Exhuming Marguerite Gautier

Abstract

“It is remarkable,” wrote Kierkegaard in 1842, “that the whole of European literature lacks a feminine counterpart to Don Quixote. May not the time be coming, may not the continent of sentimentality yet be discovered?” (Either/Or, 210). As it turned out, the discovery was not far off: 15 years later, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary would launch a tradition of female quixotism that included some of the most important novels of the nineteenth century: Eça de Queirós’s O primo Basfíio, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina‚ and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta. Like Cervantes’s knight, Emma Bovary longs to enter the stories she reads. And in each case, this reading sets the plot in motion and is the key to the protagonist’s development. To understand either the knight or the adulteress, one must know the literary works and conventions the author has set out to deflate. Just as Cervantes’s novel depends on the reader’s familiarity with chivalric fiction, pastoral literature, and Greek romance, to read Madame Bovary one needs a map of the “continent of sentimentality.”KeywordsEconomic RealitySocial HierarchyClass StruggleClass TourismEmpty SignThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.