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INTERVIEWER
Let us move from the sublime to the wonderfully ridiculous. You once thought to ask in words, I believe, not unlike these: “What was Madame Bovary like in bed, and should we care?” I’ve always meant to ask you about this. You were raising other issues, larger issues. Please talk about that for a minute.
PRICE
I wish I’d invented that question. In the seventies Esquire asked me to write an article about new sexual freedoms in fiction. It was really the time in American fiction when suddenly we began to realize, My God, I can say anything I want to, and even Jesse Helms can’t stop me! I can portray any sexual act. I can indulge any private peculiarity in prose. . . . [Ultimately,] I said that Flaubert probably would have benefited had he been able to tell us more about what Emma’s actual adulterous unions are like for her, because the whole subject of the novel is Emma’s romantic and romantically poisonous delusions about sexual love. It was Esquire who gave it the title, “What Did Madame Bovary Do in Bed?” I think I called it something really dull like “Uses for Freedoms."
INTERVIEWER
What was she like in bed? Boring? Selfish?
PRICE
Rather stunned and frantic, I would think. And I don’t say it to be comic. I suspect stunned and frantic, breathless and shockingly cold to the touch.
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