Geocritiquing Flaubert’s Scaping of Yonville in Madame Bovary

Abstract

On 4 September 1852, thirty-year-old Gustave Flaubert wrote to novelist and poet Louise Colet with an update about the manuscript of Madame Bovary: ‘j’ai fait huit pages de ma 2e partie: la description topographique d’un village’.1 The specified portrayal of Yonville-L’Abbaye, which occupies fifteen paragraphs at the beginning of the first chapter of the second part of the novel,2 is rich in environmental details that provide an insight into the geographical and sociocultural identity of the fictional town. On 6 April 1853, Flaubert wrote to Colet that ‘il faut faire des tableaux, montrer la nature telle qu’elle est’.3 This insistence on the importance of realistically representing nature amplifies the significance of Flaubert’s scaping of the locale (i.e. his crafting of the scene). The evocation of the northern surroundings of Yonville, which encompasses plentiful details of the environmental conditions framing the dealings of the small-scale populace, is ripe for analysis based on a theoretical framework that emblematizes the spatial turn4 of recent decades: geocriticism. Bertrand Westphal offers a definition of geocritical precepts: ‘la géocritique [entreprend] de sonder les espaces humains que les arts mimétiques agencent par et dans le texte, par et dans l’image, ainsi que les interactions culturelles qui se nouent sous leur patronage’.5 Flaubert’s evocation of factors contributing to a sense of place6 indicates his uncommon awareness of environmental dynamics in the region that encompassed his growth as a Norman novelist. For Anne Green, Mary Orr and Timothy Unwin, ‘Flaubert’s aesthetics are […] linked to his intrinsically modern sense of places and spaces’.7 The topological account of Yonville, which conveys Flaubert’s attunement8 to the nature of human-modified landscapes, highlights the economic and sociocultural circumstances of the town before the key protagonists appear. Éric Le Calvez proposes that ‘la description d’Yonville-L’Abbaye […] est initialement déterminée par le fait que tout […] tend à transformer le paysage en un tableau écrit’.9 Flaubert’s extensive account of the alluvial plain occupied by the town is analogous to landscape art favoured in the Salons of the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris, yet the scaping of Yonville has added depth in terms of ecological markers that give a flavour of environmental conditions in rural Normandy during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article will geocritically focus on three types of human and non-human features that are key to Flaubert’s representation of the fictional town (roads; waterways; flora), with the aim of foregrounding the extent to which the narrative enriches our understanding of the non-human elements of an ecoregion in which the author was deeply enmeshed10 throughout a period during which the culture and the landscape of northern France began to feel the effects of industrial forces.