CLARISSA AND EMMA AS PHEDRE
821
Emma Bovary, too, in the appalling automatism of her passion,
is a member of the sun-family. But in her story, instinct and society
do not confront each other antagonistically. There are no social
"obstacles" to Emma's passion, equalized with it in strength; there
is nothing in her circumstances to prevent her from committing
adultery to her heart's content-if it were adultery that could content
her heart; nor does her love choose a single object for its tonnent,
but three-the Viscount (in fantasy), Rodolphe, and Leon-and three
is a number that can stand for any series. Hence what appears to be
a peculiar arbitrariness in the structure of the book. Charles, her
husband, is the most factitious of "obstacles"; he is simply "there"
(Charles etait
tel),
vegetative and inert; at the end, the child gives
him a push with her finger and he falls over dead. Emma's relation–
ship with the other chief character in the book, Homais
(homo,
but
particularly sapient man, enlightened man, scientific man, progressive
man, representative of an advanced social organization), is perfectly
external, without dramatic moment in her career. Her significant
relationships are with Lheureux and the blind man, and both of these
are symbolic projections of her doom, evoked mysteriously by the
scent of love, that is, by the scent of death, and associated ever more
closely with her as the scent grows stronger:-Lheureux (the
"happy"), vulture, scavenger, death-bird ("he looked at her fixedly,
while in his hand he held two long papers that he slid between his
nails": the buried metaphor of Lheureux as a bird, strangely like
and yet violently unlike the bird-image of Venus, governs his mode of
appearance) ; and the blind man-defects of the flesh, sensual frailty,
physical corruption-who, by a forced narrative contrivance is brought
to Emma's window when she is dying, with his song of maids in May
whose petticoats are blown away. Her fatality is simpler than that
of the tragic Phedre, though related to it under the archaic aspect
of the love-myth. Her simple direction is that of flesh back to earth,
where presumably she fertilizes Lestiboudois' potato-seedlings.
This
direction
is,
of course, motored and made to signify by the fact of
her sensuality: hers is the appetitive flesh, consuming itself in its
pleasures.
Society, in
Madame Bovary,
is a complex of abstractions, bour–
geois routines, cliches of thought and action, impotent skills. One can
use the word "dead" to describe this society, thinking in terms of
