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PARTISAN REVIEW
extraordinary limitation gives her the profundity of a vital principle.
Her mysterious dimensions, her beauty and her corruption, her un–
involved career toward death, are those of the sense-life under the
aspect of Eros, for it is in love that the senses concentrate, toward love
that they mature, and failing from love that they decay. Hence her
relationship with the blind man- Homais' bitterest foe, whom he
finally succeeds in getting locked up, as Emma herself has been
locked out of the century of progress, in which the senses and death
have no place.
Her mode of being is evoked incantatorily. Images of taste, touch,
and temperature, involving teeth, tongue, fingers, skin, are manifold.
Drinking cura<;:ao, she "laughed at getting none of it, while with the
tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by
drop the bottom of her glass." "Emma from time to time cooled her
cheeks with the palms of her hands, and cooled these again on the
knobs of the huge fire-dogs." Sewing, she pricks her fingers, "which
she then put to her mouth to suck them." "With the tips of her
fingers she caught her dress at the knee." "Delicately, with her gloved
hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistledown." At the
Vaubyessard ball,
Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt
it cold in her mouth. . . . She was just eating a maraschino ice that
she held with her left hand in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed,
and the spoon between her teeth.
"The musicians were cooling the tips of their fingers on their tongues."
"She saw herself again as formerly, skimming with her finger the
cream off the milk-pans in the dairy." The nurse, asking for brandy
to rub the child's feet with, says, "They're as tender as one's tongue."
Emma "bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger she
walked about the capital." "She was as pleased as a child to push
with her finger the large tapestried door." "Emma ... clutching the
velvet of the box with her nails." "Madame Bovary was already dip–
ping her finger in the holy water." It is Emma's exclusive limitation
to the sensual that gives the scene of the extreme unction, at the end
of the book, its structural significance and that raises it above the level
of Bournisien's cliches. The priest lays the oil
