Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

Excerpt from
Emma, or Happiness (or Sex Work)
by Frances Ferguson

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In 1857 three men stood as defendants, charged by the state with having corrupted the public morals in bringing Madame Bovary into the world. They were Leon Laurent-Pichat, editor of the Revue de Paris, in which Madame Bovary first appeared in installments; Auguste-Alexis Pillet, printer for the Revue; and Gustave Flaubert, author of the novel. Although the defendants were all acquitted, it has been difficult (or, in other words, all too easy) for modern readers to see why the prosecution was brought in the first place. Historians and critics generally conclude their inquiry into the matter by quoting Flaubert's remark that the authorities wanted to strike a blow against the Revue, and that they almost accidentally charged him in the process. When the prosecution of Madame Bovary is mentioned, it is nearly invariably seen under Flaubert's rubric of the random or misdirected prosecution.1 Yet the difficulty with that way of proceeding is that it minimizes an important feature of Flaubert's writing that has intrigued and disquieted many--something that is difficult to localize and yet so palpable that Sartre explicitly names it the desire to demoralize and makes it the chief burden of his magisterial (if incomplete) biography and that Jonathan Culler connects with Flaubert's desire to induce reverie--to lead people to withdraw from the world of purposeful activity.2

[....]

In the moment that the judge announced that "Le tribunal les acquitte de la prevention portee contre eux et les renvoie sans depens," he provided at least as much support for the notion of "art for art's sake" as did any of the psychologico-familial and socio-economic conditions that Sartre and Bourdieu detail in their accounts of Flaubert.9 Doubtless, as Sartre says, Flaubert saw himself as repudiating medicine, the bourgeois profession of his father and brother, and as well as law, the twin to medicine that was just inferior enough to be perfectly suited to the younger son of the family, the one who was seen as never quite managing to live up to the family's standards for success.10 Doubtless, as Bourdieu says, he was willing and able to commit himself to his art because he enjoyed a peculiarly high bourgeois privilege in not needing to think of his work as a livelihood. 11 As someone who would worry about the scale of his inheritance rather than earning his next meal, Flaubert could work with a time-frame quite different

Full Text Pierre Bourdieau: Flaubert's Point of View Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Literature and Social Practice: 211-234.

from that of most workers. Some might work for their daily bread; others, like his father and brother, had highly articulated careers that exerted a constant pressure on both their individual actions and their earnings; Gustave, however, worked on a scale that was not connected with either the dailiness of life or the lifetime career. He disconnected his own life from his work not because he didn't care deeply about his work but because he insisted upon largely ignoring the effects that his work might have on his life. Since his writing would never enable him to have the truly fabulous and life-changing wealth that he toyed with in his imagination, he maintained a peculiar detachment from the popular success and the sales of his first novel. (Indeed, the most pronounced emotion that he expresses is the sense of irritation at not being left alone, an irritation that he describes in a peculiar idiom, one of not being allowed to be finished with his novel.)12

Sartre's and Bourdieu's accounts of Flaubert's motives and situation, as important as they may be, explain a great deal about Flaubert the individual and the larger world of family and society in which he could be Flaubert. Yet because they seek to recapture the crucial terms of Flaubert's own point of view, they are not particularly concerned with what the judge thought in making his decision, which was almost certainly not an affirmation of Flaubert's disrespect for the bourgeois professions or of his decision not to have gainful employment and to "have" or inherit money rather than to earn it. Given that the judge doubtless disagreed

See Also Frances Ferguson: Pornograpy: The Theory (Spring 1995) Molly Ann Rothenberg and Joseph Valente: Fashionable Theory and Fashion-able Women: Returning Fuss's Homospectatorial Look (Winter 1996) Laura Kipnis: Adultery (Winter 1998) Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones: Fetishizing the Glove (Fall 2001)

with many of the views that commentators have seen in the novel and Flaubert's handling of it, the question that we must ask is what made it possible for the judge to send the novel and its producers off "scot-free"? For the judge's view--which literary historians have greeted as enlightened--was, improbably enough, that of a literary critic. Indeed, the judge's decision (down to and including the observation that there were a few blemishes, that Flaubert had failed to realize that some of his remarks might mislead the unsuspecting reader) are ones that Saint-Beuve immediately adopts as his own and acknowledges in making his summary assertions that "the work now belongs to the domain of art, and art alone" and that the project of the critic is not simply to rehearse the glories of past art but to acknowledge art that is contemporary.13 Thus, the perhaps surprising fact is that the judge's ruling establishes the notion of autonomy for the work of art to a degree previously unimagined. Art--whether in the form of fiction-writing or painting--might not have organized curricula and courses of instruction like medicine and law; it might not speak the specialized language of law. Yet in the moment in which the judge rendered his judgment that "literature, as art, does not have only to be chaste and pure in its expression to accomplish the best that it is called upon to produce," he essentially accepted the notion that it had spoken in its own terms.14 That is, the judge accorded Flaubert's novel the same kind of standing that the logics of the professions enjoyed. What the judgment established was the strong view that literature did not need, any more than medicine and law, to justify itself in its incidentals. Although art could not command assent any more than the recognizably established professions could, an author need not, any more than a physician or an attorney, pause to defend his every word. Art was, in other words, being treated as a special field in which one could make the same kinds of statements that were sensible in medicine and law but nonsensical or shocking if they were taken as the language of daily life. It was granted professional jargon, even as that jargon was seen to be coextensive with the natural language.

It was thus not simply that Flaubert's first published novel enjoyed a succès de scandale, that its notoriety provided it with more attention than it might otherwise have had. It was also the case that the judge, in deeming Flaubert's novel to be art, made him an artist. In making that assertion, I don't mean, of course, to suggest that Flaubert was not what we would call a meticulous craftsman, or that he didn't sweat the bullets he says he did in writing the novel. I mean, rather, to insist that the judge provided Flaubert with a new confidence that he had indeed "finished" Madame Bovary and provided him with a way of imagining that there was a rationale for thinking that he didn't, as he had so often before, need to renew his labors on the novel. For the judge had essentially affirmed that the novel had developed such internal consistency that no one would take its words as if they meant what they might outside of its pages. Although the question of the novel's realism could always be broached on a scene-by-scene or an image-by-image basis, the judge was treating it as if it had managed to establish itself as the exact equivalent of a professional language. Technique had, in other words, won the privilege of the technical.

It is a distinct peculiarity of the modern era that many artists have received some of their most intense acknowledgment as artists through the circuitous route of being tried and acquitted of affronting public morals. Even though most commentators lament the repressiveness of governments and praise the radical nature of art, one of the most important effects of obscenity trials is that they give government a role in authenticating art as art.15 The inefficiency of the process may serve to remind us of how imperfectly professionalized art was (and, to a lesser degree, remains) when its acknowledgment manifests itself in such a negative mode as that of public prosecution. Yet the obscenity trial and the review are simply different aspects of the argument that art is art not simply by virtue of its author's conviction but by virtue of its having a recognizable value to its readers. It is, thus, not really surprising that obscenity trials have regularly included testimony from critics and from other writers, and that they have treated such testimony as having the authority of expertise. Nor is it surprising that Sainte-Beuve would see the trial as in part an exercise in literary criticism and would adopt its language and conclusions, or that Flaubert himself would write to one correspondent that he was increasingly interested in literary criticism. For the trial and the review merely offered various avenues toward a recognition that Flaubert had already incorporated into his work when he appointed his friends as a kind of review committee and read passages aloud to them to be sure that his writing passed muster. (The work was not done until an auditor could declare that it was done; and Flaubert's commitment to making fine distinctions between the moments for style indirect libre and direct discourse, along with the red-pencilling he did in his letters to Louise Colet and Louis Bouilhet, are part of the process of coming to define art in terms of its revision and its having already taken into account the project of not just self-presentation but also self-justification.) Thus, when the prosecution begins by taking the words of the novel for descriptions of incidents that might occur in the real world, it quickly becomes clear that they are not merely descriptive but also justified. As the trial delivers the conclusion that the novel's words speak of incidents only in the novelistic world, the decision thus counts to convince both itself and the novel's author that the novel provides a valid new measure of work, a new unit in which action may be measured.

In describing the prosecution and the verdict in this way, I am obviously advancing a position that runs counter to a host of critical commentaries on the novel that stress the uncertainty of identifying the attitude of the author in relation to his character. That view--classically represented in Henry James's remark that Flaubert refused to "stand and fight it out" in his writing--takes two forms: one suggesting that the prosecution would never have been initiated if the court had recognized that Flaubert was not himself speaking (and was not therefore endorsing) Emma's thoughts as represented in the style indirect libre of the novel, the other suggesting that the prosecution could never clearly identify who was speaking and, therefore, did not know where to attach blame.17What seems mistaken about those positions is that they suggest that the novel left something open, that it is an equivocal appeal to its reader, when the novel's most surprising element was that it left nothing open at all in its insistent reach toward professionalism for art in prose. For what the criticism has stressed has been exactly the sort of thing that Flaubert would have identified as getting Baudelaire into trouble--the appeal to the reader, the address to the "hypocrite lecteur," that represented Baudelaire's understanding of the imperatives that would enable the ancient art of poetry to survive in the modern world.

Flaubert makes prose a profession, gives it ways of justifying itself if not of exactly following rules. While it is true that poetry in mid-nineteenth century France becomes more committed to sublimity (if we temporarily restrict that notion to the idea that a work will insist upon its completion in its readers' consciousness), Flaubert aims to make prose the art of the beautiful in making the novel an insistently complete form that has no real reliance upon or appeal to its readers. The Beauty that he is continually chasing in the novel is, in that sense, impersonal not simply because one can't exactly form an image of the novelist who speaks but also, and more importantly, because Flaubert has recognized the significance of having the novel become scientific: "It's there that the natural sciences have their virtue: they don't care about proving anything."18 Thus, while gossip will become important for many writers, in his novel demonstration replaces opinion. And the project of "demoralization" is not, as Sartre would have it, a desire to inspire dejection but rather a desire to remove all the opinions, all the moralizing assumptions, that have hedged the novel previously.

[....]

The Emma Bovary who has had something very close to twenty lives is the Emma Bovary whose life could easily be lived by twenty others. While it may seem like a joke on the citizens of Yonville that they move rapidly from gossiping about Emma's gifts to Leon and about his being her lover to praising her exemplary behavior as the manager of her household and her husband's billings, the point of the drastic variation is not to show the crowd's fickleness. The function of publicity in Yonville is to respond instantaneously to any new behavior, to judge it without regard to an individual's previous behavior, to encourage individuals to express their better selves. Thus, although Flaubert depicts them crowding to the windows to get good seats for the theater of life, they are not demonstrating a personal trait like curiosity in this. They are fulfilling what has become an obligation, the commitment to enabling (and requiring) people to be seen, and they are neither immoral nor fickle. Rather, the virtue of this public lies in its willingness never to hold it against Emma the exemplary housewife that they had only recently thought of her as Emma the adultress. Yet for both Emma and the people of Yonville this efficiency in updating their views with little interference from even their previous views constitutes a considerable limitation as well. For in this society of the weightless past, Emma can easily lose track of herself.

It thus becomes possible for us to identify with some exactitude why sexual relationships are prominent in the novel. For if Dickens presents his readers with a domestic sphere that is continually invoked as a stay against the confusion of the world outside its borders, Flaubert is interested in analyzing how even marriage is being modernized by the pressure of utilitarian morals. For modern marriage--particularly when one is married to such an inert character as Charles Bovary--is simply not competitive with the efficiency of modern adulterous sexuality. In the recognizably similar but various worlds of Emma's convent school and its prizes and laurel wreaths, the ball at Vaubyessard and its world of recognition and acknowledgment, and the small-town life of Yonville and its ever-renewed assessments of how people are doing, we are presented with situations in which the notions of action and reward for action have been brought into extraordinary proximity.

Now it might seem a flaw in this description of the modern that it appears to apply as well to Charles, that antiquated and bovine figure who is continually represented as ruminating on his own happiness. Charles, on the one hand, approaches the condition of becoming an emblem of happiness, in which satisfaction registers itself organically without his ever needing to refer it to anyone else. He seems like an old-fashoned allegorical cartoon. On the other, the novel depicts him as someone who regularly identifies his own happiness and who conspicuously approximates success and reward with his regular consumption of meals (his passing of his medical examination, his wedding, and then his daily life become the occasion for taking meals that are, for him, both simple sustenance and sustenance that bespeak his complete satisfaction). Yet Charles's happiness is not modern but something that the novel outlines as deeply primitive--a satisfaction in the ordinary rhythms of life that cannot imagine what it would be not to like that life, happiness that feels unmediated and uncompetitive because it never needs to reassure itself that it cannot possibly be misery since it is so conspicuously "happier" than other people's happiness.

This is as much as to say that Charles actually does fail Emma and that he fails her for the very simple reason that he cannot imagine making a judgment on his life that would be different from the direct experience of it. He cannot, in other words, imagine a happiness that can count itself as success only insofar as it travels through someone else. A simpler and better-hearted version of Sade's sexual athletes who are interested in other people as mere occasions for the production of their own individual pleasures, Charles is portrayed in the novel as solitary from the classroom of his youth to the household of his marriage. For Charles's limitation is not simply that he is too innocent to imagine himself sinned against but that he is unconscious of the possibility that he might be doing something other than succeeding by living his daily life. Emma is driven to distraction by the very husband who is devoted to herÑthrough her life, her death, and his discovery of her adultery. Her fury merely registers the fact that he cannot imagine that she is unhappy and that her unhappiness might be a judgment on him.

The novel is nothing if not simultaneously vague and precise about treating the notion of satisfaction in sexual terms. Charles bounds from the marriage bed; Emma develops a sense of uneasiness and melancholy. Her first sexual experience with Rodolphe is clearly marked as the first satisfying sexual experience of her life, and Flaubert presents it in terms that sound the note of the cliché so strongly that there is no temptation to produce an historical genealogy that would identify them as having been fresh once ("nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places" [M, p. 16]). But it would not be worth remarking on these facts if we were to see them as drawing the moral of the supreme importance of sexuality to individuals and to the marriages and affairs that unite them (and thus as hailing an account of Freud's significance as an interpreter of the fundamentally sexual basis of human identity).

For what is at stake is the discovery of sexual action as a rationalized utilitarian action, complete with an insistence upon the happiness standard and the insistence that it must apply to the greatest number. Sexual action becomes not simply the stuff of advice books but is also discovered as a synchronized success, a feat of timing in which two individuals simultaneously produce the judgment of their own happiness. Sexual experience comes to need to be justified, to meet new standards. For, as Flaubert recognized in his remarks about the development of "love" and Byronic satire's inability to discourage its rise, sex was being made to answer to bonheur, so that one's actual experience was continually shadowed with the sense of expectation and disappointment. Its only real alternative, he suggested, was prostitution, which he admired for its professional detachment rather than for its golden-hearted practitioners and for the detachment that it afforded him (a detachment he rather spectacularly displayed in insisting upon keeping a cigar in his mouth while having intercourse at one brothel he freuented with his friends).40

What I am arguing here is that Flaubert, in describing utilitarianism's appropriation of and application to sexuality, ceases to need sexual explicitness because sexuality, in having been socialized, operates according to a logic that plays itself out on a variety of fronts. Thus, though it might be controversial if I were to insist upon the importance of counting Emma's experience of orgasmic sex and were to say that I think that she experienced orgasm exactly once (on the day of the agricultural fair), I think that it's easy to see that a premium attaches to synchronized success and simultaneous happiness and that this emerges in the language of objects that develops around the gifts that circulate as love tokens in the novel.

 1. A brief description of the trial appears in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, tr. Paul De Man (New York, 1965); hereafter abbreviated M. See also the transcript of the proceedings, "Procès: Le Ministère public contre Gustave Flaubert. Réquisitore de M. l'Avocat impérial M. Ernest Pinard; Plaidoirie du Défenseur, M. Sénard; Jugene" in Gustave Flaubert, Oevres, ed. René Dumesnil, 2 vols. (Paris, 1951), 1:615-83.

2. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, trans. Carol Cosman, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1981-1991), 1:430, hereafter abbreviated I; and Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 173-74.

9. "Procès," Oevres, 1:683. Sartre describes himself in his preface as attempting to determine "what, at this point in time, can we know about a man?" He goes on to outline this project as one of acknowledging that "man is never an individual" but "a universal singular. Summed up and for this reason universalized by his epoch, he in turn resumes it by reproducing himself in it as singularity. Universal by the singular universality of human history, singular by the universalizing singularity of his projects, he requires simultaneous examination from both ends" (I, 1:ix). Because Sartre's account of Flaubert ends before he has reached a full discussion of Madame Bovary, we have more information about his views of Gustave in relationship to his family and to his school than to the trial, with its insistence upon giving a reprise of his view of the relationship between the writer in his singularity and the epoch in its universality. See also Pierre Bourdieu, "Flaubert's Point of View," trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring 1988):539-62.

10. See particularly "Father and Son," I, 1:173-438.

11. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Flaubert's Point of View."

12. Flaubert, letter to Frédéric Baudry, 11 Feb. 1857, Correspondance, 2:680-81.

13. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, review of Madame Bovary, in M, p.325

14. "Procès," 1:683.

15. In an essay in Diacritics, Carla Freccero rehearses the common view that it is repressive even to raise the question of whether a particular book or image might do harm. Thus, she is outraged that Brett Eaton Ellis's American Psycho was seen by some women as a misogynistic text, and she takes their desire to regulate its distribution as both naive and contemptible. My own view differs from hers, in that I think that the history of the public discussion of novels and images does not suggest that the debate is so rigged that it is necessary to immunize novels from it, even when it occasionally eventuates in trials. See Carla Freccero, "Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho," Diacritics 27 (Summer 1997): 44-58.

16. Flaubert, letter to Colet, 30 Sept. 1853, Correspondance, 2:445.

17. See Henry James, "Gustave Flaubert," The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956). pp. 125-61.

18. Flaubert, letter to Colet, 31 Mar. 1853, Correspondance, 2:295.