Aspiration, self-invention and the unstable distance between the life we want and the signs that signify it.
Madame Bovary is my favourite novel. I’ve read it four times. One of the reasons I keep returning to it is that I never quite return to the same Emma.
She is one of literature’s most divisive women: romantic, dissatisfied, reckless, selfish, deluded. None of those descriptions is entirely false, but none of them is sufficient either.
Flaubert made her frustratingly difficult to hold in one position. She sees the narrowness of the life available to her with painful clarity. However, her tragedy is that she repeatedly mistakes the signs of another life for the freedom she's actually seeking.
That refusal to settle into a single reading is part of what makes Bovary such an intriguing subject for perfume. Peer Parfum’s interpretation, composed by Antoine Lie in collaboration with sculptor Gina Fischli and Clemens Hunziker, does not attempt to capture some definitive Emma.
Nearly two centuries later, the promises that seduced her remain remarkably familiar: the possibility that acquiring the right objects or inhabiting the right image might somehow deliver us into another life. The cultural vocabulary has changed, but the fantasy remains remarkably intact.
Antoine translates that enduring fantasy through an excessive, animalic profusion of tuberose, orange blossom and gardenia, blazing over leather and vinyl, a fascinating pairing in Bovary. Leather carries the language of luxury and craftsmanship; vinyl can reproduce its surface, its texture and even something of its smell. Together they occupy the unstable space between material and representation, luxury and the sign of luxury.
That distance between the desired life and the signs that signify it is painfully acute in Emma. Objects, lovers and social rituals become evidence of another existence, as though possessing its surfaces might somehow make that existence her own.
Perfume is also an unusually apt medium through which to revisit Emma Bovary. Smell runs throughout Madame Bovary as a means of collapsing reality and fantasy.
The tobacco and verbena lingering in the Viscount’s cigar case allow Emma to construct an entire inaccessible world from a scented fragment. Later, the perfume of Rodolphe’s hair folds the present into memories of the Viscount, Léon and the ballroom at Vaubyessard.
Flaubert is famously supposed to have said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” The line is probably apocryphal, but perhaps it has survived because it contains something true.
How often do we measure the life we have against the image of another? How often do we learn what romance, beauty, status or freedom are supposed to look like from the culture surrounding us, only to mistake those signs for the thing itself?
Perhaps there is a little Emma Bovary in all of us.
