This chapter begins with a reading of the famous description of Charles Bovary’s cap in the early pages of Madame Bovary. Although the moment has been rightly understood as embarrassing for Bovary, this chapter asks if it should be read also as differently embarrassing for the voice that describes it. So great a performance might be taken as an awkward instance of overdoing it. In other words, unpacking the moment of the mistake helps us to see ways in which embarrassment tends to spread not only from character to character but also across formal boundaries (between character and narrator, reader and novel) that we tend to think of as secure. The chapter then moves on to account for a logic of incorporation that helps to demonstrate ways in which the novel not only generates embarrassment, but also needs it at several levels if it is to make the sense that it does.
Keywords: Gustave Flaubert, embarrassment, incorporation, omniscience, eating,