Abstract
My title is a loose play on words since ‘object’ choice in psychoanalytic discourse refers to the grammatical sense of object and has nothing to do with material things. Yet erotic choices in Flaubert are invariably mediated or accompanied by the investment of affect in material objects connected with the loved person, and critics have variously explored the function of fetishism in the construction of characters’ psychologies, and in motivating the presence of movement of objects in the novels.1 Fetishism is here used partly in the fairly unspecified sense of a Bachelardian emotional investment in objects, exploited by a descriptive writer for symbolic or generally poetic potential.2 But it is also used in the explicitly Freudian sense of a neurotic structure — the elevation of part of the body or an item of clothing to the status of magic substitute for the maternal phallus. For the split fetishising subject, the absence of the phallus is at once acknowledged and denied in its attempt to ward off the castration anxiety supposedly entailed in a male recognition of sexual difference.3
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Notes
See, for example: Charles Bernheimer, ‘Fetishism and Allegory in Bouvard et Pécuchet’, in Naomi Schor and Henry F. Majewski (eds), Flaubert and Postmodernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) pp. 160–76
Pierre Danger, Sensations et objets dans le roman de Flaubert (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973)
Jean-Pierre Duquette, Flaubert ou L’Architecture du vide (Montreal: Les Presse de l’Université de Montréal, 1972)
Stirling Haig, ‘Madame Arnoux’s “Coffret”: A Monumental Case’, Romanic Review, 75 (1984) pp. 469–82
Diana Knight, Flaubert’s Characters: The Language of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Naomi Schor, ‘Fetishism and its Ironies’, Nineteenth-century French Studies,17 (Fall-Winter 1988–9) pp. 89–97
D. A. Williams, The Hidden Life at its Source: A Study of Flaubert’s ‘L’Education sentimentale’ (Hull: Hull University Press, 1987).
For example, Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).
Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ (1927), in On Sexuality: ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ and Other Works, ed. Angela Richards, tr. James Strachey, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) pp. 345–57.
I have found the following articles on Freudian fetishism in nineteenth-century French literature particularly helpful: Peter Brooks, ‘Le corps-récit, ou Nana enfin dévoilée’, Romantisme, 63 (1989) pp. 66–86;
Naomi Schor, ‘Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand’, Poetics Today, 6,1–2 (1985) pp. 301–10, and ‘Salammbô Bound’, in Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) pp. 111–26.
Ideological approaches to the role of objects in Flaubert have tended to focus on Madame Bovary rather than L’Education sentimentale, for example: Edward J. Ahearn, The Magic Cigar Case: Emma Bovary and Karl Marx’, in Michel Guggenheim (ed.), Women in French Litera-ture (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1988) pp. 181–8;
Claude Duchet, ‘Romans et objets: l’exemple de Madame Bovariy’, Europe, 485–7 (1969) pp. 172–201;
Michel Picard, ‘La prodigalité d’Emma Bovary’. Littérature, 3 (1973) pp. 77–97.
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983).
For example Jeanne Bem, ‘Flaubert et Oedipe’, chapter 2 of Désir et savoir dans l’ceuvre de Flaubert: Etude de ‘La Tentation de Saint Antoine’ (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1979) pp. 26–46.
A particularly full and persuasive account is provided in D. A. Williams, ‘Sacred and Profane in L’Education sentimentale’, Modern Language Review, 73 (1978) pp. 786–98.
Freud, ‘Representation by Symbols in Dreams — Some Further Typical Dreams’, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ed. Angela Richards, tr. James Strachey, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp. 466–529.
I am thinking of ‘Le séminaire sur “La lettre volée” ‘, in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits I (Paris: Seuil, ‘Points’, 1970 pp. 19–75, where Lacan draws a metaphorical link between the female anatomy and the purloined letter conspicuously dangling from the mantelpiece (p. 47).
On this see again Schor, ‘Femâle Fetishism’, op. cit., and Sarah Kofman, L’Enigme de la femme: la Femme dans les textes de Freud (Paris: Galilée, 1980).
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, tr. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984). The quotations that follow are from pp. 175, 241, 243 and 372 respectively.
Bourdieu, ‘L’Invention de la vie d’artiste’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 2 (March 1975) pp. 67–93, p. 88.
See too Bourdieu, ‘Flaubert’s Point of View’, Critical Inquiry, 14 (Spring 1988) pp. 539–62.
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Knight, D. (1993). Object Choices: Taste and Fetishism in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale. In: Rigby, B. (eds) French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11824-3_12
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