Love and madness: ‘Lucia’ in Flaubert and Forster
In his essay on Delacroix, Baudelaire writes that “all the arts tend, if not to act as a substitute for each other, at least to supplement each other, by lending each other new strength and new resources”. In both Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), the main characters attend a performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and see its great mad scene. The recurrent allusions to the melodramatic Lucia add richness and complexity to each novel. They illuminate the characters and themes, raise the emotional intensity and heighten the psychological significance of the action.
As in Romeo and Juliet, the passionate lovers in Lucia try to transcend family hatred, but conclude in tragedy and death. Lucia loves Edgardo, the enemy of her family. Her brother opposes the marriage and convinces her with a forged letter that Edgardo has abandoned her. Edgardo challenges Lucia’s brother to a duel. Before that can take place, on her wedding night Lucia kills the man she’s been forced to marry, goes mad and dies. Overwhelmed by grief, Edgardo kills himself.
I
Emma Bovary loathes her provincial, limited, dull and dreary life, and tries to create a superior existence through love affairs, inspired by Donizetti’s opera. Flaubert writes that Emma’s “temperament was more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes”. Emma’s romantic longing for happiness echoes the tragedy of the opera’s heroine. Trying to make herself fall in love with her boorish and unappealing husband Charles, she hopes to exalt herself with music and “sang to him many melancholy adagios”. Flaubert’s description of her unrealistic idea of love comes straight from Lucia: “Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness.”
Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880)
In Either/Or (1843), Søren Kierkegaard observed, “It is remarkable that the whole of European literature lacks a feminine counterpart to Don Quixote. May not the time for this be coming, may not the continent of sentimentality yet be discovered.” Fourteen years later Emma, who lives on the impossible-to-achieve romantic illusions inspired by her escapist reading, becomes the Don Quixote of Yonville in Normandy. Emma, whose maid and confidante is ironically named Felicité, “tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books. . . . She read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of orgies and gory situations.” Finally, realising that she is dangerously vulnerable, Emma has to stop reading novels.
Flaubert refers three times to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, author of The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), the source of the opera. The town druggist Homais offers Emma books by Scott. After reading his novels she’s transported to a romanticised Scotland: “She fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels.” While watching the opera she recalls reading Scott in her youth and “seemed to hear through the mist the sound of Scotch bagpipes re-echoing over the heather”. Her remembrance of the novel helps her to understand the libretto, and she follows the story phrase by phrase through the bursts of music and vibrations of the violins.
Emma’s lovers, Rodolphe and Léon, perceive that she’s attractive, sensual and bored. As they each move in for the kill, she becomes their eager victim. Rodolphe’s vile and “brutal temperament” resembles Lucia’s villainous brother in the opera. As Rodolphe’s seduction matches Emma’s fantasies, she hears a prolonged cry “mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves”. As they attend the agricultural fair and the banal speeches contrast to his insincere words, Emma becomes his great prize. Her ecstatic exclamation, “I have a lover! a lover!” echoes the mad scene when Lucia sings, Alfin son tua (“At last I’m yours”). But the callous Rodolphe soon abandons her.
Léon first lures Emma with his pretentious interest in nature and literature. Again echoing the opera, he makes her want “to throw herself into his arms and say to him, ‘It is I; I am yours.’ ” After Léon’s three-year absence in Paris he unexpectedly reappears in Rouen, as if he’s just stepped out of the opera, and resumes their relations. Oppressed by the heat, Emma and Charles leave before Lucia ends, and she remains in Rouen for a day to see the third act—and to reignite her liaison with Léon. The next day they sacrilegiously tour Rouen Cathedral (which Claude Monet would paint in a famous series in the 1890s). As Emma leaves the Cathedral to drive off in the carriage with Léon, she ignores the final warning on the north porch: The Last Judgment and the Condemned in Hell-Flames.
Léon’s seduction of Emma in the frantically driven closed carriage, “shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel”, is a condensed version of the opera. During their secret rendezvous in a Rouen hotel, Emma takes the dominant role. She frightens and thrills Léon with her sexual experience and reenacts Lucia’s passion: “She undressed brutally, tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding snake. . . . Then, pale, serious, and, without speaking, she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.” But her affair with Léon, like that with Rodolphe, is doomed to failure. Soon afterwards, like Lucia in her forced marriage, Emma “was as sick of Léon as he was weary of her.” As if replaying a tedious role, “Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.”
The music in the opera makes her respond emotionally to Scott’s story. Charles, obtuse as always, fails to understand Lucia, just as he fails to perceive his wife’s adultery, “because of the music, which interfered very much with the story”. As the novel progresses, Emma becomes more and more like the tragic heroine of Lucia and decides to end her life. When the druggist’s assistant gives her the key to the poison cabinet, “he looked at her, astonished at the pallor of her face, that stood out white against the black background of the night. . . . He had the presentiment of something terrible.”
In the opera Lucia yearns for love and longs for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from a miserable life, would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Powerfully identifying with the agonies of Lucia but ignoring the heroine’s tragic fate, Emma “recognized all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of the prima donna seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that charmed her, some very thing of her own life.” As the lovers in the opera “spoke of the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the vibrations of the last chord.”
Ignoring her stirrings of conscience, Emma recalls her loveless marriage to Charles. She sees the emotions of the opera—“anguish, vengeance, jealousy, terror”—as a dramatisation of her sorrows. She wishes she had attempted, like Lucia, to control her destiny, “Oh, why had not she, like this woman, resisted, implored?,” and tries “to imagine that life, resonant, extraordinary, splendid, that might have been hers if fate had willed it.” Exactly like Lucia, “madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid.” Later, when she demands 8,000 francs from Léon to pay her debts, he seems to confirm her fear and declares, “But you are mad!” Her slow death is like the expiration of a diva in the grand finale of an opera.
Emma’s conflict with the moral code of her world leads inevitably to her tragic decline. Victor Brombert defines “her morbid excesses: the neglect of house and child, the taste for orgiastic books, the loss of pudeur, the rapacious desire for money, the aggressive sensuality.” Yet she feels her wild extravagance is just compensation for her wretched marriage, and declares that Charles “will forgive me, he who could never pay me enough for having lived with him. Never! Never!” She’s ironically ruined by her massive debts, not by her reckless adultery. As she races around at the end of the novel trying to raise the money that would prevent the depredations of the bailiffs, the increasingly desperate Emma is betrayed by four men: Rodolphe, Léon, the diabolically rapacious merchant Lheureux and the notary Guillaumin. Only the dull and deluded Charles remains faithful.
A hideous blind man with an idiotic laugh appears three times in the novel to warn Emma of her tragic fate. The first time the poor devil follows her coach and sings about the doomed “dream of love”. The second time “he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a famished dog” and the disgusted Emma throws him a coin to get rid of him. When she hears him for the third time, on her deathbed, she “began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch standing out against the eternal night like a menace.”
Flaubert recalled that he actually took arsenic and poisoned himself to see how it felt: “When I wrote the description of the poisoning of Madame Bovary I had the taste of arsenic so much in my mouth, I had taken so much poison myself that I gave myself two bouts of indigestion one after the other—two real bouts for I threw up all my dinner.”
After Emma poisons herself with white-powder arsenic, she vomits blood, suffers violent convulsions and “her whole body is covered with brown spots”. The decent, cloddish Charles—a cuckold, medical failure, bankrupt and widower—examines her corpse with morbid curiosity: “the corner of her mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a thin web, as if spiders had spun it over.” In a final cruel twist of fate, Emma’s child, the once pampered and now impoverished Berthe, is condemned to work in a cotton-factory. In Through the Window (2012), Julian Barnes perceptively concludes, “during Charles and Emma’s visit to the opera in Rouen . . . Emma’s emotional life, her hopes and memories, are played off against the extravagant emotions of Lucia di Lammermoor.”
II
Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread portrays the conflict between repression and instinct. In the opera 17th-century Scotland is transported to Italy; in the novel the 20th-century English characters are transformed by Italy. The widowed Lilia (whose name echoes Lucia) travels to Tuscany with her attractive young friend Caroline Abbott. Once there she marries Gino Carella, the young, handsome and impoverished son of a dentist in Monteriano.
Her snobbish and bigoted family unsuccessfully oppose Lilia’s love marriage for all the wrong reasons. Two opposing sets of values—social dictates and the wisdom of the heart—immediately collide. They try (too late) to bribe Gino to break his engagement. Lilia’s brother-in-law, the crypto-philistine Philip Herriton who adores Italians but would never have one as a relative, is sent like a Jamesian ambassador from suburban Surrey to Italy. A tame, repressed man who wants to be wild, Philip feels that Italy might provide the necessary inspiration and release. Once there and out of his emotional depth, he enacts the title of the novel: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” The disillusioned Lilia soon discovers Gino’s infidelity: “‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘if I have a child he will be different. I know he wants a son.’” She has indeed a son, but dies in childbirth.
The opera provides an aesthetic analogy for the novel, and the English spectators see Italy as a pageant and performance. Forster observes, “the Italians are essentially dramatic: they look on death and love as spectacles.” In one dramatic scene, “The vista of the landing and the two open doors made Gino both remote and significant, like an actor on the stage.”
EM Forster by Dora Carrington, oil on canvas, 1920
Caroline, Philip and Harriet, his critical and disapproving sister, return to Italy to bring back Lilia’s infant son. In Verona, as a prelude to Lucia, they visit the evocative and foreboding tomb of Romeo’s Juliet. On the night before their momentous confrontation with Gino, they go to the opera in Monteriano: “This strenuous day of resolutions, plans, alarms, battles, victories, defeats, truces, ended at the opera.” Forster pays tribute to Flaubert by alluding to his novel several times and portraying the same Lucia di Lammermoor. He connects his operatic scenes to Flaubert’s when Harriet, “like M. Bovary on a more famous occasion, was trying to follow the plot”. Like an orchestral conductor, Forster writes, “Lucia began to sing, and there was a moment’s silence. She was stout and ugly; but her voice was still beautiful. . . . The climax was reached in the mad scene. Lucia, clad in white as befitted her malady, suddenly gathered up her streaming hair and bowed her acknowledgments to the audience.”
Lucia dramatises the heroine’s thwarted passion and madness, the murder of her husband and her death. The English characters watch the opera at the same time as they reenact it. Harriet, a peevish spinster with malicious energy, has been unresponsive to painting and “crawled like a wounded creature through the streets of Florence”. The violent waves of excitement that sweep around the theater threaten Harriet. Like the spectator in Madame Bovary who cries for silence as the orchestra begins, Harriet stands up, shouts orders and tries to stifle the loud audience. Struck in the chest when the soprano throws her bouquet into the audience, she storms out of the theater.
By contrast, the lively atmosphere makes Philip and Caroline more emotionally responsive to Italy. In the novel, Lucia brings the enemies, Philip and Gino Carella, together. The Italian pulls the Englishman, “his long-lost brother,” from the stalls and into his box, and caresses him. Like the audience in Madame Bovary, the English leave before the third act. But the opera releases Caroline’s love for Gino just as it had reignited Emma’s affair with Léon.
The parallels between opera and novel are striking. Both families, for selfish reasons, want to prevent the marriage. Lucia and Edgardo have pledged their love in secrecy; Lilia and Gino have married secretly. The frustrated love between Lucia and Edgardo also becomes frustrated love of Caroline for Gino. Watching the opera makes Caroline realise that she loves Gino. Like Flaubert’s Rodolphe, Gino is a charmer and a cad. Enraptured by Gino, Caroline “lost self-control and screamed like a breath from the pit”. Lucia gives way to her feelings, which drive her to madness and murder. Comparing Caroline to Lucia, Harriet screams, “Mad! Absolutely stark, staring, raving mad!” The repressed English characters hope to express their true feelings in Italy, but the conflict between smothered emotions and physical longing has tragic results.
Philip and Harriet steal Lilia’s infant so he can be raised as an Englishman. The carriage used for sex in Flaubert becomes the death carriage in Forster. The infant dies when their carriage accidentally overturns during a heavy rainstorm. Guilty about her outrageous theft and the death of the infant, Harriet has a mental breakdown. Like Flaubert’s blind idiot who follows Emma’s carriage and reappears at her deathbed, Forster’s “poor idiot” foreshadows the tragedy. He follows the carriage on the way to the accident: “He cannot speak. He takes messages for us all. . . . He understands everything, but can explain nothing.”
Both novels have scenes of unusual cruelty: Bovary’s disastrous amputation of a clubfoot and Emma’s agonizing death; the infant’s death and Gino twisting Philip’s arm, broken in the carriage accident. Philip screams to Caroline after Gino’s cruelty: “ ‘Oh, the foul devil!’ he murmured. ‘Kill him! Kill him for me!’ . . . ‘Remember,’ Caroline continued, ‘there is to be no revenge. I will have no more intentional evil. We are not to fight with each other any more.’ ” Unlike the opera, there’s a truce, if not a resolution, in the novel.
Like Lucia, the tragedy in the novel is inevitable. Italy has revealed that the English characters cannot escape their frustration and doom. They lack the ability to love and can’t make the vital leap from the snobbish and sterile to the intuitive and emotional. Philip, suffering from his repressed and frustrated homosexual love for Gino, is about to disguise his deepest feelings and propose to the good-hearted and redemptive Caroline. She confesses her love for Gino, but refuses to repeat Lilia’s mistake by marrying him. All three Englishwomen recreate and suffer different aspects of Lucia’s tragic fate: Caroline fails to consummate her love, Harriet goes mad, Lilia dies in childbirth,
Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in 2024. 43 Ways of Looking at Hemingway will appear in the fall of 2025, all with Louisiana State University Press.
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