People often describe cotton as simple. It is often identified as soft, comforting, and above all, familiar. But there is nothing simple about cotton. Its delicate softness disguises the triumphs and tragedies of our civilisation. Its influence on the course of human history did not go unnoticed by writers and statesmen. It is a story of how a modest crop became the backbone of modern capitalism and empire; of how a commodity from the Global South fueled the rise of the Global North. Cotton’s history with humanity uncovered a divided world where the wealth and power of one half depended on the labour and land of the other.
Nineteenth Century accounts of Cotton
It was a February afternoon, when Emma Bovary set out for a half-forgotten town not too far from Yonville, lured by talk of a cotton mill under construction. She was accompanied by Homais, the apothecary, the young and alluring Léon and Charles, her dull, devoted husband. Homais, the advocate of bourgeois morality, whose mediocrity matched his almost instinctive cunning, spoke at length of the creeping and deliberate advances of industrial progress. The mill, to him, stood as the monument of change. Not everyone was as keen.
The snow fell in thin, deliberate sheets and Emma, Gustave Flaubert reminds us, is bored. And in her boredom, her thoughts drift from the mill to discreet fancies. Of all the preoccupations that consume her, Léon, the soft-spoken and reticent young lawyer, lingers most in her mind. Charles, her husband, is rendered an inconvenience than a threat. Emma’s resolute defiance, her mutiny against marital decorum, Flaubert insists, is instigated in the most uncharacteristic of places, against the scaffolding of a cotton mill. Madame Bovary, considered a triumph of narrative craft and composition, remains a defining work of the European realist tradition. The mill’s brief mention in Flaubert’s most famous novel likely holds more meaning than it initially suggests.
After all, cotton threads its way throughout the novel. From the very first pages, Flaubert draws attention to Charles Bovary’s cotton cap, an object whose simplicity announces the gentle ignominy of its wearer. Emma is married to this uninspired dullard, and from that union, the novel’s tragedy unfolds. The reader is reminded, time and again, that the fabric is key to this tragedy. It is no accident that the Bovarys are brought to ruin by Monsieur Lheureux, the draper. Fashion and desire, stitched firmly to consumerism, wove their slow collapse. The consequences of their actions become deeply entrenched. Nowhere is this clearer than in the novel’s final moments, where tragedy settles with quiet, merciless weight. After Emma consumes arsenic and the pathetic demise of Charles, their only daughter Berthe, barely twelve, is left alone and forced to make a living in a cotton mill. The plot’s end offers no respite. There are no happy endings in a realist novel.
