Lecture Notes 8/28: Madame Bovary Part I

  • Context and aims of the medical humanities approach in this course: examining the practice, progress, education, and failures of doctors through literature; interest in how the medical gaze shapes writing. The lecturer links medical culture to literary realism and naturalism, noting Flaubert’s milieu and his own medical family background as shaping his close attention to dissection-like detail in writing.
  • Author and biographical frame: Gustave Flaubert born into a medical milieu; lived in the hospital environment as a child; realism emerges from its engagement with medical life and the body.
  • Major theoretical claim introduced: the birth of naturalism/realism is tied to medical culture and the “medical gaze,” which changes how writing probes human experience.
  • Setting and narrator focus: the novel is set in a non-metropolitan, rural/less urban space (not Parisian), highlighting Emma’s dissatisfaction with life and marriage and her turn toward material things.
  • Emma Bovary as a case study for realism and critique of romance/cheap sentiment: Emma reads romance novels voraciously (some what trashy), and her fantasy world clashes with her actual life, generating a critique of sentimental literature and the hollowing of meaning in words like bliss, passion, intoxication when emptied of original experience.
  • Stylistic devices in the text: Flaubert’s use of italics to mark emphasis or clichéd language; the narrator discusses linguistic clichés and the author’s approach to them, including the “dictionary of received ideas” and the idea that words like bliss, passion, and intoxication have lost authentic meaning due to overuse in sentimental fiction.
  • Key textual quotation discussed: Emma’s pre-marriage belief that what she experienced was love, and her struggle to reconcile life with the words she read in books: “Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was that experiencing was love. But since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must be mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant in life by the words bliss, passion, and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in the pages of books.”
  • Evidence of Emma’s appetite for material life: Emma seeks “things” to fill the void—therapy through shopping and consumerism; a central concern about the emergence of consumerism/materialism in the era.
  • Charles Bovary: introduced as a mild, mediocre, ordinary man; a target of satirical observation. The class discussion focuses on his mediocrity and the way the text renders him unremarkable yet romantically imagined by Emma.
  • Charles’s education and career: Initially fails his medical studies but gains the post of public health officer, a lower-status medical role instituted during the French Revolution and abolished in 1892; the degree did not require a baccalaureate and he practiced under supervision, signaling limited professional scope and romanticized self-perception.
  • Emma and Charles’s meeting and marriage: Emma is drawn to a romantic, elevated life; her marriage to Charles is arranged and grounded in practical constraints rather than romantic fantasy.
  • Emma’s early disappointments and the wedding night: Emma’s dream of a midnight/candlelit wedding contrasts with a country banquet and a barn setting; the wedding night is interwoven with social expectations rather than a private, intimate consummation; the lack of alignment between Emma’s longing and reality is established early.
  • Emma’s first major visual and sensory impression of Charles: the description of Charles’s appearance and clothing—hat, sleeves, wrists, and overall “mediocre” presentation—serves to mark the disconnect between Emma’s ideals and the material reality of her husband.
  • Emma’s body and appearance: the detailed physical description (eyes, hair, neck, the weight and arrangement of hair, and the general sense of her vitality) becomes a site where readers imagine beauty but also critically assess how Emma is framed within social expectations.
  • The “first reader” and the opening of the book: the class notes a distinctive opening voice and then a shift away from the initial readerly stance; the opening uses a first-person plural voice (we) that later gives way to narrative distance, a device discussed as significant and reminiscent of later works (e.g., Chekhov).
  • Convent scene and the spinster: Emma’s world includes a convent setting where a spinster from an old gentry family (ruined by the revolution) lends novels, and the content of those novels centers on love and lovers with persecuted or tragic plots; this scene highlights Emma’s education in romance and misalignment with reality, as the spinster’s stories feed Emma’s fantasies rather than a grounded education.
  • Emma’s early education and rebellion: Emma’s imagined education by reading romances is challenged by the reality of her convent and a quiet rebellion in consuming forbidden fiction.
  • Character observation exercise: students analyze the description of Emma (and potential actresses who could play her), connecting modern casting to literary interpretation and the process of visualization.
  • The opening depiction of the first reader/teacher figure and the ongoing discussion of who Emma is in appearance and temperament, including suggestions and playful dialogue about actors.
  • The motif of time and duration: Emma’s temporal life becomes structured around milestones and events (e.g., the ball, the wedding night, future expectations) and a new sense that time is measured by occurrences rather than lived experiences.
  • Emma’s early illness and disordered eating: Emma’s tendency to manipulate her appetite (e.g., drinking vinegar to look thinner) is identified as an early sign of a fragile relationship with food, appetite, and body image; this is linked to later illness and pregnancy in the text.
  • Pregnancy development: By the end of the discussed segment, Emma is pregnant, which compounds the tension between desire, fantasy, and bodily reality.
  • Narrative voice and perspective: The initial “we” frame invites readers into the world, but the narrator then shifts to immerse into the novel’s world; this transition is highlighted as an interesting feature that will recur in other authors (like Chekhov).
  • Parallels to other works and themes: The discussion connects Emma’s sensibility to broader literary concerns about realism, material desire, and the tension between art and life; the class notes also hint at intertextual comparisons (e.g., Madame Bovary and later realist/naturalist practice).
  • Teaching aids and student engagement: instructor invites student perspectives, uses questions to probe character, emphasizes close reading of detail (e.g., Emma’s eyes, hair, and dress; Charles’s hands; the hat; the ball scene), and invites discussion about how to visualize Emma and relate it to cinema casting.
  • The concluding observation: the dialogue hints at a broader plan to explore Chekhov and later authors, indicating ongoing discussion about narrative voices and realism across literary traditions.
  • Note on formatting and diction: italicization and cliches are used by Flaubert to critique sentimentality; the phrase “dictionary of received ideas” signals a critical stance toward conventional wisdom in literary language.