Fidgeting Fingers and Fickle Flesh in Flaubert

Abstract

ABSTRACT Writing about Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze comments on the body as the ‘zone of indiscernibility' between man and animal, especially ‘as it is flesh or meat.' Bacon's fleshy zone, I argue, finds an early illustration in Madame Bovary, where Flaubert will also incorporate notions of ‘animal life’ as described by the nineteenth-century pathologist, Xavier Bichat. This essay will examine these fleshy zones as they relate to changing ideas of skin, tactility, and those, fluid permeable zones between human and animal and between individual bodies and the penetrating forces of others and the environment.