Madame Bovary and the Incorporation of Pharmacy

Abstract

This chapter examines the incorporation within the literary text of the discursive shifts and institutional changes that occur as a profession reincorporates itself, and considers how the nature of that textual incorporation is suggestively connected not only to that profession’s discursive incorporation as disciplinary body through interaction and overlap with other discourses, but also to its incorporative activities concerned with its essential mission: the admixture of substances and their administration to the physiological body. The connections claimed here are plausible primarily because the profession in question here is pharmacy, which underwent a major transformation in France around the beginning of the nineteenth century, linked to other institutional and social changes, not least the scientific and French revolutions. The repercussions of pharmacy’s disciplinary and professional refashioning were still being felt during the July Monarchy — the period represented in the literary text that will be our cultural point of reference in this chapter as in others, Madame Bovary. I will argue that Madame Bovary, rather than coincidentally representing the pharmacist — simply on account of his being a middle-class professional — as representative of the rising bourgeoisie and its purportedly universal values, in fact problematises, through its incorporation of the rhetoric of what we might term a new pharmaceutical ideology, and its articulation of key institutional and legislative developments, the relationship between literary discourse, specifically mimetic fictional discourse, and contemporary scientific discourse.