Nevertheless, Flaubert’s satirical description of the cake has a lot in common with his description of the hat Charles Bovary wore as a schoolboy, right at the beginning of the novel. This hat is now rather notorious – much more so than the cake.Īs with the wedding cake, Flaubert’s description of Charles’s hat combines contrasting, incompatible layers. Here the target of Flaubert’s humour is not Romantic aspirations or visual clichés. Instead, he is making fun of contemporary theories of Realism which saw language as having a transparent relationship to the real world. In good ‘Realist’ style he gives us a detailed description of the physical qualities of the hat. Each part is plausible and even mundane, but put together they add up to a ridiculous, extravagant, and perhaps impossible object. It is part fur, part velvet part flat-topped cap, part cotton nightcap it has a visor and a tassel. Like the cake, it is made up of bands or layers that don’t work together. Nabokov, who called this Flaubert’s ‘layercake’, ‘counterpoint’ or ‘contrapuntal’ technique, drew Charles’s hat in the margins of the notes he used for his lectures on Madame Bovary.īringing multiple, clashing elements together in a surreal vertical arrangement – temple, castle, lake and cherub on the one hand fur cap, padded hat and bonnet on the other – Flaubert deploys one of his favourite literary techniques: juxtaposition.
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