Emma versus the Proprieties: Censorship, Self-Censorship, and Revision in Madame Bovary

In a letter written just before the last installment of Madame Bovary in the Revue de Paris, Flaubert remarked that [...] la morale de l'Art consiste dans sa beaute meme, et j'estime par-dessus tout d'abord le style, et ensuite le Vrai. Je crois avoir mis dans la peinture des moeurs bourgeoises et dans l'exposition d'un caractere de femme naturellement corrompu, autant de litterature et de convenances [Flaubert's emphasis] que possible [...] (1) In defense of his novel, Flaubert marshals some familiar terms of midnineteenth-century discourse on literature: beauty establishes the morality of art, style is even more important than truth. (2) Surprisingly, he types Emma Bovary as inherently immoral and, despite his detestation of things bourgeois, insists that her portrayal combines the maximum of literature with that quintessential middle-class virtue, respect for the convenances. (3) Why does Flaubert, having just identified the morality of art with its beauty, insist on the proprieties with regard to the exposition of Emma's character? His emphasis on the word smacks of irony, and Yvan Leclerc is led to claire that the letter's use of the term convenances is not cognate with related uses by Flaubert: "Ce qui convient selon les necessites esthetiques n'est pas le convenable de la morale sociale." (4) Yet the proprieties Flaubert has in mind, however ironic the reference, are not merely literary; indeed, the entire phrase--"autant de litterature et de convenances que possible"--firmly links art and propriety, no matter how little faith Flaubert has in the latter. Under a regime of state censorship, furthermore, the opposition between moral and aesthetic propriety can't easily be maintained. Self-censorship, censorship evasion, and Flaubert's pursuit of style combine in complex ways to define the convenances--at once social and literary--of Madame Bovary. Flaubert binds the moral and the aesthetic in ways that have important consequences for his depiction of Emma. In particular, the recourse to euphemism in characterizing her sexuality observes the proprieties but distances Emma from the reader, objectifying her while framing her passion in terms of strong moral judgments. Some of Flaubert's concern for the proprieties came from fear of the censors. As Rosemary Lloyd points out in reply to Tony Tanner's complaint about the novel's nondescription of the adulterous act itself, the absence of such description "is far less likely to be a textual than a pragmatic strategy." (5) The timing of the letter and its declamatory style suggest an uncomfortable situation with regard to the censoring of Madame Bovary. The letter falls between the largest of the cuts demanded by the editors of the Revue de Paris (19 November 1856) and the novel's criminal indictment (24 December 1856) for "outrage a la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs." Hemmed in by his editorial censors and the state censors they worried about, Flaubert had good reason to reassure friends and supporters of the purity of his intentions. Yet, while Lloyd is undoubtedly correct in reproving Tanner for a lack of historical perspective, an emphasis on the practical reason for Flaubert's reticence implies a fairly sharp distinction between the stylistic and the pragmatic. I argue here that Flaubert's understanding of the proprieties with regard to the representation of Emma's sexuality was guided by stylistic and pragmatic motives that cannot be disentangled. On the basis of the changes Flaubert made at the level of plan, scenario, manuscript, and published texts, we can achieve a reasonably precise mapping of his interrogation of the proprieties and a clearer understanding of how this testing of the convenances shaped the characterization of Emma as "une femme naturellement corrompu." First, we need to clarify the situation of Flaubert regarding contemporary practices of censorship. Since Madame Bovary ultimately escaped legal condemnation, unlike Les Fleurs du mal, a note of triumph tends to sound in accounts of the victory over the state censors. …