Madame Bovary et ses trente-quatre « vous », ou le retour du refoulé

Flaubert, as we all know, is the artist of impersonality, of the elocutionary disappearance of the novelist. And yet, in Madame Bovary, he intentionally introduces, thirty-four times, outside of any dialogue situation, a second person (you, yours, your…) that suggests the presence of a narrator addressing, beyond his characters, his readers – or even worse, strangely merging his readers with his characters. His readers, or more often his female readers: for the close analysis of these thirty-four occurrences proves not only that the recollection of romantic lyricism, even ironized, hovers over Flaubert’s writing, but that the author has a hard time dissimulating his male identity, then addressing his subtle analyst’s explanations to an audience of women: obviously impersonality has strict limits, those of genre (or gender)