Making Madame Bovary’s Wedding Cake
Project Lead:
Professor of Literature in French
Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages
Partner Organisations:
About the project:
Professor Jennifer Yee and the Humanities Cultural Programme launched the Making Madame Bovary's Wedding Cake project, which aimed to create a real-life version of the wedding cake from Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel Madame Bovary. This was a unique way of marking the bicentenary of Flaubert's birth (12 December 1821). It also provided an opportunity for the French Sub-Faculty to work with a well-known local institution, the Oxford Cake Shop. Making the cake brought attention to an overlooked aspect of Flaubert's famous novel: the strange, tragi-comic object that was the Bovarys' wedding cake, which encapsulated Emma Bovary's impossible, ridiculous, yet heartfelt Romantic aspirations. Flaubert's detailed description of the cake reflected his interest in kitsch and outdated visual tropes, an aspect of his work that was much less well known than his use of verbal clichés and stereotypes.
The project was closely related to Jennifer's undergraduate teaching and research. The French Sub-Faculty had up to eighty undergraduates each year studying Flaubert, with two year groups in Oxford at any one time. Students studied Flaubert either as a 'special author' or as part of their Modern Period Paper. In Professor Jennifer Yee's lectures on Flaubert, she discussed Charles Bovary's notorious hat, which had been the subject of considerable critical interest (most notably by Jonathan Culler). There had also been several attempts to illustrate it (by Vladimir Nabokov and some of the Charlie Hebdo illustrators, for example). To the best of her knowledge, there had been no comparable focus on the cake from the same novel. It was, however, a perfect illustration of Flaubert's interest in kitsch and of his satirical approach to both Romantic idealism and the popular visual arts of his time. Jennifer also had a research project, Satirical Ekphrasis and the Invention of Kitsch, which examined how Flaubert's verbal descriptions of works of visual art were comparable to his much-studied integration of verbal clichés and platitudes into his prose.
Contact: Professor Jennifer Yee
jennifer.yee@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Image credit: Bibliothèque Nationale de France
