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from Albany abandoning herself to adulterous raptures with Leon in
the Hirondelle , her white hand appearing from the window to toss
out her torn-up message of renunciation. That she "speaks like"
Emma is only the measure of what she would not do, and renuncia–
tion is her final gesture. Yet Henrietta has identified a significant
resemblance, after all . Like Emma, Isabel will submit freely and
disastrously to her imaginative sense of life, will be seduced not so
much by a lover as by her own dreams of romantic selfhood. Who is
to say that Emma's dreams are inferior to Isabel's, since both heroines
are led to fatally mistake the nature of reality? Both fail to under-·
stand the "plot" against them which is not so much the wicked con–
trivance of enemies as the circumstantial, destinal forces of material
life , the plot, in the literary sense, of the nineteenth century realist
novel in which they struggle to persist as characters.
Perhaps one cannot discuss the likeness or unlikeness of Emma
Bovary and Isabel Archer without wrenching their images from all
that distinguishes their respective fictions, from all that makes a
work by Flaubert incommensurable with a work by James . Com–
parative studies of complex masterpieces are questionable enter–
prises, liable to false analogy, false contrast, oversimplification. But,
to make such works confront one another may be a way of finding
out their special qualities; they seem to ask more telling questions of
each other than the critic might pose on his own. Such an expecta–
tion seems justified by the confrontation arranged by David Gervais,
who places the two novels at the center of his reflections upon their
authors, those two master-builders of the modern novel.
He is provoked by the recorded responses from James's side as
well as by evidences of "anxiety of influence" in his fictions . It is clear
that J ames began with an unwilling fascination with Flaubert's ex–
ample, though confusing it a little with the further experiments in
the direction of realism made by Flaubert's followers and associates–
Zola, the de Goncourts , de Maupassant, Daudet - all of whom he
personally met in the Paris of 1875 . His first important essay about
Flaubert (published in
French Poets and Novelists
in 1878) stated the
dilemma James felt :
To many people
Madame Bovary
will always be a hard book to
read and an impossible one to enjoy. They will complain of the
abuse of description , of the want of spontaneity, of the hideous–
ness of the subject, of the dryness and coldness and cynicism of
the tone. Others will continue to think it a great performance.
