BOO KS
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The first difference one notes is in the heroines. Luiza is a channing–
girl,
and Emma Bovary a formidable woman. The one is betrayed by
the sheer sensual sweetness of bodily love, stumbling into adultery with
her caddish cousin Bazilio almost out of simplicity; the other pursues
her fate with demoniacal fury. The one story is lyrical and tender in
its irony, the other dramatic and depressing. Both women act out their
parts in an established society made up of well-defined upper, middle,
and lower classes; but whereas for Emma the social world is a stone
wall that she attacks with her bare hands to get at the "happiness" on
the other side, for Luiza it is a piece of ordinarily placid machinery
in which she somehow gets her skirt caught and is whirled and knocked
about, and, to her astonishment, killed.
Ec;a de Queiroz' note is characteristically lighter than Flaubert's.
The kind of artistic mind one finds in
Cousin Bazilio
seems to me more
modern in its ironic moderation than the grandiose temper that expresses
itself in
Madame Bovary.
For all the latter's middle-class
personae,
prosaic setting, and brilliant social history, the spirit with which it is
suffused is classical and overweening. The sky lowers and the thunder
rolls about Emma as it does about Lear on the heath; she paces the
stage with all the portentousness of Medea, and heaven and earth
seem to be involved in her fall. Luiza, who loves her husband and
on the whole is a good wife, is the ordinary little bourgeoise that Emma
Bovary was supposed to be. The height of her torment is to be black–
mailed by her spying servant, in a wonderful series of scenes, into doing
the housework; she feels how she has outraged the moral order by
being forced to bend over an ironing board. It is all quite moving and
not at all ridiculous.
Cousin Bazilio
is the nineteenth-century novel before its situations
staled, its grammar wore out, its words and phrases got hackneyed, and
its emotions used up. It is literature before that word acquired its pejor–
ative meaning and became synonymous with paper, words, and un–
reality.
Seventy-five years more or less separate
Cousin Bazilio from
the
odd lot of French, American, and English novels that we have here.
It comes down to us from a time when literature was possible; now
"literature" is a vice. What are we to say about these contemporary
novels? Are they literature or are they real?
The Mask of Innocence (Les Anges Noires
in French) is the story
of a sinner, Gabriel Gradere, who finds his way to God through the
very
depths of corruption, after having murdered an old mistress and
