emma's incompetence as madame bovary

Orbis Litterarum 57: 103–119, 2002 C 2002 Blackwell MunksgaardPrinted in Denmark . All rights reserved

ISSN 0105-7510

Emma’s Incompetence as Madame BovaryRoland A. Champagne, University of Missouri-St. Louis

Pierre Bourdieu’s social science orientation for the habitus and thehexis enables us to provide a relational model for situating theliterary events of Madame Bovary. Emma’s incompetence at beinga wife according to the bourgeois habitus allows her to expand hercompetence as a woman by following the hexis of her female body.This struggle between hexis and habitus in Emma moves throughfive stages. First of all, her education in the convent provides herwith the habitus of what a bourgeois wife should be and the separ-ation of a woman’s dreams from the reality of a housewife’s tasks.Secondly, as a young married woman, Emma’s suffering allowsher to experience her individual opposition to the asphyxiation ofmarriage relative to the freedom of her womanhood. Thirdly,through language, Emma begins to externalize her struggle and inthe fourth stage of her evolution to break the rules of the habitus.Finally, in the fifth stage, Emma chooses the competence of herhexis by appropriating her own space in dying. Nevertheless, thehabitus reigns as Emma is buried in her wedding dress as if toenshrine in the code of marriage, and thus to disguise, the incom-petence of her life.

Flaubert’s work has been elaborated sociologically as a well-structured aes-thetic ensemble by Pierre Bourdieu. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857),strangely enough, was not the focus of Bourdieu’s attention even though thenovel can be profitably read through what he identifies as ‘living socially...in-serted into the network of relationships...which are recalled through the formof...controls and constraints’ (1992, 53). One of Flaubert’s contemporaries,Barbey D’Aurevilly, stated in 1865 that the central crisis for such controlsand constraints occurred at the Vaubyessard ball where ‘the world outsideenters in the heart of Madame Bovary never to leave’ (1865, 53). However,with Bourdieu’s theory of the hexis/habitus as a methodological guide, thiscrisis can be identified much earlier in Emma’s life, that is, during her forma-tive years in the convent. While the hexis is a physical orientation of the body

Roland A. Champagne104

in a cultural setting, the habitus is a cultural disposition learned throughsocial encoding. These terms can be helpful in reading Emma Rouault’s con-flicted identity as Madame Bovary.1 The habitus of what it means to be amarried woman sets up what she is going to reject with the hexis of her body.The finger-pricking episodes, taken together as a hexis, prepare the readerfor the violent confrontation of Emma Rouault with the bourgeois expec-tations, that is the habitus, of what it means to be a wife. In her case, she isdestined to be a bourgeois accomplice to Charles Bovary’s incompetence atfinding his place among others. Emma effectively manifests her own incom-petence at being the husband’s deferential handmaiden with the requisiteproperly wifely demeanor while seeking her competence as a woman in a roleother than bourgeois wife.

Emma ironically foreshadows her incompetence at a wife’s work by prick-ing her finger while doing needlework during the widower Charles Bovary’svisit to her father’s farm. This single act of pricking her finger points to herincompetence at a married woman’s work, in this case thread and needle.The violent nature of the act underscores her rejection of the expected skillsof a bourgeois wife. Within Pierre Bourdieu’s social science orientation, hehas adapted the word ‘hexis’ to mean ‘a certain durable organization of one’sbody and of its deployment in the world’ (Thompson 13). In Emma Rouault’scontext, the ‘hexis’ becomes a concept opposed to the ‘habitus,’ the expec-tations of society as appropriated by an individual. Emma’s context is thebourgeois, capitalist society examined by Flaubert, the novelist whose rolehas been described as ‘a disseminator of the already said, a transcriber of thecodes of social discourse’ (Ramazani 11). Curiously, after her marriage toCharles, Emma pricks her finger once again, this time with the flowers fromher wedding bouquet shortly before disposing of them in anger about hermarriage into the fireplace. This occurs prior to moving from Tostes to Yon-ville-l’Abbaye, a move that surely signifies, as Paula Roberts notes in herstudy of space in Madame Bovary, that married life is abandoned (1994, 2).Emma just cannot seem to do the tasks asked of a married woman, in thiscase handling flowers, without drawing her own blood. Even when Homais

1Her married name in the title of the novel conveys her disappearance even before thereader learns about Emma Rouault: ‘...the title designates her role as a married wo-man in a world of rigid restraints, impassible barriers, and impossible divorce’ (Bergand Martin 31).

105Emma’s Incompetence as Madame Bovary

asks her, upon her arrival in Yonville, whether she will do the wifely thingand tend a garden, she shrugs it off as being of no personal interest to her.

Bourdieu’s methodological process reveals the links and the breakdowns inthe communication of wifely expectations to Emma. His sociological modelis instructive about the struggle at the core of Emma’s personality. He insiststhat his model represents modern science’s ‘relational’ (1992, 255), ratherthan structuralist, way of thinking and thus enables us to see ourselvesthrough relationships. As opposed to the structuralist or static analyticalcategories that would portray Emma as the unfaithful spouse, for example,Bourdieu’s habitus offers the possibility of understanding the evolution,struggle, growth, and behavior modification in the character of Emma fromher girlhood as Emma Rouault to her married identity as Madame Bovary.In addition, the play between habitus and hexis allows the reader to appreci-ate the struggle in her character as part of the contiguous changes in societyaround her. Gossip and reputation-formation influence the limited spacewithin which Emma can work out her identity relative to her habitus. WhileSartre notes that Flaubert was subject to an ‘idiosyncratic habitus with aspecific kind of interiorization’ (1972, 55), we could say the same thing aboutFlaubert’s creation, Emma Rouault: that is, she is subject to an individual’swrestling with the expectations of what a wife should be. Indeed, Bourdieu’smethod helps us to understand a schizophrenic personality that societycreated through its inculcation of habitus within Emma. In effect, Flaubert’sliterary model shows us that ‘Emma experiences everything twice, first inexalted and then in degraded form’ (Beizer 144). The terms of hexis andhabitus become especially useful for their oppositional roles in Emma, al-though Bourdieu did not necessarily invent them as such. They do presentthe relational conflict that subtends the psychological crisis for Emma asdelineated recently by Susanna Lee: ‘‘Emma’s later spiritual failures occurbecause she cannot reach outside herself ’’ (2001, 205). The internal strugglebetween the habitus and he hexis focalizes this incompetence.

Emma effectively models the disjunction of personality that the habitus ofsociety has produced within many of us. Her waltzing with the Vicomte atthe Vaubyessard ball recurred many times with Leon and Rodolphe (Roberts5) and was predicted once she pricked her fingers with the reality of herincompetence as a wife. Her waltzing represents her choice of partners in lifeand the rhythm that she wanted for herself. The hexis of her bodily dispo-sition in the dance with multiple partners effectively creates a space in which


she can express her identity separately from what the habitus of marriagedisposes her to be. As Stephen Heath reminds us, this experience providesthe principal disjunction of the novel: ‘Emma becomes the heroine she wantsto be, finds herself in the novels of adultery she has read, but that heroine,these novels, do not correspond to any reality of things’ (1992, 83). Thismakes the mirrors she uses all the more ironic for her. The lack of correspon-dence between the hexis and habitus in her life makes her unable to see herselfas others, especially we readers, do. Five steps lead us to the conclusion thatEmma breaks with the bourgeois expectations for a spouse and becomesincompetent at meeting these standards while seeking alternate roles for her-self as a woman. First of all, the habitus of the French culture’s understand-ing of wifely behavior meets with a mismatch in Emma’s education duringher formative years. Secondly, Emma’s suffering is a key to her awareness ofa problem in her adaptation to the habitus. Thirdly, language is ‘culturalcapital’ (Harker 43) according to Bourdieu and thus the instrument by whichthe habitus activates its rules determining the nature of her marriage toCharles. Thus, Emma’s language is a key to examining the role of habitus inher behavior. Fourthly, breaking the rules becomes the basis for her to inventher own womanly code in contradistinction to the habitus. Lastly, Emma’sincompetence is modeling behavior2 for a generative scheme leading to theconquest of the smile whereby she acknowledges her release from imprison-ment in the habitus of a married woman.

I. The Habitus as Cultural Understanding

The habitus is a social disposition learned through formal and family edu-cation. Emma acquired competing versions of the habitus through her con-vent education and subsequent life on her father’s farm. The problem is thatthe opposition between these two becomes stark in the hexis of her initialfinger prick, suggesting her incompetence with needlework. On the one hand,she received a mystical idea of the religious union with Christ from thepriest’s sermons in the convent: ‘Les comparaisons de fiance, d’epoux, d’a-

2Emma’s hexis provides modeling behavior in contradistinction to ‘the model of thehappy nuclear family, as promulgated by the Code Napoleon’ (Orr 27). Louise Kaplanreminds us that ‘‘...Emma’s adulterous passions and neglect of her motherly dutiesmark her as a threat, a subversive force, an undermineer of the structures of thebourgeois family’’ (1991, 202).


mant celeste et de mariage eternel qui reviennent dans les sermons lui soule-vaient au fond de l’ame des douceurs inattendues’ (Flaubert 37)3 [The com-parisons of fiance, of husband, and of heavenly lover with an eternal mar-riage which recur in the sermons stirred up an unexpected mellowness in thedepths of her soul]. On the one hand, this promised satisfaction in the depthsof her soul sets up Emma’s transcendental attitude toward society’s expec-tations of a wife. On the other hand, the habitus – that is the dispositions ofan individual which, as Charles Taylor describes it, ‘encodes a certain culturalunderstanding’ (Taylor 58) – of what is expected of a bourgeois wife is assimi-lated internally, though not thoroughly, into Emma Rouault the woman. Herfather’s farm provides this cultural context, wherein her father observes that‘elle a trop d’esprit pour la culture’ (25) [she is too independent for farm-work]. She nervously bites her lips, suggesting her discomfort with the pros-pect of spending the rest of her life in the service of her father on his farm.Meanwhile, Charles’s first wife, Heloıse, ironically fantasizes about Emma’s‘belle education’ (19) with the supposedly sophisticated sewing skills and ac-quired refinements. And yet these are not the qualities that attract Emma toCharles. Her white nails and the direct gaze of her brown eyes are the ordi-nary features that appeal to this ordinary man.

The mismatch of bourgeois expectations and Charles Bovary provides thesetting for Emma’s own incompetence. While his classmates had the practice(‘nous avions l’habitude’ 4) of brashly throwing their caps on the floor, Charlescould not manage to pay attention to them and instead held his cap shyly onhis knee in direct contradiction to his father’s ambition for him: ‘avoir dutoupet, un homme reussit toujours dans le monde’ (8) [with audacity a manalways succeeds in the world]. Charles shows himself to be especially incom-petent in living up to his father’s masculine, athletic model of ‘l’ideal viril del’enfance...a la spartiate’ (7) [the Spartan, virile ideal for childhood]. MichaelRiffaterre tells us that society and Charles’s father would like Charles to bemore than he ever proves himself to be: ‘Charles does have what it takes tokeep his female satisfied, if only she would give him a chance’ (1981, 81). Hischance is imbedded in the bourgeois values instilled in him. For example,when he first arrives at les Bertaux, the Rouault farm, Charles judges it tobe acceptable in appearance (‘une ferme de bonne apparence’ 15). Judging

3Henceforth, page numbers following the French text will refer to this edition of Mad-ame Bovary.


by appearances, constituting a veil that Emma does not respect, Charles iscomfortably drawn into the farmhouse where a great hearth fire awaits.These bourgeois trappings were conducive to his adopting the role of gallan-try in order to court the waiting ‘Mademoiselle Emma.’ And then Emmapricks her finger during one of Charles’s first visits.

Her awkwardness in needlework is not unrelated to the myrtle wreaths sheshows Charles in her bedroom. Those wooden, and therefore artificial, myrtlewreaths were bourgeois awards given to her for her academic success. It isironic that she brings Charles into her bedroom to show him how scholarlyshe had been, while we learn later that the authorities of the convent werehappy to see her leave because she did not care for religious mysteries and‘elle s’irritait davantage contre la discipline, qui etait quelque chose d’antipa-thique a sa constitution’ (41) [she was even more annoyed with discipline,which was something contrary to her constitution]. She was an independentthinker who resisted the strictures of discipline and dogma that imposed con-trol over the youth in the convent by channeling their thinking. After all,Bourdieu tells us that ‘children are inducted into a culture, are taught themeanings which constitute it, partly through the inculcation of the appropri-ate habitus’ (Taylor 58). Yet Emma resisted the complete ‘inculcation.’ Herstruggles with what society expected of her began when she challenged theways of the convent schooling she received.

II. Emma’s Suffering

Emma distinguishes her kind of suffering. Leon, Rodolphe, and Charles allacknowledge suffering as part of their daily lives. Her suffering, however, isclaustrophobic. During the ball at Vaubryessard, she tells Charles to stay inone place for fear of being mocked by others for not knowing how to conducthimself, in this case, how to dance. Her admonition of ‘reste a ta place’ (51)[stay in your position] does not hold for her. She refuses to be limited by thehabitus. When she tells the local parish priest, Bournisien, that she is suffer-ing, he just shrugs her off by encouraging her to do her duty and to acceptsuffering as a common condition: ‘nous sommes nes pour souffrir, commedit saint Paul’ (115) [we were born to suffer, in St. Paul’s words].

Society’s habitus thus views suffering as a condition of belonging to thegroup and accepting its rules. For example, Charles as husband agreeablywatches Emma (90) sew while Leon the outsider to the marriage takes excep-


tion to Emma’s needlework. As Leon observes her sewing, he notices that ‘lesdoigts d’Emma semblaient s’y ecorcher par le bout’ (108) [the ends of Emma’sfingers seemed to be chafed from it]. Leon does not see Emma as his wife andinstead understands that this work wears away at her body. Once again thehexis of her body is communicating the unfitness of wifely decorum. Emma’sbody reflects Bourdieu’s view of the hexis: ‘the body is the site of incorporatedhistory’ (Thompson 13). Flaubert’s story unravels this history as Emma bitesher lips until they bleed (122), thus showing her anguish at not being contentwith her disposition toward ‘un gouffre vague’ (112) [an anonymous abyss] thatshe admits to Felicite as having consciously recognized only after her marriage.In this state of emotional upheaval, Emma flouts the social codes, as when shepublicly parades her friendship with Leon to go see her child, who was livingwith Mme Rollet the wet-nurse, only to have the mayor’s wife spread the rumorthat ‘madame Bovary se compromettait’ (94) [Madame Bovary was compro-mising herself].

Emma thus begins to be openly hostile to the habitus. A key to readingher open hostility is what she wears one day when Charles is courting her ather father’s farmhouse: ‘Elle portait, comme un homme, passe entre deuxboutons de son corsage, un lorgnon d’ecaille’(17) [Like a man, she wore be-tween the buttonholes of her blouse, a turtle-shell pince-nez’]. Charles Baude-laire, Flaubert’s contemporary and acquaintance, picked up on this associ-ation and remarked that Emma embodies ‘virile virtues’ (1975, 82) such asthe spirit of domination that sparks her to unravel the rules of the habitus.When she was pregnant, she hoped for a boy and fainted after the baby’sbirth when she was told that the baby was a girl. She herself was thus per-petuating the female habitus by bringing yet another female body into theworld to be controlled by society’s expectations. And yet she is determinedto drive a wedge between the habitus of her role as wife and her female desire:‘it is as if Emma knows, in the depths of her seething heart, that the mostessential component of her whole enterprise is the desire which animates herfemale body’ (Maraini 94). The suffering entails the difference between thatdesire and dispositions toward roles that trap the desire within her body, asprovided by the habitus.

III. Language as the Cultural Capital of the Habitus

Pierre Bourdieu’s research indicates that language contains what he calls,after a Marxian fashion, ‘the cultural capital of the habitus’ (Harker 43). By


‘capital’, he means the currency of exchange that attributes value to a culturalcommodity. Language achieves this status obviously for Flaubert who, as iswell known, invested considerable effort in his search for le mot juste. Hischaracter Emma is not as articulate as he was. Indeed, Flaubert’s narrativevoice approaches Emma’s frustration with language in the famous passage:‘...la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fele ou nous battons des melo-dies a faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les etoiles’ (196)[...human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we play tunes to makebears dance when what is desired is to touch the stars]. Emma’s situation,during her initial attraction de Leon, is associated with such anguish at thelack of the right words: ‘Alors, les appetits de la chair, les convoitises d’argentet les melancolies de la passion, tout se confondit dans la meme souffrance’(111) [Thus the appetites of the flesh, the lust for money, and the sad mo-ments of passion, all of these were confounded in the same suffering]. Bourd-ieu notes that the mixture of lexical fields is no accident. In this case, Flaub-ert’s expressions, ‘the appetites of the flesh’ and ‘the lust for money,’ are sen-sual inter-penetrations of the melancholy state of Emma’s desire whenconfronted with the habitus of the moeurs de province, the ‘bourgeois man-ners’ that are the subtitle of Madame Bovary.

What is not so obvious is Emma’s investment in language. Stratton Bucknotes that ‘...Emma’s tragedy stems in part from her inability to find wordsadequate to her feelings or her needs...’ (1966, 71–72). Her inarticulate naturebrings her close to Flaubert’s own fascination with the crucial importanceof words. Even Flaubert’s distant narrator acknowledges the problem: ‘maiscomment dire un insaisissable malaise’ (42) [but how do you express an elus-ive discomfort]. When Emma blurts out to Father Bournisien the words jesouffre, she effectively situates her opposition to the habitus of language bynot adapting words appropriate to her role as the doctor’s wife. She shouldbe adopting the vocabulary of duty according to Father Bournisien who,ironically as Emma’s directeur de conscience, is also suffering from his owninability to control the local brats disturbing the peace around his church.Meanwhile, Emma cannot adequately communicate the details of her ownsuffering to those around her. During her boating escapade with Leon, heasks if she is suffering. She cannot find the precise cause of her anguishexcept to say that it is probably just an evening chill in the air.

The crucial identification of suffering with choking brings Emma to a real-ization of her imprisonment by the habitus. Her linking of ‘je souffre’ [I am


suffering] and ‘j’etouffe’ [I am choking] leads her to have the windows openedin order to breathe fresh air. This is a key investment in the cultural capitalof language because of her words bridge suffering and space. At the ball, sheused the French word place to tell Charles to keep his relative position. Whenthe Bovarys move to Yonville, Emma brags to Homais that she enjoys chang-ing places (‘j’aime a changer de place’ 82). Relative to others in her society,ruled by the habitus and the dispositions it gives them, Emma would haveher husband retain his bourgeois status while she is anxious to change thedisposition of ‘wife’ which is choking her.

The windows motif especially underscores Emma’s investment in the cul-tural capital of language. Let us take two of the many commentators on therole of windows in this novel. Jean Rousset reminds us that ‘the windowcombines open and enclosed space, represents an obstacle as well an escape,a sheltering room as well as an area of endless expansion, a circumscribedinfinity’ (1965, 67). Paula Roberts observes that the window is literally ameans for Emma to look outside as if she did not belong to the internalenclosure of the windows (Roberts 5). This play of inside/outside is also func-tioning within Emma’s limited use of language as metaphorical windows ex-pressing the simultaneous transparency and frustrations of her desire. Thetransparency entails the ability of her dreams to transcend the enclosuresoffered by the limited dispositions of the habitus of wife for Emma. She canliterally see beyond the windows, for example toward Leon strolling freelyoutside marriage or Rodolphe fleeing the responsibility of a married womanwith a child. She thus seeks association with the freedoms of both Leon andRodolphe, only to find that they cannot provide the space she needs. She ismetaphorically enclosed by her financial dependence on her husband Charlesand thus precluded from making decisions that allow her to leave her role aswife. The windows of her home entrap Emma with her few words, thoseacceptable for the limited dispositions that the habitus of wife provides, forexample as a devoted mother to Berthe or as a faithful, deferential partnerto Charles. Emma refuses these dispositions of the habitus of bourgeois wifewhile concomitantly being incapable of finding the words for what lies out-side the windows. In the village of Tostes, she was almost agoraphobic andthen claustrophobic as she struggled with the habitus and the hexis: ‘Souvent,elle s’obstinait a ne pas sortir, puis elle suffoquait, ouvrait les fenetres, s’hab-illait en robe legere’ (68) [Often, she would stubbornly stay inside, then shewas suffocating, opened the windows, and was scantily clad]. Upon finally


speaking the words j’etouffe, she subsequently realizes that her concomitantsalvation involves opening windows. On her deathbed, she requests that thewindows be opened for there, too, she was suffocating from the ideologies ofthis life.

In examining language as the cultural capital of habitus, we must recall,with Jonathan Culler, that a novel such as Madame Bovary is ‘writing, not aworld’ (1974, 230). As such the story of Emma Rouault is the stuff of writtenlanguage especially that provided by Flaubert who, to repeat the insight intohis role as a novelist, is ‘a disseminator of the already said, a transcriber ofthe codes of social discourse’ (Ramazani 114). His words fix Emma in thehabitus of language encoded in narrative and direct irony both toward herand toward the habitus as Flaubert sets up the expectations of bourgeoissociety against the desire of the individual. Here, narratology instructs us inhow language becomes the cultural capital of the past and how that past fixesEmma’s fate. Gerald Prince’s narratological study of Madame Bovary notesthe preponderance of flashbacks to flash-forwards in the structure of thenovel: ‘If flashbacks are more numerous (about forty), their most importantfunction is to present the characters’ antecedents...’ (1995, 88–89). Hence,in Emma’s early years, especially those before her marriage, the repetitivedispositions of habitus through language began to appear. As Bourdieu re-marks, ‘the habitus...tends to reproduce the conditions of its own productionby producing... objectively coherent strategies which are also systematicallycharacteristic of a kind of reproduction’ (1989, 387 [my trans.]). These ‘strat-egies’ entail how language incorporates the rules of marriage. Emma cannothave access to words that are not allowed within the household of a sociallysanctioned marriage. This is her reticence, the nothing, that is at the centerof Madame Bovary. Her lack of the exact words to express her desires setsup Flaubert’s insight about the deepest desire of the writer-artist: to appearto treat one subject and to actually treat a totally different one (Sartre 20).Rather than to speak about Emma, Flaubert is actually speaking about thelack of ties between her and society, the nothing condemning her before herlife began.

Returning to the issue of her financial dependence on Charles, Emma’swifely language cannot incorporate her personal financial accounting. Herdebts are her husband’s debts. She brought no financial resources into theirmarriage. She had few household skills and was thus of little value to herfather on the farm. M. Rouault reasoned that a doctor as a prospective son-


in-law meant that there would be little bickering over Emma’s lack of adowry. Then there was Charles’s own misjudgment not only about M.Rouault’s wealth, which had likewise been foreshadowed by Charles’s mistakeabout the dowry in his first marriage to Heloıse, but also about Emma’sphysical beauty. Neither attribute was enough to provide capital for the suc-cess of the marriage between Charles and Emma. Her body, which obsessedCharles during their courtship, ironically houses the desires that challengethe habitus of wifely language through the hexis of her womanly behaviorwrit larger. That hexis began to be expressed through the finger pricks in herneedlework and from the wedding bouquet. Her corporal dispositions con-tinue to struggle with the habitus so that she could no longer endure theboredom of Charles’s meager conversational abilities. The reader can almosthear her sigh in exasperation as she struggles with the repetitive behavior ofher husband, such as his embrace coming home from work. Emma is thusprimed to follow her hexis and to reject the habitus of being a wife.

IV. Breaking the Rules

Emma is not altogether without power as a spouse. She manipulates the codeof a woman’s cultivation to her benefit. A wife is supposed to be the hostessto the family’s guests. In nineteenth-century France, the skill of piano-playingwas part of how a well-educated wife was expected to entertain in the drawingroom. Homais, as the mainstay of bourgeois values in Yonville, advises Charlesto support the idea because it promotes the habitus of the maternal role ofthe wife as the educator of her child and promises a rewarding financialinvestment. Lucette Czyba reminds us that the socio-economic status ofwomen thus influences their adaptation of the habitus of wife as mother(1983, 56). Men likewise reinforce the linkage keeping the wife in her placewithin this socio-economic niche, that is, subservient to male dominance. Asthe proponent of the bourgeois habitus to Charles in Yonville, Homais there-fore encourages the musical lessons because Charles wins twice: ‘...en enga-geant Madame a etudier, vous economisez pour plus tard sur l’educationmusicale de votre enfant’ (266) [...by involving your wife in these studies, youinvest in the musical education of your child]. Her piano lessons, under theguise of the town doctor’s pretensions to culture and the promise of hospi-tality through the financial support of his wife’s entertainment and educationpotential, are manipulated to give her excuses to go to Rouen to meet her


lover, the new and exciting Leon who had traveled away from Yonville toParis with all its pretenses at cultivation. Emma thus plays on the marginsof respectability as a wife to seek her personal desires. The habitus of wifelycomportment is thus compromised by the hexis of womanly desire. As such,Emma breaks the rules of being deferential to her husband and being a faith-ful spouse. She is in control of her actions after having learned to be unfaith-ful with Rodolphe. With the new and exciting Leon, Emma does the seducingand arranging the lovers’ rendezvous. She thus enacts the fantasies derivedfrom the novels and romances she read during her convent education.

And yet Emma needs to distance herself from the habitus of her marriagenot only by going away in trysts but by displacing herself away from herhusband permanently. She pleads with Rodolphe – ‘Emmene-moi, emmene-moi’ (198) [Take me away, take me away] – as if he were a chevalier whocould whisk her away on his noble steed. Here again the habitus intervenes.This time it is the guilt of mother-love assimilated from the habitus thatconditions Emma to propose that she take Berthe with her as she and Rodol-phe plan to leave Yonville. Rodolphe is not so comfortable with that part ofthe agreement. Let us remember here that it was with another man, Leon,when Emma first ‘compromised’ her reputation by bringing him along to seeher child. Another disjunction, a sign of the opposition of her bodily hexisto the habitus that informs her that she must stay in her marriage, occurs inher fainting spells – a Romantic device that in Emma expresses the disparitybetween her desires and the expectations of society’s laws symbolized by hermarriage to Charles (Chambers 159). After receiving Rodolphe’s letter,Emma faints, as she did upon hearing the news that her child was a girl. Herbodily hexis could not bear to promote the habitus to yet another woman.In fact, as Louise Kaplan argues, ‘With these feminine frivolities [such as herfainting spells], she masks her dominating spirit, her desire to penetrate theveil of illusion’ (1991, 236). Emma’s aspirations as a woman again and againare not synchronized with the rules of what a woman can be according tothe habitus of the wife. Instead, she breaks the rules but cannot exit theentrapping habitus despite her fainting routine.

Emma’s illness after the departure of Rodolphe exemplifies the strugglebetween the hexis and the habitus. In today’s terms, we would say that thereis a psychosomatic effect of Emma’s desire on her body’s dispositions. Thebower in the Bovary garden is a revealing symbol of the protective role ofthe habitus. This bower is literally a decorative structure offering shade and


a place for climbing plants and flowers. Through her destruction of her bridalflowers in Tostes and her rejection of Homais’s appeal to her gardening tal-ents when she first arrived in Yonville, Emma rejected her wifely duty to workwith flowers. Yet the bower was a constructed place among flowers, almostan inverted womb-like shape that provides shelter from the sun and harshlight, where Emma was courted by the young Leon and was attracted by hispromise of cultivation outside of marriage. After Rodolphe’s letter, Charlesescorts her, during her illness, to the bower. Emma is strident in her rejectionof that place – ‘Oh! Non, pas la, pas la!’ (215) [Oh no, not there, not there!] –as if the bower reminded her of the false hope that another could save herfrom her fate as a wife. This same bower will shelter Charles after Emma’sdeath, when Charles himself experiences the suffocation of the habitus re-garding marriage and its social dispositions.

Emma maintains a non-wifely deferential behavior toward her husbanduntil the end. Her behavior can be characterized as ‘virile’ insofar as she doesnot acquiesce to the habitus of how a woman in marriage should act andinstead ‘strains against ever-narrowing spaces throughout her life’ (Tipper375). The habitus effectively reduces her space as a woman while she strugglesto find her own in which prodigality reigns. She ignores the expectation thata bourgeois wife defer to the financial solvency of her husband, the wage-earner of the family. She tosses her last five-franc coin to the blind beggar asthe ultimate act of defiance toward a habitus disposing her to be concerned,as a responsible wife, with protecting the solvency of her household. Emma’slack of deference for the inferior position of the bourgeois wife to her hus-band explodes the financial predicament of a wife dependent upon her hus-band’s income in a capitalist environment. While Homais lauds Charles’s op-portunity to save money by sending Emma off to Rouen for piano lessons,Emma in fact uses this occasion as a subterfuge for her prodigality. Whenher careless financial ways finally lead to jeopardizing Charles’s estate, shemust ironically appeal yet again to the habitus of men as the financial re-source for women. Prostitution is constantly implied when Emma goes to thelawyer Guillaume, to Leon, and to Rodolphe for income to alleviate thefinancial quandary she has incurred for her marriage. Her integrity, the hexisof her body, must be sacrificed for the survival of the habitus.

Her only viable space is the literary one created by Flaubert because therethe life she wanted to promote in the son she never had can be asserted inthe martyrdom of her suicide. She must die because she cannot live within


the space that the habitus had prepared for her. Even her death is a strugglebecause she imagined for herself the facile death of the heroines in her ro-mances. Instead, her body once again communicates the hexis of oppositionto the habitus that had prepared her for a very different death. Bourdieu’sexplanation of the habitus is insightful: ‘Bref, l’habitus est le principe de lastructuration sociale de l’existence temporelle, de toutes les anticipations etles presuppositions a travers lesquelles nous construisons pratiquement lesens du monde, c’est-a-dire sa signification, mais aussi, inseparablement, sonorientation vers l’a-venir’ (1992, 450) [Simply put, the habitus is the principleof the social structuring of temporal existence, of all the anticipations andthe presuppositions through which we practically make sense of the world,that is, its meaning, but also, inseparably, its orientation toward what is tocome]. Making ‘sense of the world’ in which she found herself is the real rubfor Emma and the reason why the hexis of her woman’s body is opposed tothe habitus of society’s dispositions for a wife. Emma’s whole life was thusplanned by the structuring of her education as a woman and as a wife. Theexpectations of being woman and wife were incompatible in Emma. Herdeath was written in that incompatibility. But there is more. Emma is also amodel as a literary product in which we can examine the interests of thehabitus because, as Bourdieu tells us, ‘the fact that the literary or artisticproduction appears as disinterested...does not mean that it is’ (Thompson16). So let us examine the nature of the interests in Emma’s story.

V. Emma’s Modeling Behavior

The benefit of the literary modeling of Emma is that we can see and examineboth sides of the divide. Once Emma and Rodolphe begin their liaison, shelooks at herself in the mirror and exclaims, almost ecstatically: ‘J’ai un am-ant! un amant!’ (167) [I have a lover, a lover!]. She does not see the womanwho transgresses her expectations of fidelity as a wife. She is said to havefound ‘dans l’adultere toutes les platitudes du mariage’ (296) [in adultery allthe platitudes of marriage]. Curiously, her mirror gives her a view of herotherness to the habitus of a married woman. This mirror-image of herotherness prefigures the one she uses on her deathbed when she is also lis-tening to the blind beggar, that haunting character she encountered in Rouenwho recalls the mythological figure of Tiresias, the blind seer who is reputedto have had a bisexual identity. Tiresias incarnates a mythological bonding


of masculine and feminine as well as the linking of past and future to contrastwith Emma’s own life that constantly vacillates between these poles. Whileshe is sometimes deferentially feminine in the early stages of her liaison withRodolphe and assertively masculine in her sexual relationship with Leon, shefinds calmness in reflecting upon her past within the walls of the convent andconsolation in the possibility that Rodolphe will take her away to some idealfuture life over there. Emma’s future had already been inscribed in the habitusof marriage she had read about and learned in the convent. Even Rodolpheis part of that socially inscribed hope that heterosexuality builds into themale as the harbinger of hope and deliverance from women’s responsibilityfor their own destiny. Bourdieu reminds us that the habitus entails ‘the near-perfect anticipation of the future inscribed in all the concrete configur-ations...’ (1990, 66).

None of these configurations lasts for Emma, however, as we readers learn.She is instead perpetually anguished by the present-day habitus of marriagewhose dispositions leave her reflecting upon ‘d’ou venait cette insuffisance dela vie...’ (289) [where does this lack in life originate]. Only as she gazes uponherself in a handheld mirror on a deathbed does she finally listen to andimagine a face-to-face confrontation with the blind beggar/Tiresias who singsabout love and the attractions between the sexes. Curiously, it is then thatEmma appears almost mystically transported beyond the habitus. The ex-plosive confrontation between Emma and her other produces this bizarrelaughter just prior to her death, so that we could agree that ‘Emma laughswhen she senses herself suddenly outside the world which holds her imprison-ed’ (Cladwell 66). The beggar leads her to this awareness that there is anoutside, an other to the habitus that held her captive. Even after her death,Charles sees to it that she is buried in her wedding dress, slippers and crown.The habitus of marriage reigns over the hexis of her body despite her momen-tary glimpse of transcendence.

Emma’s modeling behavior also entails an ironic justification of thehabitus. Her struggle with her learned dispositions in marriage and her dis-content keeps her life and her narrative energized. Despite Emma’s frag-mented relationship with the habitus, never totally assimilated by and oftenfragmented, characteristics that are after all part of the experience of mod-ernity, we reaffirm with Bourdieu ‘...the strategies intended simply to neutral-ize the action of time and ensure the continuity of interpersonal relations,making continuity out of discontinuity’ (1990, 107). Of course, time and mar-


riage must continue after Emma. A recent sequel to Madame Bovary, anovel entitled La Fille d’Emma (Buffard 2001), shows that the pattern exem-plified in the character of Emma continues despite her death. Flaubert’snovel thus models what Bourdieu calls for in the method of habitus as ‘anacquired system of generative schemes’ (1990, 55). This all began with Em-ma’s pricking her finger while doing needlework, the hexis in the habitus,Flaubert’s way of criticizing the very system which educates us about beingwho we are.

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Roland A. Champagne: born 1946. Ph.D. 1975. Professor of French, University ofMissouri, St. Louis. Publications: The Maiden of Tonnerne, translation of the Cheva-lier d’Eon (collaboration), Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, as well as severalbooks and articles on French literature.

emma's incompetence as madame bovary

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