Ironic Discursive Strategies in Madame Bovary

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the Rainer Warning’s study on Flaubert, this article analyses the specific procedures that allow for the ironic coexistence of romantic discourse and realistic discourse in Madame Bovary. Here we focus on a particularly complex fragment of the novel –its intricacy due to the wealth of narrative voices and stylistic resources– to describe, on the one hand, the hiatuses that in the text mark an interruption of romantic discourse and the shift to realistic discourse, and, on the other, the dilogical confluence of voices where both discourses overlap. However, we conclude that such dichotomies can only exist on a theoretical frame. All mechanisms induce the reader to focus on language, producing a distancing effect and “levelling” the text