Arts & Culture
Gustave Flaubert, c'est moi
Published 29 September 2003
Jane Austen was exhilarating, Charlotte Bronte erotic, Ibsen gloomy and Brecht a hoot . . . Fay Weldon on inhabiting the minds of other writers and adapting Madame Bovary for stage
I've clocked up various adaptations for the stage in my time. I've "done" Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jane Eyre (which got a West End run, directed by Helena Kaut-Howson). I've doctored literal translations of A Doll's House and The Good Woman of Setzuan for the English-speaking stage. I've "done" Pride and Prejudice for television (the BBC's 1980s version: they like to do a new one every decade). That is to say, I have spent time inside the heads of Hardy, Bronte, Ibsen, Brecht and Austen. It is easier, let me say at once, to be inside female heads than male. The scenery is more familiar.
Recently I have been in Flaubert's head, with a stage adaptation of Madame Bovary: what an honour! That nervy, acutely intellectual, vividly aware, highly principled, wholly non-macho writer of the mid-19th century was a head and a half to find yourself in, I can tell you. The agricultural fair in Rouen, circa 1846, is as vivid now as the day he went to it and made Emma flirt with Rodolphe: blue sky, green grass, boring speeches and prize pigs.
I didn't engage too closely: you might never get back to yourself. So it's a notably loose adaptation, my Madame Bovary, subtitled "Breakfast with Emma", a chamber piece now going into production with Shared Experience, directed by Polly Teale who recently dramatised the life of Jean Rhys in After Mrs Rochester with great success. Its substance is Emma's conversation with country-doctor husband Charles over breakfast. Will she, won't she, take the arsenic?
Meanwhile her lovers drape themselves over the breakfast table while the domestic drama unfolds (it is a Polly Teale production, after all). More coffee, my dear? I wave at Flaubert from time to time across the years, in a genial and I hope respectful manner, and I get the feeling he doesn't mind too much. It's OK by him.
Because I like Charles. He needs allies. He is not the dull old stick Emma thinks he is, and that Flaubert suggests. He is as blinded by love for her as she ever was by love for handsome young men. She's a wretch and a spendthrift and, sure, she destroys him. "Emma Bovary, c'est moi," said Flaubert, unforgettably, so we know whose side he's on. He looked into himself and found her. But he was always one for a good argument, a lively protest. Even though he never did allow Emma a brain or a glimpse of anything outside the personal.
See the play as an exercise in things that were better not said, that once said cannot be unsaid, a lesson in how to hold the tongue. Flaubert based the novel on a press cutting - a report in the newspapers of a provincial doctor's wife who, having taken poison, is discovered to have been engaging in adulterous liaisons. (Thomas Hardy, incidentally, was another one who sometimes worked backwards from press cuttings, though apparently he didn't wish this to be known. Why not? Chaucer borrowed from Boccaccio, Shakespeare from everyone; a plot's just a plot, it's the working out that counts.) Charles believes in Emma's virtue to the end - and the fate Flaubert designs for him is so dire, so tragic, it is as hard to read as the end of Jude the Obscure. I could not do this to Charles. I took liberties.
Emma confesses, in the hope of her salvation, and his, and perhaps there is a future for at least one of them? And perhaps Felicite, the maid, won't run off with all Emma's things, and the child will be OK? Fate might not be as cruel as Flaubert suggests, in an errant exercise of writerly power. What I don't change is the extent to which Madame Bovary is a novel not just about sex but about debt and the anxieties thereof, of compulsive shopping as well as compulsive falling in love. And the enemies, who were thought to be friends, close in.
Of these other heads I've been in, Jane Austen's was best: brisk and sharp and to the point; a glorious sense of exhilaration. The sense of the world at her fingertips, there for the creating, there for the controlling. She is always conscious of her reader, serving their pleasure. (All that reading aloud to her family she did in the early years no doubt helped.)
Charlotte Bronte's head was more erotic, but vaguer and woollier, obsessive. Charlotte didn't care much for her readers, let alone the general public: she thought she was a cut above them. Visit Haworth parsonage, and feel her longing for you to leave. But perhaps she just didn't like my version of her play. It was like trying to deal with a mass of rising bread dough as large as a room. Punch it down here and it would rise up there.
Inside Ibsen's head it was like forever reading the Guardian. Rather gloomy, rather self-righteous, reproachful. But compelled by forces greater than himself, helpless in the face of them, demanding so much respect you could faint away altogether. The early reviews were ferociously bad but he would have been disappointed had it been otherwise.
Brecht, oddly, was a hoot, communist or not, a really social being, a pleasure to be in his head. Loved the people, loved the event, carried away by enthusiasm about whatever it was he was doing, easily diverted by a bit of dance and music. Those around him took him too seriously. And Hardy? Well, it wasn't a bundle of laughs in there. He hadn't a clue as to what went on in other people's minds. I reckon he had Asperger's. But he was so moved by the world of natural beauty it was impossible not to share it. A kind of rippling brook of language all around. But not a natural for the stage. Too episodic. Flaubert? As I've said, and then think of Martin Amis and double it.
Perhaps the great trumpet will sound and all those who have adapted the work of other writers for this medium or that will come face to face with their adaptees and be answerable. Theft, plagiarism, perjury, misrepresentation. That would serve us right. Tolstoy et al meeting up with Andrew Davies - now there's a confrontation scene for the latter to write. No doubt he will.
Madame Bovary: breakfast with Emma runs from 25 September to 4 October at the Oxford Playhouse, 11-12 Beaumont Street, Oxford (01865 305 305). It will then tour to the Theatre Royal, Bath; The Lowry, Salford; Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford; Liverpool Playhouse; and Lyric Hammersmith, London W6. For more information visit www.sharedexperience.org.uk
Fay Weldon's memoir Auto Da Fay is published in paperback by Flamingo
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
