Madame Bovary (Essay Sample)

Madame Bovary Student’s Name Institution of Learning Madame Bovary Introduction The great creation of literature, "Madame Bovary" denoted the defining moment in the advancement of the modern novel. Flaubert worked on every sentence in search of the famous "right word". His interest in the form of the novel, successfully realized in the unique structure of Madame Bovary, had a strong influence on subsequent writers, who set themselves the goal of creating new forms and technical prims. The main theme of "Madame Bovary" was the age-old conflict between illusion and reality, between life invented and genuine. For the disclosure of this theme, Flaubert used not the heroic impulses of a noble personality, but the pitiful dreams of an ordinary bourgeois woman. Flaubert gave his close-knit characters a sublimely universal meaning. The artistic problematic of the novel is closely related to the image of the main character – Emma Bovary, embodying a classic romantic conflict, consisting in the pursuit of the ideal and rejection of base reality. The young woman's emotions, however, pass on a purely realistic background and have nothing in common with the exalted positions of the past. Desperate housewife Flaubert's anti-heroine and the very first "desperate housewife", who laid the foundations of romantic prose, provoked a scandal when publishing and still challenges the reader’s moral (Amann, 2006). Although Flaubert at first does not seem to approve of the heroine's obsession with herself and her interests, later his attitude to her icy charm and vanity changes surprisingly, so that in the last hundred or so pages there is a shift towards sympathy and even the forgiveness of her ostentatious and a narcissistic escape from reality. She turns into a broken, tragic character. Does this make Emma a sad prototype of all suffering female characters in a mass culture, incapable of recognizing themselves in the system of established social ties? On the other hand, maybe she was just the very first feminist, who had attempted to overthrow the norms of bourgeois morality and therefore suffered from the consequences of her actions. The anti-romantic design of the novel persistently manifests itself literally in everything, and Flaubert repeatedly destroys annoying stereotypes of stories about extramarital affairs. Emma is subject to the influence of stereotypes, but she herself is not threatened to turn into a cliche. Flaubert makes it clear that her story is far from unique. The reason for Emma's disappointment is not so much her innate vanity and stupidity as the historical conditions of the life of women of that time - under the rule of the bourgeoisie in Europe. To legitimize Emma's disappointment and perpetual misery, the stifling sociocultural impacts of life in nineteenth-century country France have frequently been conjured. However, given her foundation and her time and place, Emma's position is barely run of the mill. She neither cooks nor cleans nor bring up a kid, and is excluded from essentially all family unit duties. Allowed to come and go however she sees fit, could seek after scholarly and stylish interests in the event that she so craved (Arlow &.Baudry, 2002). As Roland Champagne (2002) states, “Emma’s incompetence at being a wife according to the bourgeois habitus allows her to expand her competence as a woman by following the hexis of her female body” (p.103). These refinements compare to a distinction in nonexclusive vision. Emma's issue with Rodolphe is about the strain between middle class obligation and a longing that is recognized as aristocratic. This is the strain at the heart of numerous wistful or household novels. This sort of fiction enabled the ascendant bourgeoisie to characterize itself by contradicting its ethical gravity to the libertinism of the privileged (Amann, 2006). For a poorly educated wife of a provincial physician whose spiritual needs are formed by monastic education and reading (among the authors read by Emma, ​​named Lamartine and Chateaubriand, and this is very symptomatic), there are two unattainable ideals - an outwardly beautiful life and sublime all-consuming love. According to Vinken (2008), “Madame Bovary is nothing but the working out of sexist cliches of its time, which are collected with unusual thoroughness in this article: like the adulteress in the article, Madame Bovary becomes addicted to novels and neglects her only daughter, who is confided to a loveless nurse” (p.761). With ruthless irony, sometimes painted sadness, Flaubert shows Emma's attempts to decorate and "refine" her life, her quest for unearthly love. Dreams of the heroine of the magical countries and fairy princes are perceived as a parody of the epigone's romantic novels. But it is important that the search for such love turns into the same ordinary nature and vulgarity: both Emma’s beloved have nothing to do with the way they appear in her imagination. However, their idealization is the only way for her to justify herself. Although she vaguely understands that it is not so much these men, who are dear to her that are very far from the ideal images that have arisen in her exalted imagination, but rather the feeling of love that she cultivates because her love is the only possible way of existence. Sexual and consumer desires Emma cannot escape from the ordinary life. Richard Zakarian (2014) stated in his article: “Emma’s major shortcoming-although she may be the only superior character in the novel-is her lack of conscience and moral blindness” (p.25). This is the difference of this image from all the previous characters of Flaubert, who were internally always free from vulgarity. New middle-class representatives reoriented the society in a different sexual dichotomy, which in turn generated new forms of interaction between public and private interests, between the state and the family, between men and women. Sex issues became the outer border of democracy, as the generation of revolutionaries gave in to the triumphant and self-satisfied petty bourgeoisie. As related destinations of contestation in the mid nineteenth century, parenthood and sexuality were liable to assignment by logical, moral, restorative, administrative, and scholarly experts, all contending and adding to an emotional changing of sexuality and sex into open talk. The social milieu to which Flaubert was reacting was one portrayed by change and distress where belief systems encompassing working class sexuality and sex were concerned (Rooks, 2014). The novel as a literary form developed along with this increasingly prosperous class, which had plenty of free time to read, but in the middle of the 19th century, the genre of realism implanted the knife into its hypocrisy and, above all, the contradictory attitude of the middle class towards sexuality. Emma embodies all these contradictions, but at the same time seeks (though unsuccessfully) to overcome them. Explaining the high impulses of Emma with physiological impulses, Flaubert thus showed their reverse side and thereby strengthened the irony further. Dissatisfaction with the spiritual is due to the dissatisfaction of the physical, the thirst for immense poetry turns into a thirst for sexual pleasure. The connection with Leon stimulates her passion for luxury, for soft fabrics and delicious food. From the first chapters of the novel, through subtly and thoughtfully selected details, Flaubert reveals the drama of poetic feeling. Therefore, the clich'e, as a depersonalized allocation of the desire and talk of the Other, turns into an instrument Emma uses to get away from the deficiencies of her own reality. The longing of the Other does not concur, though, with Emma's methods of acknowledgment, and this inconsistency reveals new insight into the capacity that the clich'e plays in Emma Bovary's life (Reis, 2015). For consciousness, which is formed in the conditions of provincial-petty-bourgeois existence, it is difficult to find a way to a living, real sense of what is objectively beautiful. True, the character of the novel does not seem to want to reckon with real life, trying to accept reality only in those conditional forms that are prompted by "love novels", and therefore the possibility of a double existence for Emma is created: next to her husband and without her husband. Flaubert clearly shows that the cause of the misfortunes of simple and, in fact, good people - Charles and Emma - should be sought in the idiocy of provincial existence. Emma Bovary does not rise above the level of the society in which she lives. She is just as vulgar a petty bourgeois as the people around her. The romantic books read in her youth inspire the desire for “high love”, her reluctance to put up with the vulgarity of the surrounding world, which leads to an "eternal pursuit of illusion" - this is the basis for the collision of the novel. Emma keeps in the soul the ideal of life assimilated in the guesthouse, full of high feelings and passions. When Charles appeared on her horizon, she accepted the anxiety caused by her new position for her wonderful passion. The character finds in lovers the same thing as in her husband - all the same vulgarity of marital cohabitation. At the same time, the whole "poetry of love" gradually turns into the most common adultery (Amann, 2006). Emma is forced to lie to her husband, to invent many small tricks, to involve others in the sphere of her deceptions. She must tremble before her neighbors. Passionate love is expressed in the most hackneyed phrases, borrowed from some worn-out romance. Nevertheless, Emma cannot get rid of the ordinary. Platitude not only surrounds her, it reigns even in her dreams. Deep immorality, something shameful and humiliating, lies in the very nature of provincial existence, in which the high, healthy, human feelings are dulled and perverted. Emma could not fall in love with Charles because she di...