Like the cake, it is made up of bands or layers that don’t work together. It is part fur, part velvet part flat-topped cap, part cotton nightcap it has a visor and a tassel. Each part is plausible and even mundane, but put together they add up to a ridiculous, extravagant, and perhaps impossible object. In good ‘Realist’ style he gives us a detailed description of the physical qualities of the hat. Instead, he is making fun of contemporary theories of Realism which saw language as having a transparent relationship to the real world. Here the target of Flaubert’s humour is not Romantic aspirations or visual clichés. This hat is now rather notorious – much more so than the cake.Īs with the wedding cake, Flaubert’s description of Charles’s hat combines contrasting, incompatible layers. Nevertheless, Flaubert’s satirical description of the cake has a lot in common with his description of the hat Charles Bovary wore as a schoolboy, right at the beginning of the novel. It might seem odd to compare an elaborate tiered wedding cake (or pièce montée) to a hat. Blog 4: The Wedding Cake, Charles Bovary’s Hat, and the Impossible Object

Instal the new for mac Madame Bovary