in relation to Charles.
The hallmark of Flaubert's style is irony, of which there are many forms in the text.
The discrepancy between Emma's position and her aspirations, which she fails to recognise, is a fundamental
irony. Irony is the distinguishing tone of much narrative comment: when Emma takes up piano lessons to
enable her to visit Leon in Rouen "after only a month she was indeed found to have made considerable
progress" (III, 4). Flaubert however makes it clear that this progress was more in the art of love than
music. Juxtaposition is often exploited as a source of irony: a good example is the scene between Emma
and Rodolphe at the agricultural show (II, 8) or the bickering between the chemist and the curate over
her corpse (III, 9). Even the names are satirical: 'Bovary' recalls bovine and hence stupid, and 'Lheureux' in
French means 'the happy one'. Ironic narrative was nothing new Stendhal, for example, makes extensive
use of it but the sensitivity with which Flaubert handled it was. Some of his characters are unashamedly
satirised e.g. the pharmacist Homais (in particular his 'triumph' in being awarded the legion d'honeur)
and Binet, the boring bourgeois. His treatment of Emma is much subtler: she is mocked for her Romantic
fantasies and yet she also elicits considerable sympathy. In much of the text that relates to literature
the reader should also be wary, for, in many cases, there is a double irony operating: the first discussion
between Leon and Emma in II, 1 illustrates precisely the traps hidden in the text. And when Emma attends
the opera in II, 15 despite the critical distance that she tries to maintain, knowing by this stage "the triviality
of those passions which art paints so much larger than life", she realises that "her desire to mock was
powerless against the role's poetic appeal". This is the dilemma the reader of Madame Bovary confronts
on every page. As the critic Terence Cave has put it, "by portraying Emma as a reader, the novel deflates
not only her false expectations, but also the reader's". Irony then becomes the tool through which Flaubert
lays bare the processes by which readers "inflate" a text.
There has been a great deal of debate as to
whether Madame Bovary should be considered a work of realism. Flaubert despised classification and
was adamant that he was not a realist author. In the text he makes explicit not just the inadequacy of
literature as a guide to life but also the inauthenticity of the words that constitute it: "human language is
like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing
to move the stars to pity". The scientific rigour with which Flaubert dedicated himself to finding the right
words for the pettiness of provincial life and his desire to reflect this in writing a "novel about nothing",
devoid of dramatic events the closest he gets is the elopement which never was do however allow him
to be characterised as a realist novelist in the historical sense of the word i.e. operating in an artistic
context that was just beginning to value the everyday and the ordinary (made fashionable especially
by the paintings of Gustave Courbet). The importance of Flaubert's medical family background to his
methods should not be underestimated; the convergence of scientific observation and realist detail is
most evident at Emma's deathbed (medical students are said to use it as a case study for arsenic poisoning!)
and in the operation on Hippolyte's club foot. One of Flaubert's most heartfelt desires was to learn to
employ the same stratagem for the observation of the soul, for as he said "everything that one writes is
true... Poetry is as precise as geometry" (letter of 1852)