#Merkulova N.V. THE NAME «EMMA» IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERTEXTUALITY

Филологические науки/3.Теоретические и методологические проблемы исследования языка

Ph.D. in Philology Merkulova N.V.

Voronezh State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Russian Federation

THE NAME «EMMA» IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERTEXTUALITY

In the modern literature (in particular, aesthetic) onomastics, despite the presence of a number of works of scientists devoted to the study of onyms of the novel «Madame Bovary» by G. Flaubert [9], the question of intertextual component of the name «Emma» seems to be poorly understood.

Initially, before the marriage with Charles Bovary, the main female character of the novel was named Emma Rouault: this surname is one of the most common in Normandy (which is intended to emphasize the realism of the narrative). In the scenarios for the novel instead of the name «Emma» the author assumed the name «Emma» or «Maria, Marianne, Marietta» [6; 1], and only as a result of a phonetic coincidence of the semantic form with the French verb «aimer»/«to love» the anagram of «Marie» has transformed in «Emma» with some kind of additional value: «femme»/«woman», «aimée»/«beloved», «aima»/«had loved» [1; 116]. As for the family name of the eponym character Bovary, a more detailed description of the aesthetic onym is presented in the monographic study [2; 107-109].

The proper name Emma in the period of creation of the work was, no doubt, correlated with the whole romantic literature: the novel «Emma» by Jane Austen published in 1815; the character of «lady Emma» in the works by Walter Scott (by the way, the author often referred to in the text of «Madame Bovary» by G. Flaubert), etc. Along with this, the character of Emma is, first of all, the image of the «eternal femininity»: «(F)emm(e)»/«female» like a kind of an abstract woman figure from literature. Indeed, the character of G. Flaubert tends to dive into reading, a long time not expressing her own attitude. She is keen on poetry – in fact, a purely feminine genre, and is constantly looking for «poetry» in her relationship: «Souvent elle le [Léon] priait de lui lire des vers» [5 ; II, 4]; «Il fallait que Léon, chaque fois, lui racontât toute sa conduite, depuis le dernier rendez-vous. Elle demanda des vers, des vers pour elle, une pièce d'amour en son honneur [...]» [5; III, 5].

The character is completely subordinated to the illusion of the read, and only later her thoughts will result in her passionate letters (remained unknown) to her lovers: «A partir de ce jour-là, ils s'écrivirent régulièrement tous les soirs. Emma portait sa lettre au bout du jardin près de la rivière, dans une fissure de la terrasse. Rodolphe venait l'y chercher et en plaçait une autre, qu'elle accusait toujours d'être trop courte» [5 ; II, 9]; «Elle n’en continuait pas moins à lui écrire des lettres amoureuses, en vertu de cette idée, qu’une femme doit toujours écrire à son amant» [5 ; III, 6].

The writer in his «Dictionnaire des idées reçues» says: «Genre épistolaire. Genre de style exclusivement réservé aux femmes»/«Epistolary genre. The style of exclusively female genre» [4; 41], - thus establishing a kind of «female nature» of the poetry and the novel in letters. The illusory world of Emma is a nostalgic image of the glorious past: the gallant epoch of chivalry, once again came into fashion thanks to the aesthetics of romanticism. And the name Emma fits into the style of the period: indeed, during the Middle ages many royals wore the name, in particular, Princesses of the Carolingian dynasty: Emma de Normandie/Emma of Normandy (990-1052), the daughter of Richard I, Duke of Normandy/Richard sans Peur, Queen Consort of England, Denmark and Norway (1002-1013, 1014-1016, 1017-1035); Emma de France/Emma of France (894-934), the first Frankish queen who is known to have been crowned (923-934); Emma d’Italie/Emma of Italy (948-1006), Queen of Western Francia as the wife of King Lothair/Lothaire (954-986); Emma de Bavière/Emma of Altdorf (808-876), the wife of King Louis the German/Louis le Germanique (843-876) and thereby Queen consort of East Francia… One of the daughters of Emma de Bavière/Emma of Altdorf was named Berthe/Bertha (died 877), the abbess of the monastery in Zurich from 856 year. It is noteworthy that in the choice of the name for her daughter the main character also gave preference to the following variants: «[elle] aimait assez Galsuinde, plus encore Yseult ou Léocadie» [5; II, 3], - including the entire palette of medieval romanticism: Galsuinde is the name of the second wife of the king of the Merovingian dynasty Childéric I/Childeric I (457/458-481/482), while Yseult is the popular heroine of the cycle of courtly novels...

Besides, Emma herself is a second wife of Charles Bovary, previously married to Héloïse Dubuc. The surname Dubuc is one of the most common in Normandy, having, like Bovary, some peasant roots: «du bocage»/«grove of trees», «agricultural landscape» (and according to the figurative meaning: «reject, defective product»). Charles's second wife seems to be for him like «the New Heloise» /«la nouvelle Héloïse», with an obvious allusion to the novel in letters about love by Jean-Jacques Rousseau «Julie, or the New Heloise»/«Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse». For example, an episode of platonic love of Emma and Leon brings back to the relationship of the main characters of the novel Julie d'Étange and Saint-Preux: their dialogue on sentimental literature/«la poésie des lacs» [10; II, 2] represents a new interpretation of the letter 23 from the first part of the novel by J.-J. Rousseau: «Je gravissais lentement et à pied des sentiers assez rudes, conduit par un homme que j'avais pris pour être mon guide, et dans lequel, durant toute la route, j'ai trouvé plutôt un ami qu'un mercenaire. Je voulais rêver, et j'en étais toujours détourné par quelque spectacle inattendu. Tantôt d'immenses roches pendaient en ruines au-dessus de ma tête. Tantôt de hautes et bruyantes cascades m'inondaient de leur épais brouillard. Tantôt un torrent éternel ouvrait à mes côtés un abîme dont les yeux n'osaient sonder la profondeur. Quelquefois je me perdais dans l'obscurité d'un bois touffu. Quelquefois, en sortant d'un gouffre, une agréable prairie réjouissait tout à coup mes regards. Un mélange étonnant de la nature sauvage et de la nature cultivée montrait partout la main des hommes, où l'on eût cru qu'ils n'avaient jamais pénétré: à côté d'une caverne on trouvait des maisons; on voyait des pampres secs où l'on n'eût cherché que des ronces, des vignes dans les terres éboulées, d'excellents fruits sur des rochers, et des champs dans des précipices» [10; 34-35].

To confirm this, in the text by G. Flaubert there are many allusions not only to the letter of Julie and Saint-Preux, but also to their legendary prototype - the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise/Les Lettres d'Abélard et d'Héloïse, which became some kind of heritage of literature in the Middle Ages (translated in the French language at the end of the XIII century) and had a huge success in the palmy days of romanticism [7]. So, Pierre Abélard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician in Paris, secretly married to Héloïse d'Argenteuil. Out of revenge Héloïse's uncle, the secular canon Fulbert, arranged for a band of men to castrate him, so that in this way by canon law it was blocked to him the path to the highest ecclesiastical offices. After that Abelard sought to bury himself as a monk in the monastery of Saint-Denis and soon continued his studies in theology, and 18-year-old Héloïse took vows as a nun in Argenteuil.

In the novel by G. Flaubert there is also a scene of mutilation, namely - amputation of the leg to the stable-boy Hippolyte. However, on a symbolic level of the subtext a sort of ritual injury is if applied to Charles: he finally loses the chance for a happy married life with Emma (remarkable is the consonance of the initial syllable of the name Emma and the term «émasculation»/«emasculation», in a figurative sense: «impuissance, a strong weakness»).

At the same time, in the text by G. Flaubert it is repeatedly emphasized the power of attempt to dominate of Emma’s woman character on the male art images. The source of such a «bellicose nature» of the eponym character once again lies in the meaning of the name base: Emma comes from German: «ermin», «herman»/«homme»/«a man»; there is also a certain harmony between the name Emma and the term «amazone»/«warrior woman» [3]. The character of Emma is also characterized by a constant competition with the men characters in the novel: in the scene of the first meeting of Charles and Emma in Bertaux «elle portait, comme un homme, passé entre deux boutons de son corsage, un lorgnon d’écaille» [5; I, 2]; at the time of her first adultery with Rodolphe the character was wearing «un chapeau d’homme» [5; II, 9]; finally, the character of Léon is named by the author «her mistress»/«sa maîtresse» [5; III, 5].

In addition, the text by G. Flaubert contains some possible association with the epistolary novel «Les Lettres portugaises»/«Letters of a Portuguese Nun» by Gabriel de Guilleragues which represents a collection of 5 letters of historical personalities: the letters were often ascribed to a 17th-century Franciscan nun in a convent in Beja, Portugal, named in 1810 as Mariana Alcoforado (1640-1723) and were said to have been written to her French lover, Noël Bouton, Marquis de Chamilly (1635-1715). The passionate love-letters of the unhappy woman, prisoner in a monastery, to her distant beloved form a monologue beginning in amorous passion and slowly evolving, through successive stages of faith, doubt, and despair, toward a tragic end [8]. So, Emma was raised in a convent, and in her letters to Leon and Rodolphe it is also traced a desire to escape from this lack of freedom («imprisonment») in Yonville-l'Abbaye. The main indication are once again the initials of Marianne Alcaforado, M.A., representing an acronym assonant to the name «Emma» (as well as Marie Arnoux, the sublime character of a beloved woman in the novel «Sentimental Education»); Léon's name is also a palindrome by the word Noël.

Thus, tracing the main onym of «Emma» values in the novel «Madame Bovary» by G. of Flaubert in the context of intertextuality represents a promising area of aesthetic onomastic research contributing to a better understanding of the ideological component of the artistic image, as well as the disclosure of the author's intention at the level of the historical and the multicultural component.

Going deeply into the infinite space of intertextuality, the aesthetic onyms are able to acquire numerous historical and cultural connotations which enable new reading and interpretation of the author's text in a changing environment in the diachronic aspect.

References:

1. Меркулова Н.В. Методика исследования художественного текста на основе анализа эстетической ономастики (на материале романа Г. Флобера «Госпожа Бовари») // Научный вестник Воронеж. гос. арх.-строит. ун-та. Современные лингвистические и методико-дидактические исследования. Воронеж: Воронежский ГАСУ, 2015. Вып. 4(28). С. 112-127.

2. Меркулова Н.В., Моташкова С.В. Эстетическая ономастика в художественном тексте и интертексте: основные функции и проблема перевода (на материале знаковых произведений французской литературы) : монография. Воронеж: Воронежский ГАСУ, 2013. 177 с.

3. Baudelaire Ch. Madame Bovary par Gustave Flaubert, in L'Artiste, 18 octobre 1857 // URL: http://www.bmlisieux.com/litterature/baudelaire/bovary.htm. [Дата обращения: 02.02.2016].

4. Flaubert G. Dictionnaire des idées reçues // URL: Dictionnaire leboucher.com›pdf/flaubert/b_fla_di.pdf (2002 – Editions du Boucher) [Дата обращения: 02.02.2016].

5. Flaubert G. Madame Bovary // URL: lingvo.asu.ru/france/texts/bovary/00index.html [Дата обращения: 02.02.2016].

6. Leclerc Y. Plans et scénarios de Madame Bovary, édition Zulma, 1995 // URL: Visualisation séquence bovary.fr›folio_visu.php?folio=4541&mode=sequence… [Дата обращения: 02.02.2016].

7. Lettres d'Abélard et d'Héloïse. Traduction nouvelle. D’après le texte de Victor Cousin. Précédée d’une introduction par Octave Gréard, Inspecteur général de l'instruction publique, directeur de l'enseignement primaire de la Seine. Deuxième édition. – Paris: Garnier Frères, Libraires-Éditeurs 6, rue des Saints-Pères, 6. 1875 Héloïse et Abélard (Litolff, Henry Charles) // URL: IMSLP imslp.org/wiki/Héloïse_et_... [Дата обращения: 02.04.2016].

8. Lettres portugaises traduites en français par Gabriel-Joseph de Guilleragues - 1669... // URL: bmlisieux.com›archives/religieu.htm Diffusion libre et gratuite (freeware). Lettres portugaises. ... [Дата обращения: 02.04.2016].

9. Madame Bovary - Liste des noms propres établie par Nicole Caron et Danielle Girard [1100 noms environ] // URL: liste des noms propres flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/bovary/.../noms_propres/... [Дата обращения: 01.02.2016].

10. Rousseau J.-J. Julie ou La nouvelle Héloïse. Lettres de deux amants habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes recueillies et publiées par Jean-Jacques Rousseau // URL: ecole-alsacienne.org›CDI/pdf/1301/130128_ROU.pdf [Дата обращения: 02.02.2016].