Homais

Who Is Homais? An Introduction

Homais is the provincial pharmacist, and he is Flaubert’s most withering portrait of bourgeois materialism and self-importance. Where Emma yearns for something beyond her circumstances, Homais is perfectly satisfied with his place in the world and convinced of his own superiority. He is pompous, self-congratulatory, and utterly lacking in self-awareness. He represents the bourgeois mentality that Flaubert despised: satisfied with appearances, devoted to material success, and incapable of questioning the assumptions that govern his life.

Homais is not a major character, but his presence is significant. He appears throughout the novel as a kind of antagonistic chorus, offering his opinions on everything, involving himself in matters that don’t concern him, and generally making a spectacle of himself. He is foolish, but he is not harmless. His words and actions have consequences, particularly for Charles, who is often on the receiving end of Homais’s contempt.

What makes Homais remarkable is that he is never presented with sympathy or understanding. He is a pure object of mockery. Unlike Emma, with whom readers can find points of identification and understanding, Homais is simply ridiculous. His pursuit of prestige, his devotion to his own status, his superficiality, these are treated as contemptible. And yet, Homais never doubts himself. He ends the novel more successful than ever, having risen in social status despite (or perhaps because of) his essential vulgarity.

Psychology and Personality

Homais’s psychology is fundamentally shallow. He is devoted to appearances and to material markers of success. He cares about his shop, about his social position, about being recognized as a man of importance in the town. He reads the newspapers and adopts the opinions he finds there, convinced that he is a man of learning and enlightenment.

He is dominating and garrulous. He talks constantly, about his own achievements, his own opinions, his own importance. He tells stories that are invariably about himself and his cleverness. He cannot listen without interrupting. He cannot be silent. His constant talking is a kind of defensive maneuver, a way of asserting his dominance in any conversation.

What is remarkable about Homais is his complete lack of self-reflection. He is incapable of seeing himself as others see him. He imagines himself to be a man of sensitivity and culture. In reality, he is a buffoon. He imagines himself to be a good friend. In reality, he is entirely self-interested. He imagines himself to be wise and well-informed. In reality, he is foolish and credulous.

Homais is also vindictive in a petty way. When Charles attempts a surgical procedure on a patient with a clubfoot, Homais watches carefully. When the operation fails, Homais is delighted, because Charles’s failure enhances Homais’s sense of his own superiority. He spreads rumors and emphasizes the disaster, not out of any real moral commitment, but out of a desire to maintain his own status by diminishing others.

He is also devoted to progress and modernity, though this devotion is entirely superficial. He adopts new ideas without understanding them, uses modern terminology without being certain of its meaning, and imagines himself to be an enlightened man. But his enlightenment is a performance, a costume he wears to distinguish himself from the truly provincial people around him.

Character Arc

Homais does not really have an arc. He does not change. His trajectory is one of increasing success and influence, despite his fundamental baseness. This is perhaps Flaubert’s most bitter commentary: that a man of Homais’s vulgarity can rise in the world, while a woman of Emma’s yearning can destroy herself.

At the novel’s beginning, Homais is already established as a prominent citizen. He is the pharmacist, a man of some education and apparent importance. He insinuates himself into the lives of everyone around him, particularly Charles and Emma, offering advice he has not been asked for and inserting himself into situations that don’t concern him.

Throughout the novel, Homais continues on this trajectory. He attempts to have Charles attempt ambitious surgical procedures, positioning himself as a man of modern science. When these procedures fail, he broadcasts the failure throughout the town, enhancing his own status by diminishing Charles’s.

By the novel’s end, Homais has risen further. He is given a medal, recognized officially by the state as a man of merit and importance. He has achieved social advancement and public recognition. His basic nature has not changed; he has simply become more influential. The tragedy is that Homais’s success is real, while Emma’s search for meaning and beauty has ended in death.

The absence of change is the point. Homais is incapable of growth or self-awareness. He will remain forever pleased with himself, forever certain of his own importance, forever talking and never listening. And the world rewards him for this.

Key Relationships

Homais’s relationship with Charles is one of contempt barely concealed beneath courtesy. He considers Charles to be a fool and a mediocre doctor. He takes every opportunity to display his own superiority, to offer unsolicited advice, to insert himself into Charles’s professional affairs. When Charles’s surgical attempt fails, Homais is gleeful. When Charles is grieving after Emma’s death, Homais uses the situation as an opportunity to talk about his own opinions on marriage and fidelity.

His relationship with Emma is more complicated. He is infatuated with her, attracted to her beauty and her apparent refinement. But he also sees her as a potential source of status. Her associations with aristocratic values appeal to his own snobbery. He hovers around her, offering compliments, inserting himself into her life, failing to recognize that she finds him utterly contemptible.

His relationship with Bournisien, the priest, is one of constant intellectual sparring. Homais is anticleric and devoted to modern, secular philosophy. Bournisien is traditional and religious. They argue constantly, but these arguments are more about status and dominance than about any genuine intellectual commitment. Neither is trying to convince the other; both are trying to demonstrate superiority.

His relationship with his wife and children is barely present in the novel, but the implication is that they exist primarily as extensions of Homais’s own importance. His wife and children serve his status; they are possessions in his collection of markers of success.

What to Talk About with Homais

On Novelium, you could ask Homais about his philosophy and his values. Does he genuinely believe in the ideas he espouses, or are they simply fashionable? Can he articulate why he believes what he believes?

You might explore his relationship with Charles. Why does he devote so much energy to criticizing and undermining Charles? Is it genuine intellectual disagreement, or is it something else?

There’s the question of his own self-awareness. Has he ever questioned whether the opinions he holds are actually his own? Has he ever wondered whether he might be ridiculous?

You could also ask him about Emma. What did he see in her? Was he genuinely attracted to her, or was she simply another marker of status?

And finally, what does he think of the term “Homais,” which has become a byword for bourgeois mediocrity? Is he aware that his name has become synonymous with a particular kind of vapid self-importance?

Why Homais Changes Readers

Homais is infuriating precisely because he is so self-satisfied. He causes damage to people around him, and he never recognizes this damage. He contributes to Charles’s humiliation and Emma’s alienation, and he sees himself as a friend and a man of principle.

What makes Homais particularly effective as a character is that he is not exceptional. He is not a great villain. He is an ordinary man of ordinary vulgarity who represents a particular kind of human failure: the failure to look beyond surfaces, to question received ideas, to consider the impact of one’s words on others.

Readers see in Homais a version of what the bourgeois world produces: people who are satisfied with appearances, devoted to material markers of status, incapable of genuine intellectual or emotional depth. He is, in some sense, what Emma is rebelling against. Emma wants beauty and passion and meaning; Homais is content with success and recognition and money.

The bitterness of Homais’s character is that he succeeds. Unlike Emma, who is destroyed by her yearning, Homais thrives precisely because he asks for nothing more than what the world can offer. The novel seems to suggest that there is no room in this world for dreamers like Emma, but plenty of room for mediocrities like Homais.

Finally, Homais is moving because he is so perfectly drawn. Every word he speaks, every action he takes, reveals his fundamental nature. He is not a complex character. He is a simple character drawn with perfect precision. Flaubert’s contempt for Homais is absolute, and readers feel that contempt transmitted directly.

Famous Quotes

“I do not believe in God, but I believe in progress and in the power of reason” (Homais, spouting secular philosophy without understanding its implications).

“The English believe that their medicines are superior, but they are fools” (Homais, displaying the shallow nationalism that characterizes his thought).

“It is not enough to remove the hunchback; one must improve the muscles and the nerves through modern pharmaceutical methods” (Homais, offering advice about Charles’s surgical attempt with no medical knowledge).

“Madame Bovary is a woman of taste and refinement, unlike the common provincial women” (Homais, complimenting Emma while confirming his own vulgarity).

“That doctor is incompetent and dangerous, and I have the expertise to improve the medicine of this region” (Homais’s constant assertion of superiority over Charles).

Homais’s words are marked by his constant insertion of himself into conversations, his reliance on fashionable ideas, and his inability to speak without asserting his own importance.

On Novelium, you can have a voice conversation with Homais. Ask him about his philosophy, his success, his perception of the people around him. Explore with him whether he recognizes his own vulgarity or whether he is genuinely convinced of his own importance. Through voice conversation, you might understand Homais not as simply ridiculous, but as a representative of a particular kind of human mediocrity that the world rewards and celebrates.