Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and the Discourse of Hysteria‪.‬

Elisabeth Bronfen explores the murky interface between the hysteric Emma Bovary's much ado about nothing and Gustave Flaubert's idea that the perfect novel would be a book about nothing, held together only by the internal strength of its style. In his novel, a critical study of a case history of hysteria, Flaubert offers a refiguration of medical discourses on hysteria that were prevalent during his time. At the same time that the novel presages contemporary conceptualizations of this elusive and protean psychosomatic disturbance, the author argues that hysteria should not be reduced to the issue of feminine sexual dissatisfaction, but is a form of communication meant to broadcast the fallibility of the symbolic and the self, a way of articulating the vulnerability and woundedness inextricably inhabiting human existence even while the work of fantasy shields us from this nothing by inventing romantic scenarios revolving around plenitude. The article traces the way that the characters' circling around nothing emerges as one of the structuring principles of Madame Bovary, then discusses the principal heroine's performance of hysteria, and ends by discussing the way the hysteric resiliently invents ever new versions of the self, referring to no concrete organic lesions but responding to a desire to lose herself in fantasy. **********