When we trace the obscenity rulings in literature back in time to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, we find both the practice of law and the practice of representing sex in literature to be operating under very different constraints. If Flaubert was acquitted it was due as much to his name and to the whisper of his “connections” as to the triumphant line of his defence counsel that Madame Bovary was “an incitement to virtue through the horror of vice.” Much like Lady Chatterly, Emma Bovary had dared to seek her own satisfactions outside of marriage and in the sort of compulsive promiscuity that a jury in the 1960s would have been willing to condemn. It was unthinkable in 1857 that her career should end in anything but disaster, and even so, her behaviour was decidedly risqué.

Gustave Flaubert
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

The real trouble came about because Flaubert had taken a contract with the Revue de Paris permitting them to serialise his novel. Serialisation was still relatively new, but it gave writers a chance to reach a wider audience; its newness as a publishing practice also gave the authorities much cause for concern at the political opinions a revue was capable of disseminating. Aware they were under scrutiny, the Revue de Paris editors cautiously found sixty-nine passages that they asked to be suppressed or altered, utterly infuriating Flaubert, who hadn’t spent weeks slaving over each sentence for nothing. For one particularly cherished scene, he demanded a note in the text, pointing to its suppression in a way that actually drew the attention of the censor and made things worse.

The scene in question was the one in which Emma and Léon supposedly make love in a closed carriage travelling around the streets of Rouen. It was deemed “impossible” by the editor, Maxime du Camp, although all that the reader “sees” is Emma’s hand at the window, throwing away torn scraps of paper before the curtains are closed. However, it was a nineteenth-century convention to extrapolate from the text, as the activity of the reader’s imagination was understood to be part and parcel of the story. The fact that the scene was not described in detail made it no less potent to the reader’s mind. A similar scandal was caused by John Singer Sargeant’s portrait, Madame X, featuring a celebrity socialite of the day, Amélie Gautreau. When the portrait was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884, the spectators were horrified to see the strap of her dress dangling off her shoulder, implying either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Gautreau was forced to retreat from society, her reputation in tatters. Coded hints were considered the equivalent of graphic sex.

But some of the passages that the Revue was unhappy with really seem quite extraordinary. For instance, they objected to the phrase “un morceau de veau cuit au four,” or “a piece of veal cooked in the oven,” which came from the longer passage: “To spare him expense, each week his mother sent him by carrier a piece of veal cooked in the oven; and on this he lunched when he returned from the hospital in the morning.” How on earth such a phrase could be considered offensive? The only clue is that such details were considered by the editors to be “inutile” or useless.