How Two Women Named Emma Can Tell What Kind of Novel You're In

On bookslut today, I found a list from the American Book Review that seemed to me to be of a piece, interest wise, with the most recent thoughts posted by this outfit, vis a vis privileged chunks of text. Some of them are interested in their ideas about what a last line really is (the BANRR is more strict about sentences); their numbers one and four, for example, come from weirdly punctuated texts, and to throw the whole sentence up would be pdf-straining. The other chunk of special text, in addition to these prides of place, is the title, and today I want to talk about those three things working in conjunction, mostly because I still haven't picked out the book that will be this outfit's next selection. Hopefully, that will change by the end of the post.

Today I finished reading Madame Bovary by celebrated grump and mustache enthusiast Gustave Flaubert. The first sentence is as follows:

"We were in class when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy, not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.”

The last sentence is as follows:

"He has just been given the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur."

The title, of course, is Madame Bovary. According to something I read a long time ago and don't remember, at one point Flaubert was once asked who provided the inspiration for his titular heroine, and bellowed back "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" And in addition to channeling her creator and naming her text, Emma indeed is the reason for the book: she and her dalliances provide the plotting through which Flaubert channels the scathing things he has to say about bourgeois philistines, especially the pathetic Charles (the new boy from the first sentence) and the worthless pharmacist Homais (the "he" from the final sentence). For such a dominant personality, though, it seems, to my currently-occupied-with-textual-privilege eye, curious that those framing sentences have nothing to do with the titular Madame. (It's also interesting, though I'm not sure why, that the "we" making observations in the first sentence and chapter drops out and never appears again; its as though the novel is a insanely psychologically acute "Where Are Your Classmates?" from the Tostes Yearbook.)

Compare this treatment to that of another Emma. Ms. Woodhouse is introduced like this:

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

So here we know we are getting a book that wants to know: what is Emma Woodhouse like? Presumably she will be interesting enough that she will care (though Jane Austen thought no one would like her), and hopefully, for plot's sake, at least something will distress or vex her. But the big difference that I am angling at between this two novels, and using my hokey first-and-last-sentences-as-thematic-indices tool for since this is a blog and not a paper, is that one is focused on a review of a system and one the review of a person. Since I work at Borders, and have a family which is large and largely uninterested in what they call "books you have to think about", I spend a lot of my time wondering what kind of generic difference that makes for: what makes the sort of book that I would like and that my boss would instruct me to leave off of a display, since no one would buy it? Or, what kind of book would I love that my mother would refuse to put before her book club? This structural exercise has opened a set that seems potentially potent, the systems review vs. individual idea. I will sit down with some Sophie Kinsella, a book which my family and Borders customers seem to love (and about which, I swear, I have no opinion yet whatever) and see where she falls between these Emma poles.

Up next: I am not yet done with Grendel, so may you all. So I will probably write another post on him in the next day or two (plus I thought up of a line about him that is too, too good not to post).

Also -- did you know that if you stay up til midnight, you can read what feels like the next day's op-eds? And that Monday is a Krugman day? Kickass.