All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen, the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe seduces Emma in the woods. “What a delicious thing writing is—not to be you any more but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion.” It is hard to imagine another great novelist—Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Balzac—who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity. Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion—to be their mistress’ sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined in a gigantic, throbbing partouze while Flaubert’s pen flew. He was writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was reading one. “What a delicious thing reading is—not to be you any more but to flow through the whole universe you’re reading about...” etc., etc.

Rodolphe is superior to Léon, in that his triteness is a calculation. An accomplished comedian, he is not disturbed, at the agricultural fair, by the drone of the voice awarding money prizes for animal flesh, manure, and flax, while he pours his passionate platitudes into Emma’s fluttered ears. “Tell me, why have we known each other, we two? What chance has willed it?” His view of Emma is the same as the judge’s view of a merino ram. She is flesh, with all its frailties, and he is putting her through her paces, noting her points. Yet Rodolphe is trite beyond his intention. He is wedded to a stock idea of himself as a sensual brute that prevents him from noticing that he actually cares for Emma. His recipes for seduction, like the pomade he uses on his hair, might have been made for him by a pharmacist’s formula, and the fact that they work provides him with a ready-made disillusionment. Since he knows that “eternal love” is a cliché, he is prepared to break with Emma as a matter of course and he drops a manufactured tear on his letter of adieu, annoyed by a vague sensation that he does not recognize as grief. As for Léon, he is too cowardly to let himself see that his fine sentiments are platitudes; he deceives himself in the opposite way from Rodolphe: Rodolphe feels something and convinces himself that it is nothing, while Léon feels nothing and dares not acknowledge it, even in secrecy. His very sensuality is timid and short-lived; his clerkly nature passively takes Emma’s dictation.

Emma does not see the difference. She is disappointed in both her lovers and in “love” itself. Her principal emotions are jealousy and possessiveness, which represent the strong, almost angry movement of her will. In other words, she is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is only remarkable for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling. Emma is trite; what happens to her is trite. Her story does not hold a single surprise for the reader, who can say at every stage, “I felt it coming.” Her end is inevitable, but not as a classic doom, which is perceived as inexorable only when it is complete. It is inevitable because it is ordinary. Anyone could have prophesied what would become of Emma—her mother-in-law, for instance. It did not need a Tiresias. If you compare her story with that of Anna Karenina, you are aware of the pathos of Emma’s. Anna is never pathetic; she is tragic, and what happens to her, up to the very end, is always surprising, for real passions and moral strivings are at work, which have the power of “making it new.” In this her story is distinct from an ordinary society scandal of the period. Nor could any ordinary society Cassandra have forecast Anna’s fate. “He will get tired of her and leave her. You wait,” they would have said, of Vronsky. He did not. But Rodolphe could have been counted on to drop Emma, and Léon to grow frightened of her and bored.

Where destiny is no more than average probability, it appears inescapable in a peculiarly depressing way. This is because any element in it can be replaced by a substitute without changing the outcome; e.g., if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have found someone else. But if Anna had not met Vronsky on the train, she might still be married to Karenin. Vronsky is necessary, while Rodolphe and Léon are interchangeable parts in a machine that is engaged in mass production of human fates. Madame Bovary is often called the first modern novel, and this is true, not because of any technical innovations Flaubert made (his counterpoint, his style indirect libre) but because it is the first novel to deal with what is now called mass culture. Emma did not have television, and Félicité did not read comic books in the kitchen, but the phenomenon of seepage from the “media” was already present in every Yonville l’Abbaye, and Flaubert was the first to note it.

In Emma’s day, mass-produced culture had not yet reached the masses; it was still a bourgeois affair and mixed up, characteristically, with a notion of taste and discrimination—a notion that persists in advertising. Rodolphe in his château would be a perfect photographic model for whiskey or tobacco. Emma’s “tragedy” from her own point of view is her lack of purchasing power, and a critical observer might say that the notary’s 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. What has happened to her and her spiritual sisters is that simulated-oak wallpaper has become itself a kind of money inexpressible in terms of its actual cost per roll. 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 indistinguishable from each other except in terms of currency fluctuation. The banalities exchanged between Léon 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.

Through Charles, Emma acquires poetry. But he could not possibly put into words what she means to him, and if he could have articulated a thought on the subject, would have declared that she had brought poetry into his life. This is so. There was no poetry with his first wife, the widow. Emma’s beauty, of course, is a fact of her nature, and Charles has responded to it with worship, which is what beauty—a mystery—deserves. This explains why Charles, though quite deceived by Emma’s character, is not a fool; he has recognized something in her about which he cannot be deceived.