Madame Bovary's Slipper

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Notes

[1] The novel's reworking of the Cinderella story (as well as other fairytales) has been pointed out before though the surgical episode I discuss is generally overlooked in the discussions (for example, see Orr's Writing the Masculine 34–49 and her “Flaubert and the Sleeping Beauty”).

[2] All quotations from the novel refer to the 1965 Norton edition and all translations from the letters are my own except where otherwise stated.

[3] The misfit dogs Emma to the grave for even her coffin does not fit into its casing so that the gaps must be filled with mattress padding (244).

[4] “When midnight strikes [sonnera]” she had insisted to Rodolphe, “you must think of me” (137), but, after her death, he and Leon are fast asleep while it is only Charles who, as the midnight hour sounds, is awake “never ceasing to think of her” (248).

[5] The line recalls Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, the greatest of the nineteenth century's beauty‐and‐the‐beast tales, which has oft‐discussed textual links to Flaubert's novel: both Emma and Esmeralda come to grief due to their dreamy clichés of love, Emma's greyhound takes its name from Esmeralda's pet goat, and there is even a picture of Esmeralda in the notary's house. Another connection worth mentioning is the symbolic role that shoes play in both texts even if their meanings differ: in Hugo's tale, shoes become a central sign of maternal love, while Flaubert rejects the Romantic cult of the mother. Moreover, Esmeralda confesses to being a witch after being threatened with la brodequin, a boot‐like instrument of torture that proleptically echoes Hippolyte's tormenting orthopedic device.

[6] The last Bovary, Berthe, gets her name from an attendee at the Vaubyessard ball (64). If her impoverished destiny as an orphan at a cotton factory (255) seems an especially cruel touch, it is in line with the fairy tale: “au temps que la reine Berthe filait” means “once upon a time.” Queen Berthe, the legendary mother of Charlemagne, became linked to spinners and storytellers (and was sometimes thought of as Ma Mère L'oye herself). Jacob Grimm saw a connection between her abnormally large feet and her high destiny (see Warner 125–28).