Term Paper on "Madame Bovary Emma Woman or Child"

Term Paper 5 pages (2251 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Madame Bovary: Emma, Woman or Child?

Flaubert's famous heroine Emma Bovary is one of the most original characters in French literature. Her story is a tragic one. She lives in a quiet, provincial town in France, and she eventually marries a village doctor, Charles Bovary. She marries him willingly enough, but simply because she ardently wants to get married. However, she soon discovers that she does not fit in that world, and her discontent begins to grow. She then has two adulterous affairs, with Rodolphe and Leon, both of which disappoint her terribly. In the course of her love affairs, she overspends her husband's money, making so many debts that she can not repay them. She eventually commits suicide by taking an overdose of arsenic. Emma's discontent with the whole of her surrounding reality is what actually makes of her a special character. When Emma firs appears on the stage, she is a young woman who is about to marry Charles Bovary, so the reader does not get much information about her younger years. However, Flaubert tells us that she had been at a convent as a child, and that the place, instead of sobering her, increased her natural disposition towards passion and melancholy. The thing that is most easily noticeable in Emma's character is that she permanently tries to fit reality into her own idealized view of the world. Her attitude in front of life resembles to a great extent that of Don Quixote, she too seems to have learned everything she knows about reality from books. The main difference is however, that Don Quixote's bonhomie is replaced by Emma's depressive moods and spleens. Emma certainly acts immaturely and impulsively, without ever making the distinction between what good and bad, just like a child. Even when she has her own child, her recklessness continues just the same. Judged from a psychological point-of-view, Emma is a child who plays at life and is unable to accept reality for what it is. However, it should be noted that Emma's construction of her feminine, fantasy world is also a method of escaping from the patriarchal world in which she lives in.

Emma's actions all through the novel only betoken one thing: she is completely self-centered and narcissistic, and lives in a world of her own. She is irresponsible and makes no distinction between good and bad. She gives vent to all her impulses, finding inspiration in the romantic and adventurous books she reads, like Paul and Virginia, for example. Emma is, to a certain extent immoral and makes no scruples to betray her husband with her two lovers. Moreover, she gives in to spending all her money recklessly, until she finds it impossible to give it back. She might seem materialistic to a certain point, but in fact her love for luxury is rooted in her narcissism. Emma Bovary desires to have a "background" of luxury. She is a beautiful woman, almost strikingly beautiful, and what she needs to fulfill is her secret aspiration for beauty, for the ornamental, which would be the only thing that would suit her own beauty. It is true that Emma's aspirations seem material at first sight, since she wants to be surrounded by fairytale-like luxury. But she is actually a beautiful woman in search for other instances of beauty, or for the right context in which her beauty could be displayed. The actual point where the crisis begins is the ball at Vaubyessard, where she first meets with the world of luxury and romance that she desires. The fact that Emma is impressed by the perfumes, the lights and the reflections of the rich environment, shows that she only desires the luxury as a context that would satisfy her permanent crave for beautiful: "Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a blending of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes of the viands, and the odour of the truffles. The silver dish covers reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays; bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table."(Flaubert, 42)

Emma is thus certainly idealistic, a lover of the aesthetic beauty. Her fascination with luxury, which is at the same time innocent because she is not enthralled by the power that money can bring but by the appearance of luxury, is indeed child-like. Wherever she is or whatever she does, Emma permanently feels confined by her circumstances and wants something else.

The most significant side of Emma's childishness is connected with her desire to have wild love affairs that would resemble those she had read about in her books. Flaubert himself hints at Emma's child-like behavior, when she begins her relationship with Rodolphe. At first, Emma is absolutely ecstatic, but not with the relationship as such or with Rodolphe, but with the idea that she finally has a lover:

have a lover! A lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights."(Flaubert, 147)

Thus, Emma is obviously an adulteress who does not repent or even stop to consider the morality of the act. All she expects is that she would escape ordinary existence and finally reach out to touch the ideal reality that she had been dreaming for so long. Her sentiments for either Rodolphe or Leon are clearly not genuine. The only thing that she really wants is the glamour that passion can bring to ordinary life. Instead of feeling the slightest compulsion for her adultery, Emma is actually delighted that she can finally imitate the amorous adventures of the heroines in the books she loved:

Then she called to mind the heroines of the books that she had read; the lyrical legion of those adulterous ladies sang in her memory as sisters, enthralling her with the charm of their voices. She became, in her own person, a living part, as it were, of that imaginary world. She was realizing the long dream of her youth, seeing herself as one of those great lovers whom she had so much envied."(Flaubert, 147)

Emma lives entirely in this imaginary world that she builds for herself. At the end, she herself, through Flaubert's book, will become one of the most romantic heroines, with a tragic destiny. As Lawrence Thornton explains, Emma is extremely narcissistic, and her poses in front of the mirror speak of her delight with her own image: "As Emma confronts her transfigured image in the mirror, Rodolphe becomes another of the disappearing men, his essence subsumed by Emma's vision of herself."(Thornton, 989)

What Emma actually loves is not her lover, but her own image sublimated by the passion and excitement of love. She gradually becomes obsessed with maintaining the relationship with Rodolphe, merely because she does not want to go back to the everyday, monotonous reality:

The first onset of love had gone to her head like wine. So largely did it bulk in her field of vision, that she could see nothing else. But now, she could no longer live without it and began to be obsessed with fears lest something of it be lost, or its smooth course disturbed."(Flaubert,148)

Rodolphe promises her he will take her away and they would get married, but is not true to his word. He himself notices that Emma is in many respects a child, that would not listen to reason:"I can't exile myself -- have a child on my hands."(Flaubert, 148)

After her first disenchantment, Emma grows more and more bitter, feeling the entire weight of her unhappiness. What can actually be called immature in Emma's attitude and character, is her almost complete inability to love or to get genuinely involved into something real. She seems trapped in her own self-centered reality. She is child insomuch as she cannot become implicated into anything tangible. All the unhappiness in Emma's case seems to have been derived from her wish for something more. She constantly feels that her reality is insufficient:

She was not happy -- she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life -- this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a… READ MORE

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