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Chapter One: Gustave Flaubert: Emma Bovary Goes to Hollywood
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The book is concerned with adultery and contains situations and allusions that shocked the prudish philistine government of Napoleon III. Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene. I am glad to say that Flaubert won his case. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times . . . But let me keep to my subject. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature F ew books are as closely associated with their legal histories as is Madame Bovary. Most editions of Ulysses include in a preface Judge John M. Woolsey’s 1933 decision allowing Joyce’s novel into the United States, and the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not only published as a book in its own right but also famously commemorated by Philip Larkin in his poem “Annus mirabilis” as an epoch-making milestone: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.1 Neither sexual intercourse per se nor even adultery began in 1857, but it might be fair to say that modern literature did. And along with modern literature , efforts to stamp it out: as we have seen, 1857 was something of an annus horribilis, producing a bumper crop of literary trials in France, as well as unprecedented obscenity legislation in England. As Flaubert put it shortly after his trial, grandiosely but with a certain amount of justification , “my cause was that of contemporary literature itself [ma cause était celle de la littérature contemporaine tout entière].”2 The trial, in any chapter one Gustave Flaubert Emma Bovary Goes to Hollywood 17 18 Dirt for Art’s Sake case, remains part of Madame Bovary, even more than is true for Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for a number of reasons. For one thing, the novel carries a dedication to Jules Senard, Flaubert’s defense attorney, in which the author notes that it was through Senard’s efforts that the book was able to appear at all in book form. It had been prosecuted on the basis of publication in six installments in the Revue de Paris in October through December 1856, and if Senard had not won the case it would not have been able to see the light as a volume. Flaubert might just as well, though, have dedicated the novel to Ernest Pinard, the hated imperial prosecutor, since the prosecution launched his career as an author. Madame Bovary was his first published book, and while it had attracted a certain amount of attention on first publication, it was the trial that made Flaubert famous, as he himself recognized. “My Bovary continues to be a hit [La Bovary continue son succès],” he wrote to his brother just prior to the start of judicial proceedings. ‘’It has become spicy. Everyone has read it, is reading it, or wants to read it [Il devient corsé. Tout le monde l’a lue, la lit ou veut la lire].” The letter continues, in a spirit of coy cynicism: “My persecution has won me endless sympathy. If my book is bad, the trial will serve to make it seem better; if on the contrary it is to last, this will be its pedestal [Ma persécution m’a ouvert mille sympathies. Si mon livre est mauvais, elle servira à le faire paraître meilleur; s’il doit au contraire demeurer, c’est un piédestal pour lui].”3 Even so, the trial might have remained a salty detail in Flaubert’s career , since he went on to publish five more books and establish himself as an eminent author in general and not just the focus of a judicial scandal. But Madame Bovary is still his most famous work, and the trial remains literally part of the novel. Most editions of the novel available in French, from the prestigious Bibliotheque de la Pléiade volumes of Flaubert’s complete works to the cheapest paperbacks designed for casual readers and students, contain the transcript of the trial proceedings.4 The first edition of Madame Bovary to feature the trial dates from the author’s lifetime and was published with his consent.5 Not only was the trial included in the 1873 “definitive” edition of the novel with the author’s imprimatur, it was also at Flaubert’s behest that the judicial proceedings had...