Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - Essay Example

Family … Literature April 19, Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert Introduction Each literary movement and creative method was called to life not by only by a certain aesthetic background but also by a social and political environment in a society that brought a man up. Realism, in the wide sense, means the ability of art to reflect reality faithfully. In fact, throughout world literature as process we can clearly and consistently trace the movement towards Realism. Realists of the 19th century showed their heroes in development, portrayed the characters evolution, which was determined by a complex interaction of individuals and society. This is what differ them sharply from the Enlightened and Romantics. Perhaps the first and very striking example of Realism was Stendhal’s novel Red and Black, where the deep nature of Julien Sorel was revealed through the stages of his biography (Giraud 55). The Romantics were the first who criticized the bourgeois society; they introduced a new type of hero who contested the society. Despite the fact, the second half of the 19th century witnessed the final break with the Romantic traditions. It was clearly visible in the novel Madam Bovary (1856). Although the bourgeois reality stays as the main object of art, the principles of its reproduction abruptly change – the society is painted warts and all. Bright characters of realistic novels of the 30-ies and 40-ies give place to ordinary, unremarkable people (Giraud 49). Multicolored world of truly Shakespearean passion, violent fights, heartbreaking dramas, embodied in The Human Comedy by Balzac, works by Stendhal and Merimee, give way to the faded world, where the most remarkable event is vulgar adultery. Madam Bovary. The First Truly Realist Novel The first novel, which reflected the outlook and aesthetic principles of mature Flaubert, is Madame Bovary. The writer gives five years of his life, five years of hard and painful work, to this novel. It’s second title - Provincial Manners. The depth of France is presented to the reader: Tostes, where everything starts and Yonville – the endpoint. The village and small town are very similar to each other. Monotony, dullness, stagnation, quagmire engulfing everyone who gets inside. “In Madame Bovary all I was after was to render a special tone, that color of the moldiness of a wood-louse’s existence”. This is the background chosen by Flaubert for his “bourgeois plot”. The characters and events naturally fit into this flat world. When the editor rebuked the writer for his boring, unpoetic plot, Flaubert exploded: “Everyone thinks I am in love with reality, whereas I actually detest it. It was in hatred of realism that I undertook this book. But I equally despise that false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present age.” (Giraud 148).  Flaubert’s novel is based on the banal collision: the wife, unloved husband, whom she is cheating with one lover, then with another man; the cunning money lender, trapping the victim in his web to cash in on other people’s misfortunes. Simple interaction of these figures leads to the dramatic climax. Disillusioned with the lovers, utterly broken by the loan-shark, scared of the public scandal, unable to talk to her trustful husband, the adulteress commits suicide by poisoning herself with arsenic. Everything seems to be plain and simple. Only the emotional storm behind it - “When I was writing the poisoning of Emma Bovary, I had such a strong taste of arsenic in my mouth, I had poisoned myself so badly, that I suffered two attacks of indigestion, two very real attacks, for I vomited up all my dinner.” (Giraud 148). Insisting on the writers’ right to present the most vulgar and trivial subjects, Flaubert said often that poetry is like the sun that makes a dunghill shine as gold. This is what happens in Madame Bovary. The banal story raised to the highest level of truthful analytical art - adultery in the novel acquires an unexpected, at first glance, ideological and philosophical depth and genuine aesthetic value. Emma Bovary is revealed as a tragic person who tried to rebel against the hated vulgarity and who got finally broken by it.  Emma’s image is self-contradictory. She wishes at the same time to die and to live in Paris. Ambiguous is the author’s attitude towards her. Lost in the slough of philistine existence, Emma seeks a way to break out of it. To break free with the power of love - the only feeling that (in her imagination) can raise her above the hateful, gray world. That’s why she did not hesitate to accept the offer of Charles and becomes his wife. For the same reason she rushes into the arms of Rodolphe, and then, with renewed hope and passion runs to Leon. However, Emma experiences a bitter disappointment, because in adultery she eventually discovers the same abhorrent to her inertia of dull provincial relations, the same as in the legal marriage. In one of his letters Flaubert wrote that the main heroine of his new novel is a fairly depraved woman, woman with perverted ideas about poetry and perverted senses. That was the result of “romantic and sentimental” education, he claimed. Its foundations were laid when Emma Rouault studied in a convent school, when she first became an avid reader of fashionable romantic novels. Those romantic clichés turned in her head into ideals of true love and beauty. “Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers” – and the whole novel is to prove it. The crash of romantic illusions started literally from the first days of her marriage. She dreamed of sitting on a villa terrace together, hand in hand with her husband, looking at the stars. She would like to lean over balconies of a Swiss chalet or hide her sadness in a Scottish cottage with her husband dressed in a black velvet frock coat with long tails, soft shoes, and three-cornered hat. But after the noisy, like a village fair, wedding, they honeymooned in the boring Tostes. Charles, a pathetic provincial doctor, dressed good for the village, unmannered, not able to excite with the expression of his feelings - “Language is a machine that continually amplifies the emotions”, said Leon once. All Emma’s attempts to find her love ideals in Charles fizzle. Hopes for marital happiness vanish, giving way to blunt indifference, and then to complete alienation. Blinded by contempt for her husband, Emma is unable to see and appreciate either the depth of his simple but strong love nor his dedication and devotion. There and then Rodolphe appears in her life – a provincial Don Juan, Byronic hero with all the attributes that pleased the taste of his mistress. Emma is full of hope again. However, after the first serious test she understands cruel indifference and even elementary stinginess of Rodolphe, who left her for a new woman and pleasures. The final illusions of Madame Bovary are associated with Leon who came back to town full of youth and love. When she met that “Yonville Werther” after three years of separation (Leon was in Paris where he got some life experience and lost his innocent youth dreams forever) and got involved in adultery again. And again, passing through the first longing and passion that sicken her soon, Flaubert’s heroine realizes spiritual squalor of her new lover. Fleeing from the surrounding vulgarity, Madame Bovary gets inevitably imbued with it. And not only in the domestic habits, ruinous passion for expensive clothes and jewelry. Vulgarity enters the sanctuary of the woman – romantic love gives way to pure carnal pleasures. Vulgarity distorts even maternal feelings of Emma. Flaubert, regretting the ruined fate, strictly condemns his character. The severity of his sentence is particularly evident in the brutal picture of death and funeral of Madame Bovary. Unlike romantic heroines, Emma does not die of a broken heart. The reason for her suicide is extremely prosaic. Convinced of her useless attempts to get money to square accounts with the creditor, threatening her to distrain property, Emma goes to Homais pharmacy to steal the poison, which is considered to be the only escape from poverty and shame - “But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.” (Giraud 152). Agonizing death of arsenic is described in pointed lower tones; obscene song of a blind beggar outside with the sounds of which she dies; absurd dispute at her grave between an atheist Homais and Abbe Bournisien; finally, the tedious, prosaic picture of the funeral service... Yes, Flaubert had every reason to say that he was extremely cruel to his character. Madame Bovary, after its publication in 1856, became a landmark in the evolution of public ideas regarding dreams and dreamers. A new term - “Bovarism” was coined by Jules de Gaultier in 1921 to describe mentality of those who endeavor to imagine themselves different then they really are. Later, the name of Bovary got its symbolic meaning and found its place in the line with such a concept as “quixotism”. Don Quixote dreams, as well as Emma’s, were formed under the influence of novels, which he read in an immeasurable amount. “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” – Flaubert wrote characterizing Bovary. As Emma Bovary, Don Quixote did not agree to put up with reality and attempts to bring his dreams to life. Hidalgo loses the ability to draw a clear line between reality and fantasy and substitutes real for imaginary. But Don Quixote sincerely deludes himself, or, amusing themselves, the others fool him. He never lies. Emma, vice versa, is a liar by nature and is ready to deceive everyone to get what she wants. Emma Bovary is very far from altruistic aspirations of Alonso Quijano: she is self-consumed and even the future of her child is a small concern to her. But her image in the novel is not clear and onevalued: she bourgeois, tough-minded, deceitful and indifferent to everything that does not apply to her lofty longing; and a living soul, suffering, yearnful, thirsty for love and attention, longing for something extraordinary, which is not in everyday reality. Conclusion The main principle of the novel is to narrate, not to argue. The plot is hardly visible. It has no sharp dramatic clashes, intense dramatic struggle. The composition is built on the principle of representation of the flow of everyday life. The writer consciously strives for objectivity of art that appears here in the so-called ambiguous description of heroes, in which the author does not give any remarks and explanations, does not express his attitude towards them directly. Flaubert simply narrates, presenting events, revealing feelings of the characters. But the reader understands that the author cannot take that small-minded world he describes. This affects the overall tone of the novel, impregnated with irony and bitterness. The revelatory power of the novel was so great that Flaubert was put on trial. He was accused of insulting public morality and religion. Provincial life is vulgar and spiritless but ideals of Emma are quite the same. Flaubert, with deep psychological logic, as If with a medical scalpel, reveals all the springs that put the heroes in motion, depicting life of the of the main protagonist, whose ideals changed from a dream of true love and true beauty to cheats and moral decline, followed by infamous death. References Giraud, Raymond. The Unheroic Hero in the Novels of Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957. Read More