184
MARY McCARTHY
What has happened to her and her spiritual sisters is that simulated-oak
wallpaper, say, has become itself a kind of money inexpressible in terms
of its actual cost. Worse, ideas and sentiments, like wallpaper, have
become a kind of money too and they share with money the quality of
abstractness, which allows them to be exchanged. It is their use as coins
that has made them trite--worn and rubbed-and at the same time in–
distinguishable from each other except in terms of currency fluctua–
tion. The banalities exchanged between Leon and Emma at their first
meeting ("And what music do you prefer?" "Oh, German music, which
makes you dream") are simply coins; money in the usual sense is not at
issue here, since both these young people are poor; they are alluding,
through those coins, to their inner riches.
The same with Rodolphe and Emma; the same with nearly the
whole cast of characters. A meeting between strangers in
Madame
Bavary
inevitably produces a golden shower of platitudes. This shower
of platitudes is as mechanical as the droning action of the tax collector's
lathe. It appears to be beyond human control; no one is responsible and
no one can stop it. There is a terrible scene in the middle of the novel
where Emma appeals to God, in the person of the cure, to put an end
to the repetitive meaninglessness of her life. God is preoccupied and
inattentive, and as she moves away from the church, she hears the vil–
lage boys reciting their catechism. "What is a Christian?" "He who
being baptized .. . baptized . . . baptized. ..." The answer is lost in an
echo that reverberates emptily through the village. Yet the question,
although intoned by rote, is a genuine one--the fundamental question
of the book-for a Christian means simply a soul here. It is Emma's de–
mand-"Who am I?"---coming back at her in ontological form, and
there is no reply.
If
this were all,
Madame Bavary
would be a nihilistic satire or howl
of despair emanating from the novelist's study. But there
is
a sort of
tongue-tied answer. That is Charles Bovary. Without Charles, Emma
would be the moral void that her fatuous conversation and actions dis–
close. Charles, in a novelistic sense, is her redeemer. To her husband ,
she is sacred, and this profound and simple emotion is contagious.
He is stupid, a peasant, as she calls him, almost a devoted animal,
clumsy, a dupe. His broad back looks to her like a platitude. He has small
eyes; he snores. Until she reformed him, he used to wear a nightcap.
Weeping beneath the phrenological head, he is nearly ridiculous. He is
nearly ridiculous at the opera, when he complains that the 'music is keep–
ing him from hearing the words. "I like to know where I am," he ex–
plains, though he, of all people, does not know where he is, in the
