Flaubert and ‘Don Quijote’: The Influence of Cervantes on ‘Madame Bovary’ (review)

Flaubert’s admiration for Cervantes’s Don Quijote, a novel which he claimed to know by heart before he could even read, will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever read Madame Bovary. This monograph places particular emphasis on the cultural and biographical contexts that led to the genesis of these heavyweights of the European novelistic canon. Context is indeed privileged over text to the extent that one has to wait until the rewarding final chapter for a detailed comparative analysis of the two texts in question. Prior to this point, Fox takes a rather old-fashioned l’homme et l’œuvre approach to the subject which deals emphatically with influence rather than intertextuality, and with authorial intentions and motivations rather than textual effects. While this approach is unquestionably informative in many respects, the book suffers from a pronounced teleology both in its construction of the authors’ ‘evolution’ (p. 98) into their roles as creators of their respective masterpieces, and in its approach to the literary history of the novel as a genre. Northrop Frye complained, over fifty years ago, that romance was widely regarded as a form that exists only to give way to, or grow into, the novel. Fox’s contempt for romance suggests that little has changed in this regard – she describes its various forms as ‘outmoded, convention-ridden genres’ (p. 137) that are ‘vulnerable to ridicule because they are built on conventions and not on a poetics’ (p. 110); the chivalric romance in particular is dismissed peremptorily as ‘an aesthetically inadequate genre’ (p. 24). This stridently evaluative approach fails to acknowledge its own aesthetic prejudices: judged according to a classical or neoclassical aesthetic, romances will inevitably seem fatally flawed; all this shows, however, is the inappropriateness of judging them in these terms, and the importance of an approach that is sensitive to the very different aesthetic criteria that inform their production and reception. Fox is in fact more dismissive than her authors in this regard: the Barber and the Curate, after all, do not burn all the chivalric romances they find in Don Quijote’s library (they notably save the Amadis de Gaula and Tirant lo Blanc), while Flaubert did indeed, as Fox points out, have a ‘weakness’ (p. 110) for Scott’s romances. Despite these generic prejudices, Fox’s reading of Flaubert alongside Goethe and Scott opens up the Don Quijote-Madame Bovary binary to reveal a more complex intertext of mediating works, and she offers in particular some interesting parallels between the changes of narratorial perspective in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor and Flaubert’s novel. Fox’s discussion of the genesis of Madame Bovary is similarly lively and informative, and intriguingly casts Du Camp and Bouilhet in roles that recall the Barber and the Curate of Don Quijote – their task to ‘cure’ Flaubert of his own Romantic excesses. Thus, while this book is not without its faults - including the absence of any introduction or conclusion, and an unacceptable number of typographical errors (from a reference to ‘Italino Calvino’ (p. viii) to a quotation from Flaubert in which ‘mes compatriotes rugiront’ rather than ‘rougiront’ (p. 112)) – there is much to enjoy here too, and it will be of particular value and interest to undergraduate students of the European novel.