriage. Like all marriages in the 19th century bourgeois milieux, it was basically about property. You had an older man who’d established himself - a man wasn’t allowed to get married until he’d established himself - who would marry a girl who was meant to be a virgin - hence the convent education, because convent educations were basically about preserving virginity - and Balzac, for example, said, ‘This is a time bomb, because what happens when the man gets to fifty and the woman gets to thirty, and there are young men, banging on the door trying to get in - young men who haven’t had the right to get married… It’s a critique of the bourgeouis marriage.
(A few days after this, a friend informed me that one of Casanova’s most famous exploits was bedding two nuns)
The defense actually claims that Madame Bovary is a salutary moral tale, since she gets her just desserts in the end - a painful death. As Andy says, ‘the author is being tremendously sadistic to his own heroine.’ Melvyn is so taken with this that he wants to pick it up later in the programme - a good catch. Not long after, he becomes distracted by Mary Orr:
Mary Orr: One of the really important parts of the trial was that the text itself was used as the basis for the evidence. Any student going back to those key scenes - the carriage ride -
Melvyn: For people who haven’t read the novel, there’s a ride in a carriage through Rouen with one of her lovers, and they close the curtains so nobody can see inside, and we hear a lot about the horses at the front, how they sweating -
Mary: They’re sweating, and the coachman is sweating, and -
Melvyn: It’s extremely erotic, and very well done (laughs)
Mary: And no-one can actually pinpoint exactly where the offence to public sensibility might be, that it’s all in the imagination of the reader. Most of the scenes of similar ilk in the novel again play with that hugely charged eroticism. It’s like films where you’ve got a couple who are just about to enjoy one anothers pleasures* and all you see in the camera is the waving grass and the blue sky -
Melvyn: Or the train going in to the tunnel.
Mary: Indeed, so Flaubert does exactly that, well before the cinema caught up with it.
Two points. Firstly, exchanges like these are why I love listening to In Our Time - it’s a perfect mix of education and madness. Secondly, who still says ‘enjoy one anothers pleasures’ these day?
Where things really get interesting is about 35 minutes in. Andy has been trying, unsuccessfully, to shock people for the entire programme so far, with his claim that the book isn’t so great and that he would’ve convicted Flaubert. Maybe he did actually succeed with the bad joke, but sensing the end of the programme, he kicks it up a notch:
Andy: In a sentence, I think of Flaubert as a rapist- because he forces sex on his heroine.
Melvyn: Surely… it’s the people in the book who force sex on his heroine, and she herself is looking for sex from the people in the book -
Andy: Now you’re following the Flaubertian line, of dissociating. Let us dissociate the author from his own book. There’s the book, floating in mid-air, as he says. It’s just a text, as Barthes would say. However, if want to return to the real world, as you’re suggesting, clearly Flaubert wrote it. He made those things up! He made those characters do what he wanted them to do. It’s not as though they have a life of their own.
It starts off as mildly shocking, and then becomes pretty intriguing when Andy says that Flaubert - and other (male) novelists - claim to understand what was going on inside the mind of a woman, ‘to speak on her behalf’. Again, Melvyn sounds genuinely impressed by this and suggests revisiting it next series.
By this point, I doubt any listeners are that concerned about the end of the trial any more, so the programme meanders around a little, only to recover with another of Andy’s weird theories about Flaubert being autistic and his writing is trying to compensate for that cognitive deficit. Now, as someone who knows a little about autism, I really don’t buy this theory, although I would suggest that perhaps he did have high-functioning autism at most - a slightly ‘extreme form of the male mind‘ (as espoused by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen).
Despite not generally enjoying ‘culture’ editions of In Our Time, I found this one quite memorable, mainly due to the quantity of great ideas that came up during the programme, and the good rapport the guests had. If you haven’t listened to it, I suggest you do.
Now, I don’t intend to write posts this long for every single edition, partly because I don’t have the time, and partly because most editions don’t have quite so many great quotes. Still, this is the general idea - a commentary on the programme that includes quotes, links to additional resources and some of my own theories. If you have any thoughts on how it might be improved, let me know!
And if you’re interested in reading Madame Bovary, you have a number of choices. You can download it from Project Gutenberg in the original French, or in English as translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. You can also read the same translation in a more friendly web version.