What It Is
The castle of the Marquis d'Andervilliers and the ball that Emma Bovary and Charles Bovary attend in chapter 8 of Part I, invited by an almost comic accident: cherries from the garden at Tostes. The scene in chapter 8 of Part I shifts the axis of the novel, and the ball can be summed up this way: it does not seduce Emma, it poisons her.
Where It Appears
In chapter 8 of Part I what weighs is not the Viscount, who barely speaks to Emma until the final waltz, but the material and social excess of the castle: the portraits with centuries of lineage, the iced champagne that makes her shiver all over, the waltz she learns on the spot, and the Duke of Laverdière at the table.
Il avait vécu à la Cour et couché dans le lit des reines!, he had lived at Court and slept in the bed of queens!
On the way back, Charles finds the green cigar case on the road. Once at home, at the end of chapter 8 of Part I, the ball stops being a memory and becomes a crack in Emma's life, opened in a boredom that chapter 7 of Part I had already described; in chapter 9 of Part I, it becomes illness.
Son voyage à la Vaubyessard avait fait un trou dans sa vie, à la manière de ces grandes crevasses qu’un orage, en une seule nuit, creuse quelquefois dans les montagnes, her trip to Vaubyessard (see La Vaubyessard) had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevasses that a storm sometimes carves in the mountains in a single night.
sa vie était froide comme un grenier dont la lucarne est au nord, et l’ennui, araignée silencieuse, filait sa toile dans l’ombre à tous les coins de son cœur, her life was cold as an attic whose skylight faces north, and boredom, a silent spider, spun its web in the shadows in every corner of her heart.
In chapter 3 of Part II the name of Berthe Bovary comes from a young woman whom Emma heard the marquise call by that name at Vaubyessard. In chapter 5 of Part III the pattern of the ball, excitement followed by greater boredom, reappears on a weekly scale in the Thursdays in Rouen.
she became irritable, gluttonous, and voluptuous
What It Means
The ball can be read from both sides. In Emma's favor, the class distinction the scene shows, marked by the skin and the smell of the rich, confirms that her hunger has a real object. Against the reading of provincial society as the cause, the ball should have satisfied her, because it gives Emma exactly the world she was missing, and it does the opposite: it increases the hunger. Hence the thesis that the problem lies in the structure of her desire. Part I plants here the pattern of excitement followed by greater boredom, which repeats in each love affair. The ball can also be read through Plato's cave.
The ball does not take Emma out of the cave. It is the fire mistaken for the Sun, a more luminous shadow, and so it poisons instead of freeing. Every time reality hurts, she makes the prisoner's gesture of returning to the shadows.
From the castle Emma takes away two things that the novel follows afterward: the cigar case, found on the road back, and her daughter's name, heard from a marquise. The first stays with her; the second passes to Berthe, whose last record is a spinning mill.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Desire, Dreams and Fantasy.
- Characters: Emma Bovary, Charles Bovary, Berthe Bovary.
- Neighboring symbols: the green cigar case, the object that comes out of the ball, and Yonville, where the family moves after the boredom of Tostes.