Ed Gallagher explores Flaubert's
literary influence
Edward J. Gallagher, Henrietta Jennings Professor of French, has spent a career haunted by Gustave Flaubert and his notorious Madame Bovary, working with colleagues and students to unmask the classic novel's many layers. In Textual Hauntings: Studies in Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux, Gallagher examines the striking similarities between the two French classics, and the ways in which great texts inspire the next generation of writers.
As a student of the French novel, how do you delineate between "influence" and "borrowing" in your examination of texts? Is the final determination up to scholars or individual readers?
Putative borrowings are usually easy to spot. Both Emma Bovary and Thérèse Desqueyroux, unhappily wedded women who abhor the married state, use practically the same unusually striking expression--the "filth of marriage"--to describe their disgust and visceral repugnance. Influence, I think, is a broader phenomenon. That's why I borrowed from Matei Calinescu the idea that there are texts that haunt each other. By looking at these hauntings, you come to appreciate better what each novelist did with similar material. Mauriac was surely inspired by Flaubert's novel, but that's not to say that Thérèse Desqueyroux is derivative. Mauriac took what he liked and made it his own, just as Racine had taken his tragedies from the Greeks but made them his own through his personal vision and genius. You ask about scholars and readers. Scholars are simply individual readers who have read and then re-read literary texts. When scholarly readers write with clarity and without jargon, what they say about the texts they've read closely may help other readers see better. Doctrinaire critics and those who write opaque, impenetrable prose appeal, if at all, to only a very narrow academic audience. I aim for clarity and hope I hit the mark.
Did Mauriac ever discuss how Flaubert might have influenced his work?
I wish he had, but he didn't. Mauriac did take Flaubert's famous statement, "I am Madame Bovary," and applied it to himself and to his heroine, saying that "Thérèse Desqueyroux was myself." While certainly not proof of influence, the admission is certainly interesting and intriguing. And so, the question is: What threshold of similarities between these two stories needs to be there for you to say that Flaubert's 1857 novel influenced Mauriac's, published 70 years later in 1927? The similarities are so numerous-and not just attributable to the fact that each heroine is a provincial, bourgeois, unhappily married woman--that one critic's suggestion that Mauriac must have been inspired by Madame Bovary, unconsciously and unbeknownst to him, seems to me to be untenable.
Both texts you studied deal with the definition of "self"; can you briefly explain how the early French novelists developed the modern concept of "self"?
Novelists, even the medieval romance writers like Chrétien de Troyes, functioned as psychiatrists long before that medical specialty existed. There is general agreement identifying Madame de Lafayette's 1677 novel La princesse de Clèves as the first modern novel, precisely, I think, because of the author's penetrating and exquisitely detailed analysis of what makes another unhappily married woman, but a virtuous one, tick. Madame de Lafayette traces the gradual development of the eponymous heroine's self-awareness and her evolving moral code, based on both reason and the experience of passion. So it's these writers' exploration of the rational and irrational aspects of human nature and their attempts to plumb the murky depths of human motivation that make their novels so appealing. Their characters seek both to achieve and to avoid self-awareness. The authenticity of these portraits rings true for readers.
Madame Bovary was scandalous for its time and remains a favorite on banned books lists; did Thérèse get the same reception and if not, why?
Even in 1857, the obscenity trial ended with Flaubert's acquittal on charges that Madame Bovary constituted an attack on religion and public morality. Certainly by today's standards, the novel is very tame. There are no graphic sexual scenes at all. As for Mauriac, even before publishing Thérèse Desqueyroux, he was a well-known and successful Catholic writer, and quite orthodox. His heroine is a poisoner, not, like Emma, a serial adulteress. So while Rome put both Madame Bovary and Salammbô (Flaubert's historical novel set in ancient Carthage) on the now-defunct Index of Forbidden Books, the Holy Office, as far as we know, had no problem with Mauriac.
What's the one French novel everyone should read?
While the easy answer is "Madame Bovary, of course," you have to remember that the novel is the genre par excellence in nineteenth-century France. Other major novels by that century's "big four" include Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Balzac's Old Goriot, Flaubert's Sentimental Education and Zola's L'Assommoir. All these novels create fictional worlds that help us understand more clearly what it means to be human.