Feminist Correctives

Nearly all novels remind us that the story of one person both is and is not the story of other people, each of whom is the main character of their own life. In the populous characterological world of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Hippolyte, a stableman at the inn in Yonville, must be pushed to the back of the crowd so Emma Bovary can seize the foreground. Hippolyte may in principle be worthy of a whole novel of his own, but that would be a different book; Hippolyte, not Madame Bovary. Rare exceptions such as Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, in which narrative agents take turns as primary and secondary characters, prove the rule: the bourgeois, legal principle that all men are equal under the law can’t be neatly transposed to the bourgeois novel, in which men and women are necessarily unequal under their creator.