Banned Books Dawn B Sova Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds (pdf)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

lows, or The Young Misses Manual; The Confessions of a Young Lady; The Ups and
Downs of Life; and The Victims of Lust, in which catalog copy promised every
stretch of voluptuous imagination is here fully depicted, rogering, ramming,
149
MADAME BOVARY
one unbounded scene of lust, lechery and licentiousness. The nature of the
works meant that they were freely pirated, so numerous editions emerged
containing embellishments that varied from one edition to another.
William Dugdale, dubbed by erotica collector Henry Ashbee as one of
the most prolific publishers of filthy books, included The Lustful Turk among
his stock. By 1857, he had been prosecuted nine times for his publications and
suffered the seizure and loss of large amounts of his stock. In 1857, in response
to complaints lodged by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Dugdale
appeared in court before Lord Chief Justice Campbell. The justice declared
obscene the books seized, including The Lustful Turk. After referring to Dug-
dale as London s most notorious pornographer, the justice sentenced him to
a year in jail. An incensed Dugdale threatened the justice with a penknife, but
the sentence was carried out. That same year, Chief Justice Campbell proposed
the creation of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and worked to make it
law, citing The Lustful Turk as among the works that the act would outlaw.
In the United States, The Lustful Turk was deemed pornography, and
the work was automatically confiscated and destroyed in numerous raids
on booksellers by Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice. The book never went to trial because, as in England,
publishers and distributors simply printed new copies of the pirated book and
sold them furtively.
FURTHER READING
Boyer, Paul S. Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in Amer-
ica. New York: Scribner, 1968.
Broun, Heywood, and Margaret Leech. Anthony Comstock. New York: Albert &
Charles Boni, 1927.
Kearney, Patrick J. A History of Erotic Literature. Hong Kong: Parragon, 1982.
Kronhausen, Eberhard, and Phyllis Kronhausen. Pornography and the Law: The Psy-
chology of Erotic Realism. New York: Ballantine, 1959.
Perkins, Michael. The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature. New York: William
Morrow, 1976.
MADAME BOVARY
Author: Gustave Flaubert
Original dates and places of publication: 1857, France; 1888, England
Original publishers: Michel Levy (France); Henry Vizitelly (England)
Literary form: Novel
SUMMARY
Madame Bovary relates the story of Emma Roualt, a young Frenchwoman
married to hardworking doctor Charles Bovary, and the manner in which
150
MADAME BOVARY
she allows impossible romantic ideals to destroy her marriage and her life.
Despite her husband s infatuation with her, Emma feels little for him and,
instead, seeks the passionate love she has read about in romance novels.
When the couple attends a fancy dress ball at the estate of a marquis, Emma
dances with royalty and mingles with the rich; she leaves believing that this
was the life she was born to lead.
She becomes extremely unhappy, and Charles decides that she needs a
change of scenery. As they move from Tostes to Yonville, Emma learns that
she is pregnant. This knowledge and the attentions of notary clerk Leon, who
shares her interests in art and literature, distract her at least until the baby
is born. Having hoped for a boy, Emma is disappointed when a daughter is
born, and she begins to borrow money from dry goods merchant Lheureux to
buy luxury items that she believes she deserves.
As Emma becomes increasingly unhappy, she gravitates toward Leon
and the two profess their love but do not begin an affair. Instead, to avoid
temptation, Leon moves to Paris. Emma, however, begins an affair with a
patient of her husband s, the wealthy Rodolphe Boulanger, who wants only
to add her to his list of conquests. Each morning Emma obsessively rushes to
Boulanger s estate, where the two make passionate love, and she meets him
some evenings after Charles is asleep.
After the novelty wears off and Boulanger ends the affair, Emma sinks
into a deep depression, staying in bed for two months. When she recovers,
Charles takes her to Rouen to enjoy the opera, but she secretly meets Leon,
and they begin an affair. She lies to Charles, telling him that she will take
weekly piano lessons in Rouen, but she meets Leon in a hotel room each
week to continue their affair.
At the same time, her debt to Lheureux increases, and she begins to
borrow money elsewhere to pay him back. She becomes desperate when he
confronts her and threatens to confiscate all of her property unless she imme-
diately pays him 8,000 francs. Unable to raise the money, Emma commits
suicide by ingesting arsenic after writing a letter of explanation to Charles.
Her death weakens Charles, who dies soon after, leaving their daughter,
Berthe, to work in a cotton mill to earn her living.
CENSORSHIP HISTORY
Madame Bovary was censored before publication as a novel, when it appeared
in installments in Revue de Paris, a literary publication run by Flaubert s friend
Maxime DuCamp. Before agreeing to publish the work, DuCamp asked to
excise a single passage, about a page and a half in length, near the end of
the novel. The passage relates Emma s extended tryst with Leon behind the
closed curtains of a cab, and DuCamp felt that getting it past the censors
would be impossible. Flaubert agreed, but he was not prepared for the fol-
lowing editorial note inserted by the editors in place of the passage: Here
the editors found it necessary to suppress a passage unsuitable to the policies
151
MADAME BOVARY
of the Revue de Paris; we hereby acknowledge this to the author. The edi-
tors later requested that cuts be made in the sixth and final installment of the
novel a move that Flaubert first fought and then reluctantly accepted, add-
ing his own disclaimer regarding the quality of the now-fragmented work.
The omission of the offensive passages did not prevent government
action being taken against Madame Bovary, though Flaubert felt the action
was aimed more at the overly liberal Revue than at his novel. Madame Bovary
went on trial on January 29, 1857, in highly formal court proceedings in
which Imperial Advocate Ernest Pinard admitted that the language of the
law of 1819 was a little vague, a little elastic. He also asserted that the
prosecution faced peculiar difficulty because reading the entire novel to
the jury would be too time consuming, but reading only the accused pas-
sages would be too restrictive. To solve the problem, Pinard summarized
the novel in detail and read verbatim the offending passages. When his ver-
sion reached the appropriate point in the narrative, Pinard called upon the
jury to apply limits and standards and noted, Yes, Mr. Flaubert knows [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

pobieranie @ do ÂściÂągnięcia @ ebook @ download @ pdf