MADAME BOVARY
183
if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have found someone
else. But
if
Anna had not met Vronsky on the train, she would still be
married to Karenin. Vronsky is
necessary,
while Rodolphe and Leon
are interchangeable parts in a machine that is engaged in mass produc–
tion of human fates.
Madame Bavary
is often called the first modern
novel, and this is true, not because of any technical innovations Flau–
bert made but because it is the first novel to deal with what is now
called mass culture. Emma did not have television, and Felicite did not
read comic books in the kitchen, but the phenomenon was rampant in
every Yonville l'Abbaye, and Flaubert was the first to note it.
Mass culture in
Madame Bovary
means the circulating library and
the
Fanal de Rauen
and the cactus plants Leon and Emma tend at
opposite windows, having read about them in a novel that has made
cactuses all the rage. It means poor Charles's phrenological head-a
thoughtful attention paid him by Leon- and the pious reading matter
the cure gives Emma as a substitute for "bad" books. It means the neo–
classic town hall, with its peristyle, and the tax collector at his lathe, an
early form of Do-it-yourself. One of the last visions Emma has of the
world she is leaving is the tax collector in his garret pursuing his sense–
less hobby, turning out little wooden imitations of ivory curios, them–
selves no doubt produced in series in the Orient for export. She has fun
to Binet's attic from the notary's dining-room, which has simulated-oak
wallpaper, stained-glass insets in the windows, a huge cactus, a "niche,"
and reproductions of Steuben's "Esmeralda" and Schopin's "Potiphar."
Alas,
it
is like Emma to stop, in her last hours of life, to
envy
the notary.
"That's the dining-room
1
ought to have," she says to herself. To her,
this horrible room is the height of good taste, but the blunder does not
just prove she has
bad
taste.
If
the notary had had reproductions of the
"Sistine Madonna" and the "Mona Lisa," she would have been smitten
with envy too. And she would have been right not to distinguish, for
in the notary's interior any reproduction would have the same value,
that of a trophy, like a stuffed stag's head. This is the achievement of
mass-produced culture.
In Emma's day, mass-produced culture had not yet reached the
masses; it was still a bourgeois affair and mixed up, ironically, with a
notion of taste and discrimination-a notion that persists in advertising.
Rodolphe in his chateau would be a perfect photographic model for
whisky or tobacco. Emma's "tragedy" from her own point of view is her
lack of purchasing power, and a critic might say that the notary'!; dining–
room simply spelled out the word,
money,
to her. Yet it is not as simple
as that;
if
it were, Emma's head would be set straighter on her shoulders.
