Passion and Possession in Madame Bovary

Materiality is perhaps the feature of the modern novel that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary exhibits to the most profound effect. Materiality in the history of the novel can be understood in part as the identification of characters through their physical possessions, and includes a heightened focus on description of setting and things. Though these elements are no doubt present throughout Emma’s life, they seem to be the most consistent and significant in her relationship with Rodolphe. Flaubert connects passion to possession in this relationship in order to display the destructive effect of materialism on love, even if the love between Emma and Rodolphe is more erotic than romantic. Material possessions are the foundation and representation of the state of their affair: Rodolphe describes his desire for Emma in terms of having and taking, while Emma understands his wealth as enabling his freedom, which only deepens her distress when she cannot rely on their relationship to redeem her from destitution.

Emma and Rodolphe’s relationship is founded upon materialism. The two meet at the Yonville pharmacy, where Rodolphe is first identified as a “gentleman dressed in a green velvet frock coat…[and the] yellow gloves” of a dandy, and they first connect by commiserating about provincial clothing and the simplemindedness it exhibits: “Just imagine—,” he says, “not one of these good people is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat” (111, 121). Flaubert also juxtaposes their burgeoning affair with the village fair. The structure of the dialogue intersperses the chairman’s decrees with declarations of passion, making it literally impossible to divorce materialism from the initial intimacy between Emma and Rodolphe:

“Seventy francs!”

“A hundred times I’ve tried to leave you, and yet I’ve followed you, I’ve stayed with you.”

“For manures—”

“As I would stay with you tonight, tomorrow, every day, my whole life!”

The nearly direct echo of “Seventy francs” and “A hundred times” is followed by a cheeky contrast between manure and Rodolphe’s empty promises. While the chairman awards salespeople for their wares, Rodolphe sells Emma on an affair founded on falsehoods.

As the affair progresses, Flaubert again makes great effort to emphasize their possessions as metonymy for their physical relationship. In the penultimate moment of seduction, “the material of [Emma’s] riding habit [catches] on his velvet coat” (141). He finally takes her in what Flaubert describes as a moment of weakness and extreme emotion (141), after she has only narrowly avoided his forceful advances (140). Though their first time is purportedly consensual, the language of his coat “catching” her riding habit alludes to the blurred line between seduction and predation. After their subsequent liaisons at Rodolphe’s estate, she would get up from bed to “examine the room, open the drawers of the furniture, comb her hair with his comb and…even place between her teeth the stem of a large pipe that lay on the night table among the lemons and sugar lumps, next to a carafe of water” (144). This reads as an attempt, even if subconsciously, to reassert her autonomy after surrendering it to Rodolphe, by handling his things with nonchalance and command.

When their relationship begins to sour, Flaubert uses material things to convey the characters changing emotional states. Emma tries to spoil Rodolphe with gifts—incidentally, her first purchases from Monsieur Lheureux, the dry goods merchant who will eventually lead Emma deep into debt—as tokens of her affection. She seems to believe these physical manifestations of her passion for Rodolphe are not only the natural consequent of their relationship, but also a way to secure his devotion in return. However, he feels “humiliated” by her gifts, and only accepts them after she insists. His attitude towards her gifts resembles his romantic feelings for her, or rather, the lack thereof. He “find[s] her tyrannical and overly intrusive,” even as he “perceive[s] in this love further pleasures to be exploited” (166-167). The last word here connotes material resources: He uses her body and her capital like a conquistador exploits his colonies, with all the same rapaciousness, debauchery, and domination. Furthermore, Flaubert describes the “charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing” to reveal the naked and “eternal monotony of passion” (167). He relies on clothing once again to represent their relationship and the cause of its failure. Rodolphe has not only bankrupted Emma of her novelty and, therefore, her utility for arousing his pleasure; he has also set her on the path towards financial ruin.

To further emphasize the destructive effect of materialism on love, Flaubert consistently describes Rodolphe as possessing Emma in body and soul. After their brief encounter at the pharmacy, he imagines “Emma…dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her,” then declares, “’I’ll have her!’” (114, emphasis added). Here is one of many explicit links between erotic attraction and possession. Flaubert uses a similar euphemism to describe their dalliance in the forest: “she gave herself up to him” (141). Though Emma hopes that “at last she would possess those joys of love,” Flaubert instead says that “fears of Rodolphe’s took possession of her” (144). She becomes dependent on his attention “now that it was indispensable to her life,…afraid of losing some part of it” (144).

Throughout their relationship, passion is described in terms of something tangible to have, to hold, and to lose, reflecting the untenable imbalance of power in the relationship, both materially and emotionally. Emma becomes dependent not only on his affection, but also on his wealth. Indeed, she describes him as her “king,” while she is his “servant and concubine” (167). In strikingly similar language, Emma visits Rodolphe for help paying her debts, “[not] in the least suspecting that she was prostituting herself” (274). Flaubert hearkens back to the early stages of their relationship when he characterizes Emma as “giving herself away” to Rodolphe by begging for his help. The characters come full circle: Emma, possessed by her love and her lover, is left with nothing of her own and no one to help after Rodolphe discards her, as was his intention from the moment he declared he would have her.

Finally, Emma equates wealth with freedom, an idea all the more darkly ironic by her destitution. In an early interaction outside of the fair, Rodolphe spins a story to earn Emma’s pity.

‘I’ve been so alone. Ah! If only I’ve had some goal in life, if I’d known some affection, if I’d found someone…Oh, I would have expended all the energy I possess, I would have surmounted everything, conquered everything!’

‘Yet it seems to me,’ said Emma, ‘that you’re scarcely to be pitied.’

‘Oh? You think so?’ said Rodolphe.

‘Because…well…,’ she went on, ‘you’re free.’

She hesitated:

‘Rich.’ (121)

Here, Rodolphe himself compares love to possessing and conquering the object of his affection. This passage also establishes Emma’s belief that being rich allows one to be free. From the way she speaks about her daughter (77), she seems to understand that women can never be truly free from the restrictions of a patriarchal and misogynist society. In a direct reaction to this lack of freedom, she plays at being rich until her debts overwhelm her.

Even as debt drives her to desperation, she rebukes Monsieur Guillaumin and echoes her statement about wealth and freedom, saying, “I’m to be pitied, but I’m not for sale” (270). Whereas Rodolphe was not to be pitied because of his wealth (121), Emma lacks wealth; however, she defends her freedom by staving off Guillaumin’s advances. Flaubert claims of his character that she is “quite unaware” of the similarity between her rejection of Guillaumin and her hope that Rodolphe will save her, but Emma is still able to reject Guillaumin in spite of her material condition. Therefore, her poverty and subordination do not strip her of her bodily autonomy. It would follow that she goes on to offer her body to Rodolphe willingly, which betrays some level of awareness of the transactional nature of their relationship. This would explain her extreme reaction when Rodolphe denies her the three thousand francs: Though she is certainly succumbing to madness, she also rationally perceives his denial as a betrayal of the very foundation of their relationship. She had believed that she could “force him by reminding him, with a single glance, of their lost love,” and she prostrates herself in front of him in a familiar posture of self-effacing adoration (274). She even echoes their first meaningful conversation, calling him “rich, and happy, and free,” this time with a spitted wrath (277).

In this equation of freedom and wealth, Emma ultimately has neither despite her best efforts, which leads to the dissolution of her relationship with Rodolphe and her very will to live. Before their initial separation, Emma reminisces about her youth, saying that those days had been “happy…free…[and] rich in illusions” (151). But she had “spent [these illusions] in all the different adventures of her soul, in all those successive stages she had gone through, in her virginity, her marriage, and her love…like a traveler who leaves some part of his wealth at every inn along his road” (151). The second part of this passage is an example of Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse. Emma frequently compares freedom and wealth, but she does not seem entirely capable of coming up with the metaphor of a traveler’s journey to describe the stages of her romantic life. Flaubert condemns her for the very materialism that he imposes upon her as her creator and the mouthpiece for the thoughts of which she is incapable of articulating. In a rare, clear moment of Flaubert speaking as himself and addressing the reader, he says that “a request for money, of all the tempests that may descend upon love, [is] the coldest and most profoundly destructive” (276). An examination of Emma and Rodolphe’s relationship highlights his pioneering use of materiality to make an argument to this effect.

Flaubert speaks to the destructive influence of materialism on love by inserting careful references to Emma’s and Rodolphe’s possessions; furthermore, he describes Rodolphe as possessing Emma. When her belief in the freeing power of wealth collapses, so too does her dependence on Rodolphe. She is left with no illusions, nor any option but to end her own life. Her love for things, even more than her love for Rodolphe, is her downfall. With this narrative, Flaubert marks the start of a new era in the history of the novel.