Chapter 4 Death by Daydreaming: Madame Bovary1

When Madame Bovary was being published for the first time, in instalments, in the Revue de Paris of 1856, it became clear that Flaubert and his publishers were going to be prosecuted for an assault on morals and religion; the publishers decided immediately to suppress one particular scene that they felt would produce a scandal. Flaubert was furious, of course. The scene was the famous ‘cab’ one — the scene where Emma Bovary and her second lover, Léon, make love all afternoon in a closed horse-drawn carriage that is driven continuously through the city of Rouen, with the curtains drawn, in front of the bewildered eyes of the bourgeois. In his famous defence, Flaubert’s lawyer based his case on the assumption that nobody could be inspired to commit adultery by such a tragic and horrifying story of a woman who goes crazy and commits suicide in a particularly gruesome way. He also quoted, in full, the whole of the censored ‘cab’ scene, showing that it contains no explicit sexuality at all — in fact all that the readers, just like the bourgeois of Rouen, are allowed to see is this crazy coach apparently possessed by a ‘frenzy of locomotion’. To further his view, Flaubert’s lawyer quoted several sexually explicit lines by famous, well-loved authors, which had escaped censorship at that time.

So why was this scene so scandalous? It could be argued that nonexplicit sex in literature might be sexier than explicit sex — which may well be true. Also, the fact that neither the audience of Rouen bourgeois nor the driver of the carriage can guess what is going on inside the cab makes it more tantalising (and perhaps the readers felt insulted by an unwanted identification with the stupid bourgeois).

But I would like to argue that it is the combination of the ‘scandalous’ nature of what is happening — the ruthlessly exhibitionistic quality of the sexuality — with the gruesome horror of the psychological process that is taking place in Emma (subtly but most definitely implied in th