Gemma Bovery

AUTHOR: Simmonds, Posy

ARTIST: Posy Simmonds (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1999

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1999

Publication History

In the late 1970’s, Posy Simmonds began drawing a weekly comic strip for The Guardian called The Silent Three of St. Botolph’s. This led to other strips and, in 1981, a full-fledged book entitled True Love, which can be considered her first attempt at a graphic novel. Her penchant for satire and literary adaptation led naturally to her most celebrated work, Gemma Bovery, which, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, was serialized in The Guardian, appearing every Monday through Saturday in 1999. The success of the series prompted its publication in book form the same year. The book quickly garnered critical interest and attention and was even nominated for the celebrated Prix de la Critique Award for the best comic published in France, organized by the Association des Critiques et des Journalistes de Bande Dessinée. Though Alan Moore’s From Hell took the award, the resulting critical interest helped Gemma Bovery find an American publisher in 2004.

Plot

The book loosely follows the general plot of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886), though acquaintance with the novel is not necessary to appreciate Simmonds’s story. Gemma Bovery opens in the French town of Bailleville, Normandy, where the local baker, Raymond Joubert, consoles Charles Bovery, still mourning the death of his wife. Raymond admits to the reader that “the blood of Gemma Bovery is on my hands” and jumps at the chance to snatch her recently discovered diaries, which Charles has been too distraught to examine. Spiriting them away one by one, Raymond fills in the gaps of the tragic story he both witnessed and played a significant role in creating.

In the aftermath of a failed relationship and suffering from the flu, Gemma Tate attaches herself to disheveled divorcé Charles, who nurses her back to health. Though Gemma secretly hopes to win back her former lover, a recently married restaurant critic named Patrick, she finds life seductively comfortable with Charles. However, a lack of money and the demands of Charles’s ex-wife and children lead her to contemplate a simpler life in a place where “Culture and style go hand in hand, where the business of living is taken seriously, where food isn’t full of chemicals. Where property is dirty cheap”—in other words, France. Though Charles initially has little interest in France, he is carried away by Gemma’s enthusiasm and promises of a happy life, much to the chagrin of his former wife, who accuses him of betraying his children and his financial responsibilities.

In France, the couple settle into a life similar to one they shared in London. Charles becomes content in his country existence, restoring old furniture for British vacationers, while Gemma feels trapped in a rotting, leaking, vermin-infested hovel. Their neighbor, Raymond, follows her at a distance, eager to be a modern-day Flaubert. To this end, he “wills” her to strike up a romance with a local landowner and law student, Hervé de Bressigny. When the relationship becomes too serious, he decides to intervene, sending Gemma a breakup letter plagiarized from Flaubert. Though Gemma suspects the letter is inauthentic, the breakup is confirmed when Hervé writes his own letter, far less literary, canceling their planned elopement to London. To make matters worse, Hervé’s mother is planning to sue Gemma over a piece of furniture that she promised to have Charles restore, which has since disappeared.

Heartbroken, Gemma is left to face Charles’s wrath (who learns about the affair from Madame de Bressigny) and tremendous debt. In a plot twist that surprises even Raymond, Gemma enlists his help to draft a letter to the Bressignys’ lawyers, but when she goes to collect the letter from him, she is shocked to find a copy of Madame Bovary in his kitchen. She notes his guilty reaction and banishes him from her house. Nevertheless, Raymond feels that he, alone, can save her from the same fate as Madame Bovary. He writes letters to Charles, the Rankins (Gemma’s English friends who live nearby), and Patrick, warning them that “something was closing in on her, something was going to happen to her. . . . An accident of some sort.” Again, his authorial pretensions fail him, as she dies mysteriously a few days later.

Characters

•Raymond Joubert, a former book editor, has returned to Bailleville to manage his family’s bakery. Full of literary pretensions, he loves gossip and enjoys dissecting the lives of his customers. Though at times a bit of a caricature, as when he derides the English for preferring the French countryside to the French themselves, he emerges as the most psychologically realized creation in the novel, revealing his own character through the intimate confessions of the novel’s heroine.

•Gemma Bovery, a successful magazine illustrator prior to meeting Charles, is the novel’s tragic heroine, modeled on Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. Like her, Gemma is too passionate for the squalid realities of daily existence. She is an artist who simply works in the wrong medium: men. No relationship can sustain her artistic vision of a pastoral, Antoine Watteau-like world in which art and love are intertwined and immortal. Bills, betrayals, and nosy neighbors will always intrude.

•Charles Bovery, a divorced furniture restorer, lives a comfortable, if bohemian, lifestyle before meeting Gemma. Lost in his own world, he avoids the messier side of life, preferring to tinker away in his studio. He lives in fear of his former wife, who perpetuates their married existence through a series of threatening calls and letters. Nonetheless, he is a passionately devoted father, indulging his children in the same way he indulges Gemma’s whims and fancies.

•Hervé de Bressigny is a young law student whose well-to-do family owns an estate in the Bailleville area. He has returned to the ancestral home to cram for his law exams, which he already failed once, so he can establish a respectable life with his bride-to-be, Delphine. A man ruled by powerful women, he quickly falls under Gemma’s sway, all the while knowing that his mother would never approve of such relations.

•The Rankins, a.k.a. Mark and Wizzy, are an English couple who have a house near the Boverys’. They are well off and employ both Charles and Gemma in various restoration tasks. The couple represents a broad satire of English couples who settle in France for such amenities as the culture, the wine, and the landscape, but are otherwise distrustful of the French and do not mix in their society.

Artistic Style

Perhaps the most unique aspect of Gemma Bovery is its storytelling. To call it a graphic novel is in some ways misleading, since this has become synonymous with a single approach: a comic book novel. Whereas many traditional comics rely heavily on artwork, using text simply for dialogue or narration, Simmonds strikes a closer balance between the two. Essentially, Gemma Bovery is a self-contained novella with an accompanying visual text. The art itself follows a loose comic book format, though it occasionally adds fine details such as a montage, a setting, or an impressionistic detail. The effect is like reading several different works at once, each one adding a different perspective or interpretation to the story line.

A typical example of this occurs on page 27, when Raymond reads about Gemma’s escape from London. The reader observes Gemma’s dislike of the children, who are too wrapped up in sports, television, and pizza, instead of such things as the wildflowers that interested her as a youth. It concludes sparely, “Gemma had soon had enough of it.” This text is not included in the comic strip frame or in a traditional narration box but rather exists in the blank space of the page itself, as a self-contained novel, seemingly oblivious to its comic book companion. The text even appears in book font, as if to call attention to itself as the story. Indeed, Raymond’s narration is concocted solely from his own observations and Gemma’s diaries; he cannot know what really happened, which the author provides in comic strip asides (though these, too, may be Raymond’s imagination).

Beneath the text, a more traditional comic follows, several small frames detailing Charles and Gemma’s argument over his children and former wife. The style of the drawings is quite at odds with the text: Whereas the text is sharp, spare, and matter-of-fact, the black-and-white drawings are soft, at times sketchlike or simply unfinished. They have the look of half-remembered or improperly realized visions of what may have been. This in itself is a brilliant commentary on the novel, which claims authoritative knowledge by one or more of its narrators.

The story line of the comic strip also adds insights to Gemma’s character that Raymond could never know, revealing her as more self-aware than the fatalistic narrator believes her to be. For example, in her argument with Charles, the two are drawn in the style of a Sunday cartoon, with deft characterizations and a simple back-and-forth that is mostly portrayed as two talking heads in the frame. In the last frame, however, Charles retreats to the background, while Gemma, in the foreground, assumes a more detailed, slightly more portraitlike appearance. In this frame, she is no longer a modern stand-in for Madame Bovary, but a sympathetic, realistic modern woman, lamenting, “S--t . . . s--t. . . . I chose bloody Quality of Life . . . now I’ve made myself poor.”

Themes

With Madame Bovary as its inspiration, Gemma Bovery is an understandably rich and complex work. Its chief motivating concepts are the relationship between life and art (or reality and illusion) and the satirization of middle-class life and values. With regard to the former, the novel itself is a profound meditation on the question, “What is art?” Do the great works of art, such as Madame Bovary, provide mirrors into the human soul as timeless critiques of modern society, or are they ideals dreamed up by artists that, even in their disappointments, far surpass people’s mundane achievements? Raymond is clearly in love with the past, as demonstrated by his dropping out of a career in Paris to resurrect his family’s bakery, and pines for the fictional Madame Bovary. He hopes, foolishly, to consummate his love of art through Gemma and, by the end of the novel, to save her from her fateful demise. Raymond is disappointed time and again by the reality, particularly when Gemma loves men he feels superior to, and she rejects him as a snoop and voyeur. In the end, he can only cling to the illusion that he has “created” her story and seeks validation in her discovered diaries—which, ironically, say little about him at all. In this sense, Gemma Bovery is as much his story as hers, as he tries to emerge as a modern-day Flaubert, rather than a character in his own tangled plot.

Simmonds set out to do much more than translate Madame Bovary into the graphic novel form; her work demonstrates a keen eye for satire and caricature, a gift she honed with her satirical portraits in The Guardian and one that she brings chiefly to bear on the pretensions of the vacationing Brits. The Rankins, in particular, represent a class of well-to-do suburbanites who view France as a kind of European Disneyland, hawking a quaint brand of nineteenth-century culture unavailable at the shops. Wizzy Rankin adores the superficial aspects of France, but when it comes to the people themselves, she demurs, “Oh God, they’re frightfully difficult to know. . . . I mean, they’re jolly friendly in shops . . . and our builders are sweet . . . but other frogs, they aren’t bothered . . . well, why should they?” This attitude is shared by most of the English, and even, to some extent, by Gemma herself.

The satire, however, is double edged, for most of the French deplore the uncultured, commercialized English. Hervé’s mother dismisses Charles as a “repulsive anglais,” and Raymond, when confronted with Patrick’s charm and polished French, can only remark, “All this was said with the most perfect French accent I have ever heard in a foreigner. . . . Absolutely repellent.” Neither side can ever truly know the other, since conventional stereotypes and cartoon reality get in the way. Fittingly, it is a comic book that exposes this cultural ignorance, allowing the reader to see both sides as they truly are.

Impact

Gemma Bovery’s success has challenged American assumptions of what a graphic novel can be and should do. Major figures such as Michiko Kakutani, Elaine Showalter, and Eric Griffiths have enthusiastically supported the book, with the latter encouraging talk of a Booker Prize. Though no prize was forthcoming, the implications were clear: Here was a work that could not be dismissed as simply a “comic” or “children’s book.” Indeed, in Mick Imlah’s Times Literary Supplement review of Simmonds’s second book, he scarcely even refers to it as a graphic novel. Instead, he declares, “its single most impressive attribute is the brilliant management of what would be termed, in a purely literary context, the plot.” This does not downplay Simmonds’s amazing artwork, but, rather, reminds the reader that the art is scarcely distinguishable from the text; the two blend seamlessly together in service of the story.

Gemma Bovery has subsequently appeared in nearly every survey of the modern graphic novel, including Paul Gravett’s authoritative anthology Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know (2005). On the strength of this single work, Simmonds became one of the leading graphic novelists in England, a reputation that her next book, Tamara Drewe (2008), has ably confirmed.

Further Reading

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home (2006).

Simmonds, Posy. Tamara Drewe (2008).

Thompson, Craig. Blankets (2005).

Tomine, Adrian. Shortcomings (2007).

Bibliography

Constable, Liz. “Consuming Realities: The Engendering of Invisible Violences in Posy Simmonds’s Gemma Bovery.” South Central Review 19/20 (Winter, 2002): 63-84.

Durrant, Sabine. “Posy Simmonds: The Invisible Woman.” The Telegraph, October 21, 2007. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3668684/Posy-Simmonds-the-invisible-woman.html.

Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. New York: Collins Design, 2005.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Posy Simmonds: A Literary Life.” The Comics Journal 286 (November, 2007): 26-67.

Kakutani, Michiko. “A Romantic Like Emma, Trapped in the Bourgeoisie.” The New York Times, January 28, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/books/28book.html.