The Use of Minor Details in the Structure of

Madame Bovary
Essay Summary
- By Prashant

The essay is about the significance of the minor details in the

structure of Madame Bovary. The death of Emma’s brother is one
such detail, one that deserves a closer look. We learn of Emma’s
brother for the first time as Emma and Charles are departing for
Tostes after their wedding. Emma’s father remembering minute
details about his new bride as she rode behind him on horseback
through the snow to their new home shows the mastery of
Flaubert’s craft. Flaubert deliberately and exaggeratedly
displaced the emphasis from the protagonists to a minor character
beautifully rendering Rouault’s reminiscence and not giving any
direct glimpse into Charles’s or Emma’s feeling during the
wedding. At the same time, the passage also helps us imagine how
Rouault’s impatience with Emma’s uselessness on the farm must
have been influenced not only his wife’s death but also by the loss
of his grown son. We also discover that the son died within a short
period after the death of Emma’s mother, which occurred
sometime while Emma was away at the convent school. Such
inferences remind us of the large gaps in information about
Emma’s early years. Flaubert concentrates on her experience in
the convent school and her romantic reading, portraying her
homelife only to show how her education has made her unfit for
life on the farm. Several elements in the novel suggest that the
memory of her brother motivates Emma in her search for
happiness, Emma is subconsciously haunted y feelings of loss and
guilt, Emma’s primary inspiration for a powerful male figure
comes before she went to the convent school. Her vision of a
brother is of heroic, worshiping figure, one who performs love
and devotion to her in the forms of presents. Emma is motivated
for the rest of her life after her brother’s death partly a search for
someone to take the place of the brother she has lost. This
connection may be implied in the birth of her child. For Charles
it symbolizes a union between them but Emma feels about the
child as a redeeming figure provided that it is a boy. When Emma
learns that the child is a girl, she faints. Emma’s disappointment
towards Berthe suggests that she is motivated by the longing to
redeem herself and abolish feelings of inadequacy that are
involved in being a surviving female. Emma wishes to replace her
lost brother with her own child.

Emma’s relationship with her father further illustrates this need.

Several details suggest that when Charles first visits Rouault,
Emma is living like a stranger in her own home, living in the
shadows of her father’s grief and isolation. Rouault puts on a false
persona for company, and yet normally not even his daughter is
invited to dine with him. In the last analysis her father is only too
happy to marry her off.

Emma’s search for her lost brother might be seen later in her
initial relationship with Leon. Though consoled by his similarly
romantic tastes and titillated by his infatuation, she maintains a
platonic and sisterly relationship with him.
Her treatment of him as an adoring younger brother supports her
vain self-image as loyal wife, and her mild flirtation becomes an
intermediate point in her trajectory toward passionate adultery
with Rodolphe. But Leon may also satisfy that old Virginie-wish
for the heroic little brother. Leon’s departure could also be seen
as another abandonment, echoing her brother’s death. Emma
suffers an agony of repressed feelings during the farewell and the
subsequent discussions of Homais and Charles, and she
“shudders” when Charles mentions the danger of typhoid for
provincial students in Paris.
Another figure that may evoke Emma’s lost brother is Hippolyte.
Emma sees her operation as a way to elevate Charles’s status and
vicariously satisfy her own desire for power. After she discover
that Rodolphe is not worshipping brother who would commit
murder for her own sake, Emma is disillusioned with the affair
just as this new opportunity for redemption presents itself.
Hippolyte is about to undergo the operation that ironically will
leave him a worse cripple. During Hippolyte’s suffering Emma,
even if she has ulterior motives, nurses him in an act of kindness
that we have not seen n her character until this point.
The reappearance of Leon, however, revives her hope for a
younger brother figure. Despite the passionate nature of their
subsequent affair, Emma takes in the role of a maternal older
sister. She considers having him followed and demands absolute
devotion. When Leon fails to steal the money to pay her debts,
she cannot understand why he will not dishonour himself for her.
She wonders why his devotion does not send him off to perform
fantastic feats, like the brother of her past and of her dreams. In
the end it is not the actual debt that presses does upon Emma. Her
desperation comes from finding no one who will help her
regardless of the cost.

Yet there is one more evocation of her lost brother, one person
who would do anything within his power. Justin, will help her to
her death, even though in doing so he jeopardizes his employment
and his life. Yet. Even though trying to stop her at the last minute,
he obeys her. When Justin later returns to her grave, his reactions
form an ironic echo to Emma’s own silent grief after the death of
her brother. His sorrow is almost as powerful as Charles’s and
certainly more powerful than that of Emma’s other men. Flaubert
uses this exaggerated grief of a minor character to illustrate an
irony in the reactions of Rodolphe and Leon, who knew Emma
far better. Perhaps in some small way Emma has attained her
release through him, by passing on a legacy of loss. Justin will
never be able to talk about her death and clear his conscience, just
as Emma remained silent about the loss of her brother.
Emma's motivations in her search for fulfilment are generously
described by Flaubert or made implicit in her speech and gestures,
but he never makes explicit a connection between Rouault's
references to his dead son and Emma's thoughts and feelings. If
the loss of her brother has an influence on Emma, as is modestly
argued here, it can be considered an additional nuance in Emma's
characterization rather than a substitute for mainstream
interpretation. Given Flaubert's craft, his careful choice of detail,
we can see a minor motif such as this one as just
one more thread that contributes to the structural fabric of
Madame Bovary. Such details enrich the novel with their
resonance and become one of those subtle aspects of texture that
define a classic. The novel speaks in a multiplicity of ways while
maintaining a sense of cohesiveness. These details shadow the
main action, giving it three-dimensional depth and creating for us
a fresh reading experience each time as we struggle to absorb the
complex life the work embodies.