memory is a dreamer: after Emma Bovary
the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand; re-reading Madame Bovary, again, against despair
I’m in the kitchen, chopping some sage or braiding some rosemary with the thyme from the garden, tying them together in a knot, washing capers off their Mediterranean sea-salt, peeling a carrot or slicing one of the long banana peppers we buy from the one corner shop weekly and, without turning my eyes away from the food, I say something like, ‘Do you remember. . .’
‘Yes,’ answers L., my partner, before proceeding with telling a different story from the one I started. And I pick up the string anyway, throwing in a recollection of mine, jarring the yarn of our memories, until we patch up something warming. Misremembering is a requisite for a memory to become collective and collective memories are what the past is to the future, essential if to be present.
‘Well, well, let’s keep up our heart, whatever happens, and when you go to rest remember that someone loves you.’ As George Sand put it in a letter to Gustave Flaubert, dated 8th December 1866.
George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, (1804 – 1876) was a French novelist, playwright, memoirist and journalist. Sand was a prolific and celebrated writer – a “genius”, according to François-René de Chateaubriand – and often pinged as a leading figure of the Romantic movement, which was prominent in Europe at the time, but in my library Sand is foremost the great writer of rural France and a socialist. Sand – sometimes she, sometimes he, occasionally we – approached justice earnestly and believed in the rooting power of words. With their life and their work, Sand reclaimed the right for women to speak up and to grab a share of men’s happiness – good food cooked by someone else, entertainment, education, a career of one’s own, fulfilled sexual desires – and exemplified the aberrance of societal, gendered roles. George Sand wasn’t afraid of love, either in fiction or in life, taking public figures as lovers, the dramatist and poet Alfred de Musset and the composer Frédéric Chopin most famously.
Heartfelt Sand was a great friend to and of French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880). The pair, who had almost opposite aesthetic ambitions and political views at most, contrasting at the least, entertained a spirited and regular epistolary relationship for over ten years (until Sand’s death). The letters flow between these two eagle-eyed thinkers of the 19th century like a stream of free associations, merging mundane observations with concerns about the Franco-Prussian war and reflections about the role of the arts, as well as updates about their reciprocal writings. Lamentations about the exercise, too.
‘I mistrust your novel about the theatre.’ Flaubert wrote to George Sand: ‘You like those people too much! Have you known any well who love their art? What a quantity of artists there are who are only bourgeois gone astray!’ (undated letter but in response to Sand’s letter from 18th September 1868).
Flaubert didn’t believe the heart had any business with the art. He described his writing method as a scientific endeavour, and he praised literature for its impartial quality. ‘Has the good God ever uttered it, his opinion?’ Flaubert asked Sand in December 1866, before announcing that the ‘first comer is more interesting than Monsieur Gustave Flaubert, because he is more general and therefore more typical.’ Gustave Flaubert was also hailed as the great novelist of literary realism.
Reading through the correspondence of Sand and Flaubert, I gave myself a whiplash injury. There was so much to reckon with, from my French education and past history classes, but vague memories of how I had read the authors’ respective novels clashed with the reader I have become today, and I found much more to be provoked by and annoyed about than I had wished for when I stepped back into these archives. Views on the world that have caused me to disagree; then, think about alternatives. I devoured the letters, curious as a raven, and kept thinking that, non, Flaubert, your novels are no bare bones. I had always read them like I take in a cabaret show – charismatic, human. But, fair, I thought too; writers rarely are good judges of their own work or, as the reader who cooks would know, any idea, any ingredient, any theory, any dish is always a foreigner inside the kitchen until one starts cooking with them. That is to say: in the mind of someone else, one is always misremembering.
It is easy to misremember a book too, so I took Flaubert up on his words and read his debut novel, Madame Bovary (1856), again. The novel tells the story of a marriage between Charles, a good-hearted but incapable doctor and husband, with Emma, a farm girl who was raised in a convent. Quickly after their union and her move into Charles’ residence, Emma is unstimulated by her new (and somewhat unexpected) rural, middle-class reality, which is far from the Parisian adventures she had wished for herself. Emma begins living above her means instead, seeking inspiration in the romantic novels she reads. She goes shopping, takes on two lovers, Leon and Rodolphe, until she eventually kills herself by ingesting a high dose of arsenic. Even with death, Emma is disappointed as she had thought the toxin would release her by means of a gentle and swift death. It is long and painful instead, like a sunny but uninspiring afternoon.
With each new read, my frustration with how Emma has been characterised – and I am pleading guilty – in academic papers, articles, in passing, and the media grows deeper. Emma Bovary is often reduced to being a woman who simply didn’t know better, a passive and frivolous soul. A real “Marie Antoinette”1 of her generation and class; I bet Sofia Coppola would have shot her biting into glazed doughnuts instead of layered and fluffy pink rosette cakes brilliantly (please do?)2. Wit isn’t impartial, as Coppola suggested with her portrayal of the beheaded (last) Queen of France, and Emma Bovary too is a good actress. By looking at the Paris she had wanted for herself, Emma Bovary is walking up streets of her own making, finding pleasure and dreaming of what she could not experience first-hand – remembering what and whom she wouldn’t get to know otherwise. If ennui summarises the Bovary’s marriage well, Emma isn’t boring for a second. She is a woolgatherer and ingenuity is a mighty skill that has the potential to overturn a repressive system. Fact is, Madame Bovary, which was first serialised in La Revue de Paris between October and December 1856, was banned for offending public morality. During Flaubert’s trial in January 1857, the French prosecution didn’t denounce Emma Bovary’s adultery per se, but the joy she had drawn from committing her adulteries3.
‘She wanted to die, Flaubert wrote, ‘but she also wanted to live in Paris.’ Happiness is a powerful energy.
Flaubert famously said that Madame Bovary was a novel about ‘nothing’. I love this description – praise be Flaubert isn’t rolling in his grave as I dare giving him credit/authorship! – because it is exactly in the breeze that Flaubert’s realism strengthens. Or in the particles that make the air brush the back of the reader’s neck – ‘the first comer’ as Flaubert put it, the imperceptible until notice is paid. Flaubert’s distinctive style, for one, serves him well as his singular handling of the indirect speech allows Flaubert to report on events while leaving room for the subconscious to be influential, a skill more recent literature has often lost in search for a stripped-out writing style. Reading Flaubert invites frantic reading behaviours because it is noisy by means of the peculiar – outfits, one’s teeth alignment, the colour of the leaves on the trees, nothing is ever left to imagination. Unless, perhaps, everything is imaginative as any boundary between what is real and what is unreal is abolished. Madame Bovary is bottomless, and this is why the novel remains one of my favourite books to read time and again. There are far less “immoralities” in Madame Bovary than freedom.
Still quoting from Madame Bovary: ‘Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.’
Dreaming isn’t always idle, but it is a remedy against despair.
If George Sand signed most letters to Flaubert as ‘your troubadour’, lively and social as Sand was, always mentioning visiting someone, somewhere, Flaubert had come back from his travels, which had taken him to Beirut, Greece, Turkey and Carthage, where he had researched Salammbô (1862), his historical novel set during the Mercenary Revolt. Maybe he had had enough with being prosecuted by the French government for their immoralities. Anyhow, he settled down in his family home in Le Croisset, down the Seine near Rouen, where he lived like a recluse while working on his manuscript for L’Education sentimentale (1868).
Sentimental Education, which spans from the 1848 French Revolution and the establishment of the Second French Empire, is a coming-of-age novel that relays Flaubert’s views about humanity. His letters – keep in mind that I’d rather pick a correspondence over a(n) (auto)biography – show him as stubborn and intransigent, with other people as much as he was with himself, and they reveal that he didn’t believe in monarchism or republicanism or socialism, not even in progress. Still, I can’t bring myself to call Flaubert a cynic, as he has often been described post-mortem. To quote George Sand: ‘L’Education sentimentale has been a misunderstood book, as I have told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me.’ I insist. Look into the eyes of Frédéric Moreau, the main character of Sentimental Education, and you will be faced with a wolf; that is, his insatiable romantic life. As Sand told Flaubert on 12th January 1876:
‘All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with, because people did not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable state of society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault.’
If misremembering a life event is a well-known coping mechanism, I am of the opinion that there isn’t such a thing as misreading a book. Flaubert didn’t dislike humankind per se but the societal structures that lure individuals to believe they could be happier always. If only they worked harder; be better; be more deserving, pursuing something else always, instead of acknowledging an ambient feeling. Cooks often orchestrate their most surprising dish with fewer ingredients – flavoursome, whetted. Or, putting the ball back into Flaubert’s court in good epistolary practice:
‘One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.’ – Madame Bovary
In Le Croisset, years after the publication of his first novel, still writing and aging, Flaubert was experiencing Emma Bovary’s loneliness: looking at Paris from its outskirts; looking back over his life. In the same 1966 letter referenced above, to George Sand, Flaubert even credited the goldfish for company at dinnertime but, Flaubert being the great stylist he was, he had processes to subsist. Still from reading his letters, to Sand and other friends and lovers, it is obvious that he could spend days moving sentences around the one paragraph. He often weeped about being unsuccessful too. In his correspondence, I discovered that Flaubert and Sand read their works in progress out loud to each other – up to three hundred pages in one night! Flaubert had training though; he was renowned for the shouting room he had dedicated inside his home to bellowing the sentences he wrote, so he could ensure his writing had the right musicality. His ‘gueuloir’ (from ‘gueuler’ in French, to howl) served his fanatical relationship with style and rhythm. Flaubert was excellent at fine-tuning reality.
Both Sand and Flaubert led aristocratic lives. To contextualise here is necessary as otherwise the learning I take from how they approached their creative and/or political lives would be unhelpful at the least, discouraging at most. Flaubert didn’t take on the extra shifts to pay his rent so he could write here and there, amongst other things; he wrote. Still, there is much to say about the truths the subconscious carries against despair. If Flaubert thought living was filled with disappointments, he drafted his novels thoroughly enough to demonstrate to his readers that beauty lies in the memory we construct. In the possibilities which only nothingness can hold, allowing room for our dreams to be and future memories to be shared. During a demonstration, as Flaubert reminded me in Sentimental Education, the banners and their slogans nourish our togetherness and entertain our history as a collective of stories.
‘Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.’ – Madame Bovary
On the bookshelf in the corner of my kitchen, you will find cookbooks and pots stored next to three notebooks. Only one has a few blank pages to spare and each one of them is filled with stained, handwritten entries where I keep track of measurements and twists on some recipes I cook often. They are most likely undated and untitled. I have kept those notebooks for about six years but without a coherent method, and I have no other ambition for them than to shoulder me whenever I need a little reassurance. You know, it’s Tuesday night and I have just come home late, and I’m wet, and I can’t remember how I make my minestrone but I’m craving the stroke of rose harissa at the back of my throat, so I pick up one of the notebooks and start flicking through it, for as long as I need, until I am reminded of what I was looking for.
margaux
PS. If you are expecting George Sand for dinner too, here is a tip: ‘I shall go to your house about three o’clock on Saturday so that we can read before and after dinner; I dine on a little fish, a chicken wing, an ice and a cup of coffee, never anything else, by which means my stomach keeps well.’ (Thursday evening, 29th April 1869)
Valentine is my favourite. (George Sand did like people.)
PPS. I’m excited to be introducing you to the Feminist Food Friends (FFF for short), a gentle collective aimed at community-building and skill-sharing in the food space. 'Slow collaboration' is our motto — and we’d love it if you joined us. You can read more about the FFF via the Feminist Food Journal:
& sign-up for our first FFF event on September 29 (7 am PST/10 am EST/3 pm GMT/4 pm CEST), at https://luma.com/a4mibq9c.
The brilliant Isabela Bonnevera, the co-founder of Feminist Food Journal, will facilitate a conversation about what it means to be a woman in food writing, and where we go from here. We’ll discuss what FFF means for its founding members and what we’re aiming to achieve. We’ll share how we (try to) balance writing our newsletters alongside other responsibilities, such as jobs, care work, and tending to our own health needs, and how that influences the logistics of working together across a vast swath of time zones.
Most importantly, this first event is as much about introducing ourselves to you as it is about your presence: What would you like to see from FFF? How would you like to participate in this space? How can we support your work, too? This event will be about 90 minutes long and have plenty of time dedicated to audience Q&A.
thank you for reading The Onion Papers. i’m margaux, a writer and cook, and this is my hybrid newsletter. if you enjoy my work, remember to subscribe and/or invite friends to the party as you keep me going.
PS. i write novels too.
Marie Antoinette, born Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria before she was married to Louis XVI, was the last Queen of France before the French Revolution and the establishment of the French First Republic.
This is a reference to the 2006 historical drama film, written, directed and produced by Sofia Coppola and starring Kristen Dunst in the role of Marie Antoinette.
Flaubert was acquitted after his trial and Madame Bovary was published as one single book volume in April 1857. It became a bestseller.
I really enjoyed this newsletter; it's an incredibly interesting topic, extremely well-written.