Madame Bovary : beyond unrealised dreams and meaningless passion

Rusiru Kalpagee Chitrasena

University of Kelaniya

2010

Bored with her husband’s mediocrity and insignificance, trapped

in a marriage that does not live up to her expectations, and

driven by her unquenched romantic passions, Emma Bovary embarks

upon a couple of tempestuous extramarital relationships that she

believes to be offering the passion she has been searching for,

to escape the monotony of her marital life. To disguise her

infidelities and the dullness of her petty bourgeois identity

which she is ashamed of, Emma tries to live beyond her means

through excessive borrowing that descends her life into tragedy

and ruin.

Gustave Flaubert’s novel of adultery and remorse is

conceptualized as one of the best satirical expositions of the

romantic fantasies and pretentious bourgeois attempts of the 19th

Century French Society. The present study is intended to

critically evaluate the thesis: “Madame Bovary is a novel which

discusses the never-realized dreams and meaningless passion.”

Given that the above thesis proposes that ‘unrealised dreams’ and

‘meaningless passion’ are the major causes of Emma’s tragedy, I

will deal with these two aspects as well, yet for me, Flaubert

does not simply deal with the so called unrealised dreams and

‘meaningless’ passion in Emma. The novelist is acknowledged for

the great affinity with which he identifies himself with Emma,

particularly with reference to his sweeping statement “Madame

Bovary, C’est moi.” Therefore, Flaubert presents the tragedy of

Emma Bovary as the outcome of various complicated individual,

social and psychological circumstances that I will bring up in

detail in the course of my analysis.

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Psychiatrically speaking, two critical biological conditions seem

to determine the tragic fate of Emma: her innate sensuality and

her romantic imagination. (Mardner, 1997) Flaubert portrays Emma

as an individual carried away by romantic fantasies and living in

a world of surrealist dreams to escape the banality of her middle

class life. Emma’s sensuality becomes apparent to the reader at

the very point of her initial encounter with Charles. As he

watches her saw, she pricks her fingers on the needle and

immediately raises them up to her mouth and sucks them. Later,

when they were drinking liquor, she drains her glass and licks

the final drops of the drink with the tip of her tongue. For an

informed observer of these behavioural patterns of Emma, her

innate sensuality becomes obvious. This passionate nature could

have been bestowed with full expression in her marital life thus

producing an agreeable relationship between Charles and Emma and

a contended life for both of them had Charles been receptive to

her spirited nature:

“Despite everything, she tried, according to theories

she considered sound, to make herself in love. By

moon light in the garden, she used to recite him all

the love poetry, she knew or to sing with a sigh slow

melancholy songs. It left her as unmoved as before,

neither did it appear to make Charles more loving or

more emotional.” (p. 56)

Emma tries her best to ignite a passion for Charles with which

she fails miserably and Charles’s passionate embraces do not move

her since they seem to follow fixed patterns which is compared to

a familiar dessert after the monotony of diner. It is this

‘placid dullness’ of Charles that quickly dampens her passion.

She expects him to initiate her into to the ‘forces of passion’

but “this one had nothing to teach; knew nothing, wanted nothing”

leaving Emma to only wonder what was meant, in real life “ by the

words ‘bliss’, ‘passion’, ‘ecstasy’ which had looked so beautiful

in books”. Emma turns to sentimental novels with dashing heroes

in an attempt to imaginatively live the passionate life she

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desires. It is this imagination that recreates her romantic

fantasies about fictional heroes in two men she encounters with

whom she tries to discover her denied raptures and ecstasies.

Emma’s infatuation with Léon Depuis grows to be a tempestuous

love one afternoon as she gazes at him simultaneously conjuring

an image of Charles as she has seen him so many times in the past

and when the juxtaposition of the images of these two men causes

her to compare them, Léon emerges as the superior. Afterwards,

Léon becomes the nucleus of her marital boredom as he reappears

in her imagination “taller, more handsome, more polished and more

indistinct” than he is in reality. Thus, by the time the two are

reunited, Emma is primed to fulfil her romantic dream of a

passionate relationship with him. Unfortunately however, Emma

mistakes Leon’s superficiality for profundity and fails to notice

that both of them are entangled in the same romantic perversions

expressed in platitudes and clichés found in the sentimental

literary works where both of them finds solace.

Léon’s departure from Yonville results in the first significant

emotional breakdown of Emma aggravating the sense of something

missing in her and once denied of the emotional security and the

sense of fulfilment that she found in Léon, she becomes an easy

prey of Rodolphe.

As she sees Léon again at the theatre, her imaginative vision of

the opera singer becomes the utmost determining force that

propels her into a romantic relationship with Léon. The voice of

the opera’s heroine “seemed simply the echo of her own

consciousness and all this fascinating make-believe a part of her

own life” (II. xv. p. 235) She transfers her feelings for the

singer to him making their union therefore inevitable.

Emma’s affair with Rodolphe is sparked by her evening at La

Vaubyeerard where she experiences the intoxicating world of the

upper classes for the first time; a world she desperately wants

to belong to. That evening is capped by her waltz with a

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viscount, which embodies for her the luxurious life which she is

soon compelled to abandon. Later, as Rodolphe tries to convince

her to give into her desires, she recollects the images of

Viscount and Léon. The juxtaposition of these images with the

presence of Rodolphe and his amorous words causes an imaginative

fusion for Emma who is now ready to allow herself to be seduced.

Rodolphe’s deceitful appearance and his daringly passionate

exclamations of love fuddles Emma to the extent that she feels

experiencing passion and elemental forces of love fulfilling her

dreams so that for the first time he begins to feel that her life

has now received all the ‘passion, ecstasy and delirium of the

romances which she had read’.

With Rodolphe, Emma experiences the thrill of pure physical

union yet she longs for more. Her innate nature of being hungry

for constant change and excitement does not allow her to be in

the same situation with him for long. She then tries to incite

Rodolphe into eloping with her in the night. For the average

reader, Emma’s desire may be frivolous yet it is grounded in her

acute need for security which she lacks inwardly as a result of

weak foundation on which her relationship with Charles is built

upon. The great misfortune of Emma is that her mission to regain

her lost security in Rodolphe too crumbles ironically like all

other sources that she depends upon for emotional sustenance.

Rodolphe’s desertion makes Emma more reckless than ever; she once

again turns to Leon and gives herself rather readily in her quest

for a much nobler passion. Yet, Leon grows a sense of resentment

towards Emma as a result of her attempt to dominate him and his

antipathy towards him is triggered at her indecent suggestion

that he steals from his Employer to pay off the debts incurred by

Emma. Following Leon’s breakaway, Emma attempts to renew her

relationship with Rodolphe in order to be able to find money and

this point, Emma, totally driven out of her sober consciousness,

is prostituting herself.

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Financial devastation and betrayal by her lovers leave Emma with

the only option of death. Throughout, she had lived for pleasure

and once confirmed that she will never have it, Emma sees no

reason to continue living. Her choice of suicide is typical of

her romantic short-sightedness and out of her romantic fantasies,

she naively assumes that death will come to her in sleep and will

put an end to all her misfortune yet this too goes wrong making

the last few hours of her, lying in the deathbed, an extremely

painful experience for both herself and Charles.

From the beginning of the novel, it becomes apparent to the

reader that Emma lacks an ideal female role model whom she could

emulate in her life. As a child, she is not blessed to be a part

of a protective family. To make matters worse, her mother, who

would have otherwise guided Emma to become a mature woman ready

and a mother, dies untimely. The nuns at the convent are not

influential enough as role models. This absence creates a large

vacuum in Emma’s growth as a woman that is difficult to be filled

in and she turns into various other models through which her

personality is shaped. As a teenager, she seeks to emulate the

romantic novels she reads while at the convent and after the

ball, she seeks to emulate the nobility and the wealthy

fabricating a new romantic ideal based on a man she met at the

ball. After her exposure to poetry, she adopts a romantic martyr-

like facade and the melodramatic opera "Lucia de Lammermoor"

drives Emma to adopt the insane fictional character Lucy Ashton

as her role model and becomes convinced that the correct way to

respond to adversity is to lose her mind and commit suicide,

which she eventually does.

Emma’s shattered hopes about a male child also seem to heighten

her disillusionment with life in general. Originally excited by

her pregnancy, she is eager to become a mother and even

fantasizes the experience of motherhood. She badly wants a son

and is sure that she will have one for she believes only a man

can have the freedom to overcome the constraints that have always

frustrated her:

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“She wanted a son. He should be dark and strong, and

she would call him Georges. The thought of having a

male child afforded her a kind of anticipatory

revenge for all her past helplessness. A man, at any

rate, is free. He can explore the passions and the

continents, can surmount obstacles, reach out to the

most distant joys.” (p. 101)

Her desire for a male child stems from her own deprivation as a

woman. From a psychoanalytic perspective, she needs a son as a

penis substitute as compensation for the subjugation of her as a

woman. She does not feel free as a woman and is thwarted by her

physical weakness and legal subjugation. The bitter truth that

her child is a girl makes her unconscious and she is only

interested in naming the baby: she impulsively chooses a name

that reminds of the ball at La Vanbyessard that depicts her

initial unhappiness of belonging to the world where she comes

from.

Emma’s tragic fate is not only determined by her innate

sensuality and vivid imagination. These biological conditions are

combined with certain external facts that propel Emma to her

tragic end. The novel draws largely on three main currents of

thought: the sentimentalism prevalent in the eighteenth century,

which leads into the Romanticism of the 1820s to 1840s; the

analytical explorations of love that develop, in part, from other

eighteenth-century writers; and the pragmatism of bourgeois

thought, which had grown increasingly dominant since the 1830

revolution." Madame Bovary is often described as a satire of the

ineffectual lives of the provincial bourgeoisie of 19th century

France, Looking at the novel from a historicist perspective,

Rosemary Lloyd observes that “ (f)rom the opening pages, with

their depiction of the way in which both children and teachers

impose on individuals patterns of behaviour they are obliged to

copy slavishly, to the concluding lines, which record Homais's

reward for conforming to the image of the successful man, Madame

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Bovary reveals the mechanisms of middle-class society, the way in

which it creates a form of fatality.” (Lloyd, 1989)

Flaubert observes the social reality of the world of the rich

that Emma longs to enter so desperately as the narrator describes

the gentlemen seated at the dinner table at La Vaubyeerard: “(t)

heir nonchalant glances reflected the quietude of passions daily

gratified” and under the shades of their gentle manners, their

“brutality” emerges in fairly trivial matters “such as exercise

strength and flatter vanity— the handling of thoroughbreds and

the pursuit of wantons.” (p. 64) Rodolphe perceives Emma as a

wanton mentioned above, an abandoned woman. He unsympathetically

manipulates her as he perfectly understands Emma’s preoccupation

as an unsatisfied wife “(g)asping for love as a carp on a kitchen

table for water” (p. 143) Therefore, he knows that she can be

easily seduced with words of love and some attention. Emma’s

relationship with Rodolphe initially appears to be a success

since it physically and emotionally touches her and gives her

what was lacking in her life with Charles. However, Rodolphe soon

wants to get rid of her and decides that “Emma was like any other

mistress; and the charm of novelty, gradually slipping away like

a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion...” He

effortlessly abandons her leaving her more despondent that she

had been before the affair.

A feminist critique of the novel would focus on the portrayal of

Emma, either consciously or unconsciously by Flaubert, as a

victim of patriarchy and male domination: her existential malaise

and obsession with fantasy may be viewed as consequences of her

limited role in bourgeois society. Tony Tanner argues that

“[Emma's] sickness must be connected to the vagueness of her

position in society: after being a daughter (and thus entirely

defined by the father . . .), she exists on the threshold in a

sort of pronominal limbo.” (Tanner, 1979)

The two men, on whom she places a great deal of trust, deserts

her and the man who should be giving her the security that she

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was looking for and should fulfil her psycho- physical and

emotional needs is not sensitive enough towards her. The novel

depicts the limited range of activities that were available to

women in 19th century society and it is this limited range of

activities available to Emma that makes her feel a sense of

missing something in her life. The limited access of the middle

class woman to the professional world is an obvious cause of

Emma’s tragedy through relatively little critical attention is

given to this as a cause of her fall given the heavy emphasis

placed on her romantic imagination alone.

Emma tries to break the monotony of her life by altering among

various pastimes: from redecorating the house to reading,

subscribing to Parisian magazines, charity work, knitting,

painting, playing the piano etc and she is portrayed as a woman

of extremely high creative potential thanks to her imagination.

On her first evening in Yonville, Emma involves herself in a

discussion on aesthetics with Léon whose banalities radiate

insights for Emma since she has found someone who can respond to

the vicarious pleasures of reading. Yet, it becomes obvious to

the reader that Emma is a more passionate and engaged reader that

the clerk and for her, books are life itself. In that case, if

looked at her from the eyes of Virginia Woolf, Emma Bovary

becomes a slightly more romanticized version of ‘the wonderfully

gifted sister of William Shakespeare’ (Woolf, 1929) who is denied

of a room of her own. Therefore the restrictions upon Emma’s

romantic fantasies become a restriction of the female creative

genius. Like Woolf who insists upon the privacy and independence

of the womankind, Emma notices that the woman is constantly

‘thwarted’ by physical weakness and ‘legal subordination’

Perhaps, a little far-fetched though, we are inclined to believe

that Emma Bovary had the potential to become a renowned

litterateur like Woolf had her romantic imagination been given a

chance to flourish in a positive manner.

From a Marxian point of view, it is possible to attribute Emma’s

tragedy to the prevailing materialist conditions and to the

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vicious spirit of capitalism which seems to lie at the centre of

Emma’s financial devastation. Her financial situation aggravates

her prolonged depression and she borrows excessively in order to

be able to spend extravagantly enabling herself to afford

luxuries that would otherwise have been a practical unreality.

Emma’s vision of herself enjoying the delicacies of the upper

classes prompts herself to be surrounded with artifacts from that

world.

Once it is confirmed that no benevolent force comes to help her,

she feels, worse than ever before, a sense of abandonment and

when she tries to talk to the local priest but cannot make him

understand her situation. Her efforts to explain her unfulfilled

needs to him are wasted and having misunderstood the nature and

gravity of Emma’s problem insists that all one needs is to be

warm and well-fed. Her attempts at reconciliation with God in

search of spiritual solace, once again mislead by her romantic

notion of religion, is not answered by the divine forces in the

way she was anticipating it; no sensation of rapture comes down

to her from the divine and she is left with a “ vague

consciousness of having been cheated. God’s absence/indifference

is therefore, as emphasised by Susana Lee, is a “foundational

event in Madame Bovary, the explicit reason for Emma’s

contaminated existence”. (Lee, 2001) However, Emma too does not

have a Christian essence in her making; it is true enough that

she is passionately kissing the crucifix yet this speaks for

nothing more than the dominant sensualist in Emma obsessed with a

romantic version of Christianity.

In my analysis, I have tried to locate Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

beyond the popular notion that it is a tale of unrealised dreams

and meaningless passion. On the contrary, the picture offered by

this tragic novel of adultery and remorse is a more complex one:

a woman’s tragedy of circumstances— individual, social, physical,

psychological, internal, external and so on and so forth. Many of

such circumstances are indeed beyond the control of Emma Bovary

though she is the one and only culprit for all her miseries in

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the way her novel is commonly understood. Flaubert’s compelling

portrayal of this desperately unfulfilled woman places his novel

firmly at the pinnacle of the naturalistic tradition as it

engages the informed reader in a tragic study of free will and

determinism.

Works Cited:

Flaubert, G. (1857) Madame Bovary. London: Penguin Popular

Classics

Lee, S. (2001). Flaubert's Blague Supérieure: The Secular World

of “Madame Bovary”. Symposium Vol.54.4, 203-218.

Lloyd, R. (1989). Flaubert: ' Madame Bovary'. London: Unwin

Hyman.

Mardner, E. (1997). Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in

“Madame Bovary". Diacritics, 49-61.

Tanner, T. (1979). “Flaubert's Madame Bovary”. In Adultery in the

Novel: Contract and Transgression. Maryland: The John Hopkins

University Press.

Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One's Own. New Delhi: UBSPD.

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