Heroines

by Kate Zambreno

androgynous mind is one that “transmits emotion without impediment” yet doesn’t necessarily have “any special sympathy with women.” But I think of how fervently, in letters to Louise Colet as well as in his novel, Flaubert dismissed women and their minds. He writes to LC (how did she handle these dismissive letters?) that the only writer who understood women, “these charming animals” was Shakespeare. “He portrays them as overenthusiastic beings, never as reasonable ones.” He might have identified with Madame Bovary, or had been her, but he also thought of her as a frivolous thing, with a feminine (weak) mind, all flesh instead of spirit. There is no ambivalence to her characterization, there is no consciousness, or possibility of consciousness. She is in Kant’s minority, a silly, frivolous animal. Her emotions are never sincere, unlike even Charles’s misguided uxoriousness (yet Emma’s husband also just romanticizes her as the character in his own novel, he never really sees her).