Reading Flaubert in Jewish

• In Event: Displacing Jewish Modernism: Benjamin, Flaubert, Kafka

Abstract

Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary occupies a central place in the history of the European novel; it is the apotheosis of realism and also its collapse. The subject of an obscenity trial that made narrative point of view an urgent legal question, the novel centered around the world of a young woman from the provinces, who, caught up in the dreams of romantic fiction, destroyed her life. Echoes of Emma Bovary reverberate in works by Dvora Baron, her Hebrew translator, Dovid Bergelson, Sholem Aleichem, and M. Y. Berdichevsky. My paper will examine the resonance of Flaubert’s novel in Hebrew and Yiddish modernist writing. It will interrogate how the central elements of the novel, the idea of the provinces (and by extension the metropolitan center), women’s romantic desires, adultery, and novel reading are interpreted and translated in Jewish contexts. The paper asks what are the narrative paths of these Jewish Emma’s, whose acts of reading inspire revolutionary changes even as they, like Emma, cannot transcend their social and economic circumstance. What happens when Emma Bovary reads Jewish languages, and circulates in Jewish milieus? How far can we trace her reach, and how far can we locate Flaubert’s stylistic revolutions in Jewish literature?

Author

• Allison Hope Schachter, Vanderbilt University