Desire, repetition and the imaginary in Flaubert's 'Un Coeur Simple.'

While the writer's ironic perspective hovers incessantly above the story of Un Coeur simple, the carefully crafted narrative protects Felicite from its potentially venomous bite. A pattern of incremental repetitions played out within a network of strategic semiotic moves prepares the most important event of Felicite's life, her love relationship to a parrot. The carefully crafted structure combines with a mode of cognition Lacan would call "Imaginary" in that it allows the protagonist to process reality primarily through images, visual projections, and material objects rather than through a symbolic system based on arbitrary linguistic signs. Together they facilitate the transformation of Loulou from an ordinary household pet, a love object, to a sacred symbol, a visionary ideal, and a promise of redemption fusing libidinal and spiritual desire. It is the intent of this reading to focus on the component parts of this strategy, to trace the links between key events, and to analyze the subtle semiosis promoting the shift to different registers of signification.

The opening lines of thc narrative set the physical and psychological boundaries framing Felicite's repeated story of desire, love, and loss. As a female servant she occupies a borderline position in the bourgeois society of nineteenth-century France, a position more akin to the material objects (Schulz-Buschhaus 123) in Mme. Aubain's dwindling estate than to the independent subjects of Pont l'Eveque society. This marginalization means that Felicite's relationship to others, her worth as a human being, is measured according to the principles of economic exchange (Woodhull 142) rather than according to any intrinsic human values: "Pour cents francs par an, elle faisait la cuisine et le menage, cousait, lavait, repassait, savait brider un cheval, engraisser les volailles battre le beurre et resta fidele a sa maitresse" (Flaubert 157). What a deal! It is hardly surprising that the French for "windfall" (une aubaine) is echoed by Mme. Aubain's name and that Pont l'Eveque society envies her for this possession.

Felicite's "eccentric" (Jameson 82) social position points to the marginalization of nineteenth-century French servants (Schulz-Buschaus 125), to their exclusion from all significant political and social institutions. In Flaubert's text, "The strict demarcation of spaces" (Woodhull 142) in the family dwelling marks the physical and psychological boundaries between servant and master while it sustains the existing social order. A relatively long, descriptive passage describes the Aubains' spacious dwelling of faded luxury while a single, unembellished sentence designates Felicite's private room significantly situated one floor above the family quarters: "Une lucarne au second etage eclairait la chambre de Felicite, ayant rue sur les prairies" (158).

This small room under the roof of the house will eventually be filled with a collection of objects summarizing Felicite's relentless search for a love object, her repeated experience of love and loss ultimately culminating in the fetishistic attachment to a dead parrot (Schulz-Buschhaus 117), who by way of the taxidermist's skillful art and Felicite's capacity for signifying within the Imaginary will become the vehicle for negotiating the psychic distance between religious fervor and libidinal desire.(1)

Always silent and upright, Felicite relates to the world primarily through a language of images, objects and actions rather than through verbal communication. Where it does occur, direct speech tends to be "truncated," normally limited to single word utterances (Debray-Genette, "Profane" 19-20). These generally serve to execute a command or strike a deal at the market; only once or twice does Felicite's speech allude to emotional states of being. Whether she always lived in this virtual silence remains a matter of speculation.

Although Felicite is illiterate, one might justifiably assume that there must have been a time when she had no reason to doubt the capacity of conventional language to authentically mediate thoughts and feelings - not, that is, until Theodore's betrayal left her wordless, grief-stricken, moaning "toute seule dans la campagne jusqu'au soleil levant" (160-61). Although Flaubert's text is constructed on the principle of discontinuity, and therefore deliberately attempts to avoid explicit cause and effect relationships (Debray-Genette, "Les figures" 357), the intensity of her emotional pain ("Ce fut un chagrin desordonne," [160]) suggests that Felicite's alienation from what Lacan calls the "Symbolic Order" might be rooted, at least partially, in this first humiliating, self-negating experience of love and loss. In her new life as Mme. Aubain's servant she conducts her affairs with the silent precision of a robot, "une femme en bois, fonctionnant d'une maniere automatique"(158).

This emotionally crippling silence nurtured by subsequent disappointments and losses, will eventually be broken by the senseless chatter of a parrot to whom Felicite will respond in equally disconnected but heartfelt phrases. With this episode, the language skepticism, up to then only implied by Felicite's psychic constitution, becomes a conscious element of the text: it suggests that words displaced by pure sounds resembling the peeling of bells and the bleating of sheep, or words transformed into rhythms keeping time to the movement of quivering wings hold greater promise for communicating inner states of being than institutionalized modes of communication.