What it comes to, I take it, is that though Madame Bovary, the novel,
is a kind of drama--since there is the interaction of this woman
confronted by these facts--it is a drama chosen for the sake of the
picture in it, for the impression it gives of the manner in which
certain lives are lived. It might have another force of its own; it
might be a strife of characters and wills, in which the men and women
would take the matter into their own hands and make all the interest
by their action; it might be a drama, say, as Jane Eyre is a drama,
where another obscure little woman has a part to play, but where the
question is how she plays it, what she achieves or misses in
particular. To Flaubert the situation out of which he made his novel
appeared in another light. It was not as dramatic as it was pictorial;
there was not the stuff in Emma, more especially, that could make her
the main figure of a drama; she is small and futile, she could not
well uphold an interest that would depend directly on her behaviour.
But for a picture, where the interest depends only on what she
_is_--that is quite different. Her futility is then a real value; it
can be made amusing and vivid to the last degree, so long as no other
weight is thrown on it; she can make a perfect impression of life,
though she cannot create much of a story. Let Emma and her plight,
therefore, appear as a picture; let her be shown in the act of living
her life, entangled as it is with her past and her present; that is
how the final fact at the heart of Flaubert's subject will be best
displayed.
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