Études Britanniques Contemporaines (Dec 2019)
A Far Cry from Emma Bovary: A Critique of Rancière—and a Tribute to Rebecca
Abstract
In Rancière’s works, it is the duty of the political philosopher to propose a rupture of the accepted distribution of positions–of what Rancière calls the work of ‘the police’. The police make sure that positions and classes remain clearly differentiated; politics, on the contrary, challenges such categorization. This is how Rancière relates ‘democracy’ to aesthetics. What he calls ‘modernist writing’ articulates the ‘democratic’ principle lying at the heart of the new ‘aesthetic’ regime of art. One of Rancière’s privileged examples, here, is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. This essay contends that Rancière’s work remains in fact blind to one of the central issues of our modernity, namely the rise of ‘the woman question’. I suggest that it is most probably a new, eminently ‘democratic’ genre, that best grasped the importance of this issue: the detective novel. My own references are to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
