MADAME BOVARY
187
mated garments, each with a strong personality, have as absurd a rela–
tion to their owners as the queer cap Charles wears on his first day at
school. The new cap, which is like a recapitulation of the history of head–
gear, is an uncomfortable ill-fitting false self dQnned for a special oc–
casion--Charles's introduction to civilization, learning, book culture. The
country boy does not know what to do with the terrible cap, any more
than how to give his full name, which he pronounces in a queer way, as
though it too were extraneous to him, a humiliation that has been stuck
to him and that he cannot get rid of, just as he cannot put the cap down.
A name is a label. Witness the penmanship flourishes of MQnsieur Ho–
mais's names for his children: Franklin, Athalie, etc. .. .
Many novels begin with the hero's first day in school, and Charles
is the hero of the book that, characteristically for him, bears someone
else's name.
Madame Bavary
starts with his appearance among his jeer–
ing school-fellows and ends with his death. Charles is docile. It does not
occur to him to rebel. His mQther, his teachers, his schoolmates, and
finally the widow, make a citizen of him. They equip him with a pro–
fession, for which he is totally unfitted but which he wears, like the
cap he has been given, mildly and without protest. He did not choose
to be a doctor ; he did not choose his name; he did not choose the
widow. The only thing in life he chooses is Emma. She is his first and
last piece of self-expression. Or not quite the last. When she is taken
. away from him, his reverence and gratitude to the universe turn to
blasphemy. "I hate your God!" he bursts out to' the cure, whO' is trying
to console him with platitudes. "Still the spirit of rebellion," the priest
answers, with an ecclesiastical sigh.
Now at first glance this appears to be an irony, since Charles has
never rebelled until that moment against anything, let alone God. But
Flaubert's ironies are deceptive, and what sounds like an irony is often
the simple truth, making a dQuble irony. The priest is right. From the
very beginning, Charles has been an obstinate example of passive re–
sistance to the forces of the time and the milieu. A proof of this is that,
in all his days, he pronounces only one platitude. His love for Emma is
the deepest sign of that O'bstination. He loves her in the teeth of circum–
stance, Qpinion, prudent self-interest, in the teeth even of Emma her–
self.
This passive resistance of Charles's, taking the form of a love of
beauty, seems to come from nowhere. There is nothing in Charles's his–
tory to explain it: a drunken father, a dissatisfied mother, a poor edu–
cation, broken off for lack Qf money. Add to this a very middling
I.Q.
No program for human improvement could be predicated on Charles's
