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of our connection with Emma, that humbles us, whereas pity runs
the risk of condescension and protects us from pain . In his revisions
of the novel Flaubert strove to remove overt signs of authorial pity
which might make us feel complacently sorry for her, as one is sorry
for Balzac's Goriot . He replaced it by blunt , reticent, and exact
description - and by a sense of the ridiculous. "In my third part,
which will be full of farcical things, I want the reader to weep,"
Flaubert said. We are made to weep out of an appalling empathy.
As Emma's history concludes, we see the meaning of those extraor–
dinary descriptions of the outer world into which she has striven
vainly to project herself. Only when she is dead does she merge, as
Charles contemplates her dead body, with the
"entourage des choses.
))
Robbe-Grillet has called tragedy an attempt to bridge the gap be–
tween the self and the world, but Flaubert makes no attempt to
cement the divorce, and for that very reason, says Gervais, "achieves
the necessary clarity of tragic art."
It is another sympathy altogether that James asks for Isabel.
With
Madame Bovary
in mind,
The Portrait of a Lady
may even, Ger–
vais believes, strike us as a subtle evasion of the tragic. The central
character, object of all regard within the novel as from outside it, is
curiously inaccessible - James draws a veil over crucial scenes of her
private life, but even our inside view of her consciousness is not as
direct as James pretends; the narrator himself is one of the Isabel–
watchers who seems to protect her, like her cousin Ralph, with a
benefit of doubt, and does not expose her contradictions . James
gives us hints that she suffers a symbolic American fault, the de–
mand, as Lionel Trilling put it, for "life as pure spirit." In a well–
known passage we are shown her brave assumption of the transcen–
dental position - she will not be defined, she tells Madame Merle, by
dress, by manners, by "appurtenances" of any kind . That Madame
Merle has a good case in her opposition to this view is evident, but
the novel does not go on to show Isabel's education, which should
teach her that even Osmond "expresses" her. Her famous statement,
"nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me," is, Gervais per–
ceives, a
bovarysme,
but James does not want us to read it so.
The Flaubert-James comparison applies itself in another way
to that near masterpiece,
L 'Education Sentimentale,
which Gervais
thinks justly described by the American novelist as "a sort of epic of
the usual (with the Revolution of 1848 introduced as an episode)
[but
1
an epic without air, without wings to lift it." What James
misses, however , is the novel's satire. James declares his impatience
