294
PARTISAN
R'EVIEW
The paragraph itself presents a picture-man and wife together
at meals. But the picture is not presented in and for itself; it is
subordinated to the dominant subject, Emma's despair. Hence it is
not put before the reader directly; here the two sit at table-there
the reader stands watching them. But the reader first sees Emma, who
has been much in evidence in the preceding pages, and he sees the
picture first through her; directly he sees only Emma's inner state,
he sees what goes on at the meal indirectly, from within her
state, in the light of her perception. The first words of the paragraph,
«Mais c'etait surtout aux heures des repas qu'elle n'en pouvait
plus
. . ."
state the theme, and all that follows is but a development
of it. Not only are the specifying phrases dependent upon
«dans"
and
«avec,"
which define the physical scene, a commentary on
«elle
n'en p'ouvait plus"
in their piling up of the individual elements of
discomfort, but the following clause too, which tells of the distaste
aroused in her by the food, accords with the principal aim both in
sense and rhythm. When we read further,
«Charles etait long
a
manger,"
this, though grammatically a new sentence and rhythmically
a new movement, is still only a resumption, a variation, of the
principal theme; not until we come to the contrast between his
leisurely eating and her disgust and the nervous gestures of her
despair, which are described immediately afterward, does the sen–
tence acquire its true significance. The husband, unconcernedly eat–
ing, becomes ludicrous and ,almost ghastly; when Emma looks at him
and sees
him
sitting there eating, he becomes the actual cause of
her
«
elle n'en pouvait plus";
because everything else that arouses
her desperation-the gloomy room, the commonplace food, the lack
of a tablecloth, the hopelessness of it all-appears to her, and
through her to the reader
also,
as something that is connected with
him, that emanates from him, and that would be entirely different
if he were different from what he is.
The situation, then, is not presented simply as a picture, but
we are first given Emma and then the situation through her.
It
is
not, however, a matter-as it is in many first-person novels and other
later works of the same type- of a simple representation of the con–
tent of Emma's consciousness, of
what
she feels
as
she feels it. Though
the light which illuminates the picture proceeds 'from her, she is yet
herself part of the picture, she is situated within it. In this she recalls
