Realism into the Masterpiece Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - Research Paper Example

? Realism in Madam Bovary Gustavo Flaubert was an influential French aouthor renowned for his masterpiece Madam Bovary. Being born in a highly respected middle class family of doctors, he grew up in a familiarity with the sight and smell of sickness and death. One of his first recollections was that of climbing the barred windows of the dissection room to look at the corpses. This early curiosity about grim reality may be considered symbolic. In spite of all the obstacles on the way, Madam Bovary became famous and immediately took its place among the masterpiece of world Literature. It is with Flaubert that we most associate the term “realism ‘. Of course every serious artist is a realist since he tries to state a recognized reality, even though it is internal or spiritual. But for the purpose of French literary history we give the term Realism to an aesthetic doctrine which was formulated in the nineteenth century. It was Flaubert’s desire to write a book about “nothing’. Though he did not quite dare write a book about nothing, he approaches his ideal in madam Bovary. It is a novel with a very ordinary story – his original intention was to write a novel about a young girl who dies a virgin and a mystic after living with her father and mother in a small provincial background, but he invented a new heroin, who would make the story mote entertaining for the reader. The immediate inspiration for the novel was the story of Dr. Delamare. Accepting a friends’ suggestion, Flaubert took up a local and recent case. In 1848, in the town of Ry, the second wife of Dr. Delamare, after a series of adulteries and extravagances had poisoned herself and precipitated her husband’s suicide, leaving an orphan daughter. Thus the subject of the novel is an actual incident in the life of a country doctor; a mean pitiable story of adultery and suicide against the background of a dreary rain sodden Norman village. Like in the normal story the characters are stupid or shameful. They are not moved by reason. Madam Bovary is a stupid character, a woman who retreats from reality into cheap dreams to escape from the life that has become a prison for her. She has a romantic thirst for the fulfillment of ill-defined urges. Being educated in a convent school , accompanied by the excitations of music and religiosity, she confines herself in the world of dreams. When she became the wife of a country doctor, the real self and its strong passion began to flow in the form of expectations. She can never become an ordinary wife who enjoys what all things given by her husband. But the romanticist in her demands more from the husband, but that was futile. The warmth and emotional fulfillment she had from the readings of romantic books during her previous life, was totally alien to her in the life with Charles. In Madam Bovary, Flaubert gives the reader a fleeting look into the reality of mid-nineteenth –century provincial life in France. The descriptions of the mannerism and customs of small –town people are brilliant. The wedding of Emma is peculiar. It takes place in the true peasant condition unlike that in the dreams of Emma. The garish colors of the rustic wedding, the frock – coats of the farmer, the lengthened common dresses of the girls, the vigorous joke and d substantial viands all bespeak of a true peasant wedding. Thus Flaubert makes his heroine suffer from a middle-class languor. Thus the descriptions given by the writer are detailed and beautiful, but they are real pictures of the natural world around him, thus giving a realistic tone to the novel. ”. Emma is presented as a character doomed to disillusionment. Antony Tholby has pointed out that “In Madam Bovary the crux of the actions lies in the contrast between Emma’s sentimental illusions and the plain facts of reality.” The hatred of middle class values is strongly apparent in Madam Bovary. The then France was under a massive social upheaval. The collapse of the aristocracy was paralleled by the rise of a new middle class or bourgeois made up of merchants and capitalists. Being the member of the educated class, he found the rough and the uncultured manners of the middleclass uninteresting. Madam Bovary was an attack on the middle –class surroundings. The provincial setting was apt for revealing the story. Doomed marriage and illusions had already become a commonplace of French romantic literature. This is well pictured in the story. But the theme was dealt with minuet details that can be found in everyday life. Flaubert’s realism follows the method of rigorous observation of human behavior against the physical background of contemporary life and its form is artistic. What Emma does when she felt restlessness in the married life with Charles was to establish new relations in hope of finding the so called excitement on the pages of the books. First Leon , a young clerk who left to Paris to seek a future, then Rudolph who later leaves her without falling in the temptations of Emma to run away. The more her husband becomes careless about her the more she throws herself into momentary relations leading her into more debts. Later we see that her visit to Vaubyessard was a turning point in her life. The party there was a striking contrast to the feast of the peasants. The frustration is at the peak when she was experiencing the love less husband. According to Flaubert “She wished she could die, and she wished she could live in Paris”. When Charles plans to shift to Yonville for a change, what Emma does was to throw her bridal bouquet into the fire. But that was the sign of the end of marriage, both morally and psychologically. The world described in Madam Bovary said Thibaudet, is a “world which is falling apart.” Emma’s adulterous desires and her financial extravagances ultimately lead her to ruin. Emma began to experience the real world around her only when she approaches her friends to raise the money needed to settle the court judgment. Recognizing the bitter fact of careful avoidance from the dear ones, she swallows arsenic and prepares to die. The description of Emma’s death is a masterpiece of Flaubert’s realism. Flaubert himself said that when he wrote about madam Bovary’s poisoning he could feel the taste of arsenic in his mouth and experienced the same nausea. The slowly narrowing world around Emma was the spectacle of the climax of this tragedy. Emma is a victim of fate according to Charles and her lover Rudolph. A letter written to Emma by him tells that. Charles is also opining to him immediately after the death of Emma “Fate willed it this way”. The death of Emma is not to be considered as the sole fault of the lady. The social and economic class has played their role well in the creation of such a tragic heroine. The then power of the society, their inclinations, prejudices and preferences had great influence in the process. In the description of Yonville we are watching a world in microcosm. The world which falls apart is the world of the liberal professions, the world which is rising in the persons of Lheureux and Homais is the world of spies. The conflict between the science and religion during the 19the century is also revealed with the bickering between the village priest and Homais. Madam Bovary is thus an attack on the attitude of the then bourgeoisies or the middle class people of France. The vein attempt of the common people to find a place among the high class is criticized by the writer. Emma always aspires to have the taste of the classy class. The disappointment leads to the development of a social and historical trend of the nineteenth century France. Thus for Flaubert realism is the reproduction of normal, typical life in the form of fiction possessing universal validity. It was made possible because of his exact observation of human behavior against the back ground of contemporary life. In an 1853 letter, Flaubert remarked that Emma could be found suffering in at least twenty French villages at that moment. To be sure , such unhappy women inhabit not only the rural France of the1850s; they represent not so much a certain place or time as a certain permanent attitude towards life , capable of appearing in the most diverse guises in different places and different era, “ Work cited Flaubert, Gustavo (1857). Madam Bovary Antony, Thoprlby (1957) .Gustavo Flaubert and the Art of Realism, Yale University Press Read More