The Mystery Play in Madame Bovary: mœurs de province by Peter Rogers

Abstract

with Nichols’s reading of Roncevaux as a complex sign system, a site saturated with historical and sacred meaning. While her study of the Roland is largely limited to the Oxford version, Robinson Kelly examines the Tristan legend as it appears in both the Old French and Middle High German verse texts. She devotes two chapters to the tale, based on its bipartite narrative structure (before and after the love potion). Unlike Alexis and Roland, Tristan is “radically disconnected from a sense of belonging to place” (180), identifying primarily with the sea, which mirrors his unstable and fluid nature. The Hero’s Place is remarkably clear in its exposition, almost to a fault (I note the overuse of expressions such as “As previously discussed”). The analysis is accessible enough to be of use to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and its fresh critical approach will be of interest to scholars of early medieval literature. University of Georgia Catherine M. Jones ROGERS, PETER. The Mystery Play in Madame Bovary: mœurs de province. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 978-90-420-2706-0. Pp. 193. 39 a. It is hard to know where to begin in appraising this well-intentioned but unruly study. There are, to be sure, praiseworthy features: Rogers’s devotion to close reading and attentiveness to textual detail; his command of Madame Bovary and its variants and of Flaubert criticism. Unfortunately, however, the weaknesses outweigh the strengths, and readers are advised to put on a seatbelt for the roller coaster ride that reading this book represents. Few will quibble with the contention that Madame Bovary is rife with religious motifs, objects, and debates. But readers may not be convinced that it contains a mystery play, because there is so little substantive treatment of that topic and so much digression into other areas. Rogers’s free-associative/intuitive presentation makes following his line of thought challenging, as he leaps among events in the plot, critics, and other works by Flaubert, sprinkling Bible verses into the mix. Lengthy, distracting footnotes, brusque transitions, and cryptic asides heighten the impression of a disregard for the reader that is exacerbated by the lack of an index. Also troubling are the cases of misreading and far-fetched conclusions, the fallout, evidently, from Rogers’s eagerness to squeeze the novel into the mystery play mold. Commenting on the fate of l’Aveugle, who thanks to Homais’s machinations is “condamné à une réclusion perpétuelle dans un hospice,” Rogers proclaims “[t]he devil is finally, and forever, committed to his proper place: hell” (163), without explaining the link between “hospice” and “hell.” Discussing Homais’s attempts to exculpate himself after Emma’s poisoning, Rogers states that according to the pharmacist’s story, Emma “would have simply mistaken arsenic for a sugar solution, a potion that the pastor had advised her to take [...] and one that she had administered in the phlebotomy scene” (102). Aside from the fact that Emma swallows a powder, not a solution, this passage reveals a practice that is endemic to this study: the overzealous stringing together of plot elements. Similarly, close reading goes awry when Rogers attempts to connect, to no apparent end, occurrences of individual words, juxtaposing Rouault’s feelings about his work (“[un] métier maudit”) and Emma’s about the arsenic (“[e]lle Reviews 181 maudissait le poison”) (128), or Lheureux’s term “une misère” (for the price of a scarf) and the narrator’s “[un] misérable” (for l’Aveugle) (161). Sometimes the basis for these connections appears to be phonetic; noting that Charles cares for Berthe after Emma’s death as he did after she cut her cheek (allegedly while playing ), Rogers offers: The play continues when Flaubert portrays Charles as an attentive father: ‘Il raccommodait ses joujoux.’ In mending Berthe’s toys, Charles is at once a doctor and a producer of plays. At another level, he symbolizes playwright Flaubert who desired to be a writer but whose father, a doctor, was not open to such a career. (118) To sum up: joue evokes jouer which evokes joujoux which evokes play—in English, since pièce would not play into the wordplay. More bewilderingly, regarding...