ect of the novel is not given, as we saw, by a
mere summary of the course which is taken by the story. She may be
there for her own sake, simply, or for the sake of the predicament in
which she stands; she may be presented as a curious scrap of
character, fit to be studied; or Flaubert may have been struck by her
as the instrument, the victim, the occasion, of a particular train of
events. Perhaps she is a creature portrayed because he thinks her
typical and picturesque; perhaps she is a disturbing little force let
loose among the lives that surround her; perhaps, on the other hand,
she is a hapless sufferer in the clash between her aspirations and her
fate. Given Emma and what she is by nature, given her environment and
the facts of her story, there are dozens of different subjects, I dare
say, latent in the case. The woman, the men, all they say and do, the
whole scene behind them--none of it gives any clue to the right manner
of treating them. The one irreducible idea out of which the book, as
Flaubert wrote it, unfolds--this it is that must be sought.

Now if Emma was devised for her own sake, solely because a nature and
a temper like hers seemed to Flaubert an amusing study--if his one aim
was to make the portrait of a woman of that kind--then the rest of the
matter falls into line, we shall know how to regard it. These
conditions in which Emma finds herself will have been chosen by the
author because they appeared to throw light on her, to call out her
natural qualities, to give her the best opportunity of disclosing what
she is. Her stupid husband and her fascinating lovers will enter the
scene in order that she may become whatever she has it in her to be.
Flaubert elects to place her in a certain provincial town, full of odd
characters; he gives the town and its folk an extraordinary actuality;
it is not a town _quelconque_, not a generalized town, but as
individual and recognizable as he can make it. None the less--always
supposing that Emma by herself is the whole of his subject--he must
have lit on this particular town simply because it seemed to explain
and expound her better than another. If he had thought that a woman of
her sort, rather meanly ambitious, rather fatuously romantic, would
have revealed her quality more intensely in a different world--in
success, freedom, wealth--he would have placed her otherwise; Charles
and Rodolphe and Homard and the rest of them would have vanished, the
more illuminatin