CLARISSA AND EMMA AS PHEDRE
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torn dishabille, with rolling eye-balls, and a dagger pointing at her.
Against the abstractions of
Clarissa,
Emma Bovary's sensual
province is immense, and this is Emma's limitation, as grotesque as
that of Clarissa: the limitation to the sensual. In contrast with
Clarissa's whiteness, exquisite modulations of color, light and shade,
play over Emma, defining her mode of being.
The sunshade, of silk of the colour of pigeons' breasts, through which
the sun shone, lighted up with shifting hues the white skin of her
face. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could
be heard falling one by one on the stretched silk.
Whereas Clarissa's clothes are an allegorical representation of vir–
ginity, whose use is solely that of tearing and rending, Emma's are
a complex sense-construct designed to delay and sustain aesthetic
experience.
He saw her from behind in the glass between two lights. Her black
eyes seemed blacker than ever. Her hair, undulating towards the ears,
shone with a blue lustre; a rose in her chignon trembled on its mobile
stalk, with artificial dewdrops on the tip of the leaves. She wore a
gown of pale saffron trimmed with three bouquets of pompon roses
mixed with green.
Toward the end of the final adulterous episode, she rips off her clothes
savagely, but this is in the manner of Phedre. At this point, her clothes
are already in the talons of the death-bird Lheureux.
As
exclusively as Emma is sensual, so is her world abstract:
Charles, a vegetable lump, "serenely heavy," his mind an inorganic
patchwork of other people's ideas (like the patchwork of the famous
hat, with its successive layers of knobs, lozenges, rabbit-skin, card–
board) ; Homais with his pills, poultices, pickled foetuses, and cliches
of progress; Leon with his Bohemian cliches; Rodolphe with his stud–
farm cliches; Bournisien with his cliches of the catechism and the
confessional; Lheureux with his receipts; Binet with his napkin-rings.
Between Emma, as the sensual-organic, and the world she lives in, as
the abstract-inorganic, there is no intercourse. Emma is, then, not the
"weak, silly, vulgar little woman" that she would be if she were the
romantic woman living under ordinary pedestrian conditions. Her
