Nineteenth century women, given limited education and little freedom, were expected to lead passive lives, usually in a domestic and nurturing role within marriage.
Gustave Flaubert's Bourgeois Background
Emma Bovary rebels against the society in which she lives and struggles to find her role. Flaubert, growing up as a member of the bourgeois despised everything his class stood for. He wrote Madame Bovary, as a rebellion against the customs, manners, gesticulations and speech of the bourgeois. As a product of her class, Emma is the means of this rebellion. Flaubert writes about the mundane where nothing happens but is able to demoralize the bourgeois within the novel.
Real Life is Replaced by Novel Reading
By substituting real life by an obsessive reading of romantic novels Emma becomes nonconformist within society. Novel reading was a pastime that was open to nineteenth century women and female identification with the world of fantasy was often a consequence. Flaubert shows she is stifled by real life as she is not given a voice in everyday situations. Her silence bursts into words with, ‘I have a lover! A lover!’ (Madame Bovary p.150) when she can identify with a romantic heroine.
Brought up in a convent, Emma’s education and early life have prepared her for silence and acquiescence. When engaged in acting out the fantasies of her romantic novels, ‘the great summits of sentiment glittered in her mind’s eye’ (Madame Bovary p.151) Emma is the heroine of a novel waiting for something to happen.
She is acquainted with ‘felicity, passion and rapture’(Madame Bovary p.33) from books and is determined to find them in real life. She breaks with the reality of social existence and enters the world of romantic imagery. As Leon tells Emma - ‘you melt into the characters; it seems as if your own heart is beating under their skin’ (Madame Bovary p.77).
The world of fantasy becomes a corrupting force as Emma’s romantic inclinations allow her to pull back from the real world. Motherless and with the absence of women friends, Emma is alone without female support and example.
Use of Cliche
Within the romantic novel of Madame Bovary, Flaubert uses cliché. He turns Emma’s pretend or ‘veritable honeymoon’ (Madame Bovary p.238) with Leon into an unreal paradise where everything is banal. ‘The rumbling of wagons, the tumult voices, the barking of dogs’ (Madame Bovary p.239) and all the noise of the city fades away. Instead they see themselves in a ‘beatific state’ (Madame Bovary p.239) embracing and they ‘yearned to live perpetually, like Robinson Crusoes’ (Madame Bovary p.239). The real world becomes the unreal; the fictional paradise of another novel. When Emma visits the theatre she identifies with Lucia, a fantasist of love. Emma cannot get enough love and pleasure from life and in her determination to have it she becomes a woman out of control.
Breaking Away From Provincial Life
Emma continually looks to life in Paris or Rouen in her attempt to break free of the confinements of provincial life. If Rouen ladies wore ‘bunches of trinkets on their watch chains’, (Madame Bovary p.56)
so did she. Emma would not allow the narrow world of the Bourgeois to socially construct her identity. She tries charity worker, religious zealot, mother and teacher in quick succession. She was educated to perhaps have expectations beyond the French Bourgeois society in which she lives.
The entrapment of her daily routine is emphasised by metaphors of circling and turning, such as the visit to La Vaubyessard and the hurdy -gurdy with ‘dancers the size of your finger’ (Madame Bovary p.60). Emma gets herself into debt buying ornaments and furnishings which do not make her happy. In Bourgeois France clothes and personal belongings indicated class and affluence. By living beyond her means, Emma rebels against the status imposed on her.
The Suicide of Madame Bovary
The ultimate rebellion, suicide, Emma’s escape from ennui and debt, was a fashionable solution in the world of romantic novels. She was long fascinated by the dead heroines she read about. Emma thinks ‘death is really nothing very much’ (Madame Bovary p.295) and that she will ‘fall asleep, and it’ll all be over!’ (Madame Bovary p.295) but her ideas of dying a romantic death are soon shattered by pain and convulsions. On her deathbed she sees her life as ‘the treachery, the vileness and the endless cravings that tormented her’ (Madame Bovary p.297). After death Emma becomes assimilated back into bourgeois society; her mausoleum inscription is ‘amabilem conjugem calcas’ (Madame Bovary p.323) or a worthy wife lies buried here. Her escape becomes the ultimate rebellious failure.
Flaubert Gustave Madame Bovary (1857) Translated with an introduction and notes by George Wall, Peguin Books, London, ISBN 978-0-14-044912-9
 |
