What It Is
The village to which Charles Bovary moves the family at the end of Part I, as a remedy for an ailment of Emma Bovary that he does not understand. It sits on the border between Normandy, Picardy and Ile-de-France, and is the stage of Part II and of the ending of Part III.
Where It Appears
contrée bâtarde où le langage est sans accentuation, comme le paysage sans caractère, a hybrid land where the speech has no accent, just as the landscape has no character.
The village has gained a new exit, the road of 1835, and even so, the narrator says, it has remained stationary. In the same chapter the cast is already seated at the table in the Golden Lion inn, and the pharmacy, across from the inn, not the church, is what draws the eye most.
E o letreiro, que ocupa toda a largura da loja, diz em letras douradas: Homais, farmacêutico., And the sign, which fills the whole width of the shop, reads in gold letters: Homais, pharmacist.
In Part II, Chapters 1 to 8, immobility is structure: in Yonville "nothing, indeed, had changed," the clock in Emma's room "kept ticking" while she sinks into the armchair, and Homais repeats "good evening to everyone" every day. In Part II, Chapter 11 the humiliation of Hippolyte's operation is discussed in the square. In Part III, Chapters 1 to 6, Rouen, with its Thursday routine, can be read as a parallel Yonville. In Part III, Chapter 8 Emma returns to Yonville after the refusal of Rodolphe Boulanger and eats arsenic in Homais's laboratory, and the book closes in the village, in Part III, Chapter 11, with the pharmacist decorated.
Acaba de receber a Legião de Honra., He has just received the Legion of Honor.
What It Means
In Part II, Chapter 1, the village can be read as the book's moral frame, a place without identity of its own where nothing moves except what the characters bring from outside. The immobility of the setting is what makes every small change in Emma visible: without this static background, her curve, from hope to disillusion to new hope, would have no contrast.
The parts set in Yonville open with an arrival and close with a decoration: the Bovary family arrives in Part II, Chapter 1, and the last line records Homais's Legion of Honor, whose pharmacy was what drew the eye most on that arrival. Of the family that arrived, no one stays: Emma and Charles die, and Berthe Bovary goes to her grandmother and then to a poor aunt.
Relationships
- Characters: Homais, Abbé Bournisien, Lheureux, Léon, Emma Bovary, Charles Bovary.
- Neighboring symbols: La Vaubyessard, the world Emma comes from hungry, and The Cab, the space without a fixed address of Part III.