SOURCE: "Emma's Stories: Narrative, Repetition and Desire in Madame Bovary" in The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 41-77.

In the following excerpt, Wing argues that "the division between language and experience is a major concern of [Madame Bovary." He focuses on the problematic nature of the novel's narrative voice and structure, noting ways in which its "authority," or believability, is undermined.]

—Eh bien! reprit Homais, il faudrait en faire une analyse. Car il savait qu'il faut, dans tous les empoisonnements, faire une analyse . . . (295)

Qu'on n'accuse personne. (294)¹

Flaubert's use of narrative in Madame Bovary demystifies in many ways the desires which motivate Emma's stories, her fantasies, dreams and her extended fictions of escape and romantic love. Emma's narratives, her protonarratives (fantasies and dreams), her letters to her lovers, the account of her financial ruin told to Lheureux, Binet, Rodolphe and...