Petit-Bourgeois lives and loves

Money: Cause of all evil ... The god of the day - but not to be confused with Apollo Politicians call it emoluments; lawyers, retainers; doctors, fees; employees, salary; workmen, pay; servants, wages. "Money is not happiness."

Gustave Flaubert from A Dictionary of Received Ideas, c. 1850-80

TROTSKY once remarked that there was nothing more pathetic in life than to see the middle class or the petit-bourgeois in the process of primary accumulation. Just what this means in the nitty-gritty of its sordid details is perhaps best described in Gustave Flaubert's classic, Madam Bovary, sub-titled Provincial Manners, sometimes translated as A Story Of Provincial Life. It is the sub-title that provides a certain code of the novel: "studies in manners" is a metaphor for the representation of society in all its effects as it opens up the social existence of a class and explores its reality through the hidden stories of people with their passions and dreams, their constant monotony, obscure lives and silent intensities. Caught between the one squalor of bourgeois reality and the other squalor of pretence, Flaubert shows people of this class talking, thinking and acting just as people talk, think and act in life that made a French critic say at the time of the book's publication in 1856 that it was "a scalpel applied to the heart, the soul, the world, alas! in all its hideousness".

Here is the Bovary story. A young woman, Emma Bovary is married to Charles Bovary, a dull country doctor. Like most women who never stop yearning for something or the other, Emma is possessed of worldly and sensual-romantic longings. But she only knew the fantasies of her class that she derived from novels and pictures, its imagination of luxury and "society", romance and adventure. Emma's complaint about men around her was that they did not fit into the imagined world of her desires and dreams as mediated by the books she was brought up on. Charles could not swim, fence, or fire a pistol, and was unable to explain a riding term she had come across in a book. Rodolphe (one of her lovers) with his man- of-the-world airs, stiff leather riding boots and so on is a cut above Charles but fails to carry pistols revealing "a kind of coarseness", as for Leon, he is "incapable of heroism, weak, commonplace, as well as parsimonious and chicken-hearted."

Emma counters the parsimoniousness of her class by spending recklessly but it is an expenditure that merely repeats the basic terms of the same class: class as possession, consumption as value. As Emma is shown into Monsieur Guillaumin's drawing room with its porcelain stove, dubious pictures, crystal door knobs, cactus and all that kitsch, Emma's reaction is spontaneous: "This is the kind of drawing room I ought to have." This is the bourgeois version of luxury with its fetish for objects which is, after all, her class' assumption of value. As Flaubert puts it, "it is the false equation of objects with feelings, with the joys of the heart."

"Moreover, the nearer things were at home, the more she turned her thoughts away from them. Everything that made up her immediate surroundings, tedious countryside, imbecile petty bourgeois, mediocrity of life, seemed an exception in the world, a particular piece of bad luck that had seized on her, while beyond, as far as the eye could see, ranged the vast lands of happiness and passions. In her desire, she confused the sensual pleasures of luxury with the joys of the heart".

The paradox is that Emma is not wrong about "the tedious countryside, imbecile petty bourgeois, mediocrity of life". It is all that and worse but her response to her social dissatisfaction mirrors her petit-bourgeois class; she is part of the problem, no part of the solution. On the one hand she believes that "the powers of love and languid tenderness of love" cannot be separated from the setting and objects that for her entail "the sparkle of precious stones and the shoulder knots on servants' livery". Emma's attention to objects, fashion, novelty, Paris, all her concerns for the signs of superior status, "to be seen at the right place at the right time" is socially natural to her class. Look around and you would see that the mixture of thrift and ostentatiousness, morality of work and the ethic of success and advancement, social satisfaction and social envy, is what makes the petit-bourgeois world, the world of Madam Bovary, of Emma and the others - and ours too.

Emma's response to her all her discontents, ("she was all desire and rage and hatred") was simply "letting go". First, to spend, spend, spend to the extent that expenditure became a social necessity and elegance the key to open this and that door. Emma finds her identity in and through objects; all the things she buys for herself is to enhance her standing in the bourgeois world: a map of Paris; a frilled shirt with three gold buttons; little coloured slippers with ribbons; a blotting pad, writing case and penholder; a pair of big blue vases for the mantelpiece; an ivory box with a silver thimble; a rug in wool and velvet; a Gothic prayer stool, Italian dictionaries and a grammar; a horse and a riding whip with a silver handle; a cigar case; and so on and on. Yet, "she groaned over the velvets she did not have". But if you do not have it, imagine to be an aristocrat, have a sense of style and gesture like tossing her last five francs to the blind man: "It seemed to her a fine thing to throw it away like that".

"Seemed" is the operative word. Emma sees herself as an aristocrat in the gesture and even if it has been done purely for the show of it, she wants to be recognised as someone "up there". Semblance, fantasy, romantic dreams is all. Desperate with the raging of unsatisfied desire, Emma tries to find her solace in extra-marital affairs. Both fail - how could they work when the face had become the mask? - and she is finally driven to suicide.

While Emma becomes the perspective on petty bourgeois life, forcing it to reveal its mediocrity through the scandal of her story, that also implicitly questions the institution of marriage and the role/place of women in a petit-bourgeois society, Madam Bovary has a deeper and wider perspective: the movement of social forces and the relation of that movement to money. Of course, there are instances of aristocratic life, of stable wealth and class, but the overall impression is one of money on the make, an economic and social transformation in which the middle class did its "bit", acquiring a something here, something there, with winners and losers in the process. (Given the inherent middle class sense of insecurity, it can never do more than a bit).

The central social perspective of Madam Bovary is the accomplishment of the middle class and the consequences for the society it creates; the dominance of industrial and financial capital and its values or petit-bourgeois culture which meant the marginalisation of labourers and servants, women and the physically handicapped. Homais, the paragon of bourgeois culture ("he was obsessed with obtaining the Legion of Honour") and the voice of its "progress" while unable to cure Hippolyte, the blind man is quite prepared to "put him away", he also dumps Emma because she was becoming a threat to the good commerce of society, to its values or sense of order. Homais is the role model, the social mean with his I-Me-Myself philosophy. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the petit-bourgeois knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It is not that the buying and selling of things and borrowing and lending of money are a constant activity, it is just that the sub-text is financial and everything is determined by this activity which is what it is in a petty bourgeois world. To take a few examples of "losers" and "winners". First, the "losers" if only because in a world in transition from feudalism to a capitalism, "red in tooth and claw" there are more "losers" than "winners".

1. The pauperisation of Charles-Dennis Bovary, father of Charles Bovary. He was forced to leave the army in which he was an assistant-surgeon major to marry a girl who brings a large dowry. This provides him enough to carry on for a couple of years before he gets into business and then into farming. He loses out in both ventures to become bankrupt in the end.

2. The declining fortunes of Emma's father who loses money every year on the farm and ends up paralysed, helpless to do anything for his granddaughter.

3. The ruin of the Bovary household: Charles has some initial success but when he moves from Tostes to Yonville, his luck no longer holds: Homais undercuts him and Emma's expenditure traps them in a cycle of unending debts. When Charles dies, there is nothing left, "a balance of 12 francs and 75 centimes".

As against these failures (there are others too), there is the outrageous fortunes of Lheureux and Homais. The first uses his capital both as straight investment and as a means of gaining control over local commerce, building up a network of debts around his competitors who are then forced to sell out under distress. "Everything is going well for him" we are told and in the end they are going even better, in addition to profits from his shop, he wins a contract along with an assurance of shares in a factory that brings him close in achieving his ambition of controlling the "whole of Yonville trade in his hands".

Homais, the chemist, uses the same cut-and-thrust obsequiousness, the same commercial cunning, putting interests over principles ("he sacrificed his dignity to the more serious interests of his business"), flouting regulations and showing a keen sense of the importance of publicity, of the creation of an image that was so essential for business. In this mundane middle-class, petit- bourgeois world, it is the economy of money that is all- important. Homais and Lheureux prosper but never spend, only materialise in their goods, their commerce, its language and ideology.

A good novel is also ("also" is the key word) social history and Madam Bovary could therefore be read in different ways. At one level it is the story of a woman in the provinces, steeped in the commonplace imagination of the petit-bourgeois with its attendant values, kitsch consumerism and general mediocrity. At another level it is a story about money, how it is made and the high human cost of making it. The stench of cheap money runs right through the book.

RAVI VYAS

Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, Penguin Classics, translated by Alan Russel, first published in English translation, 1950, œ2.50.

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