Emma Bovary Re-Imagined

IF 0.2 0 LITERATURE, ROMANCE
Larysa Smirnova
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Abstract

What to make of Emma Bovary’s dreaming constitutes a fundamental problem in the study of Flaubert’s novel. The dominant reading of Emma’s dream life adopts a critical stance toward her unwillingness, or incapacity, to accept her everyday reality. Showing how Flaubert’s text challenges our understanding of Emma as a sterile dreamer, this essay seeks to reevaluate her faculty of imagination as a powerful creative force. The argument is developed in two parts. Since no assessment of Emma’s relation to “unreality” can legitimately bypass a careful analysis of her reveries, the first part of this essay offers a detailed reading of the escape from reality that Emma fantasizes in chapter 12 of part 2 of the novel. Emma’s quixotic vision of a flight away from her husband is contrasted here with Charles Bovary’s realistic dream about their future together as a family. While Emma’s reverie seems at first glance only to throw into relief the magnanimity of Charles’s responsible but mimetically limited dreaming, a closer look at this passage reveals a textual complexity requiring further investigation into the mechanisms and implications of Emma’s dream production. This investigation is undertaken in the second part of the essay. Here, the findings that emerge from the analysis of the protagonist’s reverie will be tested against several prominent interpretations of Emma’s dreaming (by Albert Thibaudet, Gérard Genette, and Jonathan Culler). Noting their sympathetic but cautious evaluations of the enigma posed by Emma’s imagination, this essay concludes by suggesting a more radical affirmation of Emma’s force of imagination.
重新想象的艾玛·包法利
如何理解包法利的梦是福楼拜小说研究中的一个基本问题。对艾玛梦中生活的主流解读,对她不愿意或没有能力接受日常生活的现实,采取了一种批判的立场。这篇文章展示了福楼拜的文本如何挑战我们对艾玛作为一个无趣的梦想家的理解,试图重新评估她作为一种强大的创造力的想象力。该论点分为两部分展开。由于对艾玛与“非现实”的关系的任何评估都不能合理地绕过对她的幻想的仔细分析,本文的第一部分详细解读了小说第二部分第12章中艾玛幻想的逃离现实。艾玛堂吉诃德式的逃离丈夫的幻想与查尔斯·包法利关于他们未来一家人的现实梦想形成了对比。虽然乍一看艾玛的遐想似乎只是让查尔斯负责任但模仿有限的梦的宽宏大量变得轻松,但仔细看这段话,就会发现文本的复杂性,需要进一步研究艾玛的梦产生的机制和含义。这个调查是在文章的第二部分进行的。在这里,从主人公的幻想分析中得出的发现将与几个著名的对艾玛梦的解释(由阿尔伯特·蒂博代特、格姆拉德·吉内特和乔纳森·卡勒)进行检验。注意到他们对艾玛的想象力所构成的谜的同情但谨慎的评价,这篇文章的结论是对艾玛的想象力的力量提出了更激进的肯定。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Romanic Review
Romanic Review Arts and Humanities-Arts and Humanities (all)
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
期刊介绍: The Romanic Review is a journal devoted to the study of Romance literatures.Founded by Henry Alfred Todd in 1910, it is published by the Department of French and Romance Philology of Columbia University in cooperation with the Departments of Spanish and Italian. The journal is published four times a year (January, March, May, November) and balances special thematic issues and regular unsolicited issues. It covers all periods of French, Italian and Spanish-language literature, and welcomes a broad diversity of critical approaches.
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