Nineteenth century literature and critical analysis

¶ … Madame Bovary's entire experience is by way of approaching her own obscurity, and indeed her own demise, and her death as an individual. The essay by Elisabeth Fronfen is, for the most part, very perceptive and the analysis she offers is razor sharp; when she asserts (411) that Madame Bovary's reading "consumes the life of the reader, who reads instead of living," she hits the literary mark with thorough accuracy. Further, when Fronfen writes that "From the very beginning Emma's imagination connects unfulfilled romantic desires with death," she is cutting to the heart of the sadness and pathos that surrounds Emma.

In short, in my essay, I will show that the depiction of Madame Emma Bovary's adulterous behavior - beyond the racy fascination readers dipped into as Emma's desire for "self-obliteration" was carried out - was totally unacceptable for the 19th Century, and along with her other foibles, indicates a serious dance with transgressions. But transgression is also applied to the novel itself, as Flaubert was put on trial in 1857; what he attempted, through his novel, was in reality a smooth transformation from the fact of very little literature about adultery to a realistic approach to those romantic twists and turns in life.

As for The Awakening, this also is a novel which was considered a transgression by the reading public and by critics. Kate Chopin's career was all but ruined, ironically, because of the literary transgression she was accused of, notwithstanding the brilliance of her work. I will show - tapping into Bert Bender's lively essay - that Chopin used Darwin's work, and the Walt Whitman poem, Song of Myself, to help her characters come to life. And beyond Darwin, my essay will approach the idea that the Edna character certainly transforms the image of the stereotypical female of the 19th Century from a modest, obedient wife and mother into a woman having an affair and breaking all the rules.

Definitions of Transformation and Transgression

Transformation: according to Merriam-Webster Online, Transform is "to change in composition or structure"; "to change the outward form or appearance"; "to change in character or condition...transform implies a major change in form, nature, or function..."

Transgression: Merriam-Webster Online defines Transgress as "to step beyond or across...to go beyond limits set or prescribed by..."

Kate Chopin's The Awakening - Viewpoints and Critical Positions

Bert Bender's essay ("The Awakening and The Descent of Man") in the Stephen Regan book asserts that Chopin read Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man "much more closely than her many interpreters have realized" (486). And furthermore, she was, Bender writes, enamored with Darwin's theory of "sexual selection" - since it offered "a profoundly liberating sense of animal innocence in the realm of human courtship, especially for the Victorian woman," Bender explains.

The "liberating sense of animal innocence" is a transformation from what was expected in 19th Century society, to what was possible, from a literary point-of-view. The woman in Chopin's book could step out of the stereotype of a "good mother" and "loyal wife" and explore her sexual feelings through transgression ("stepping beyond or across...limits") of her marriage vows.

Darwin is quoted by Bender (487): "The sexual struggle is of two kinds...one between the individuals of...generally the male sex, in order to drive away or kill their rivals, the females remaining passive; whilst in the other the struggle is likewise between the individuals of the same sex, in order to excite or charm...generally the females, which no longer remain passive, but select the more agreeable partners."]

It is interesting, and puts some of the pieces of Chopin's puzzle together, to take Bender's point-of-view and initially reach an understanding that Chopin "...resisted [Darwin's] corollaries concerning the female's passive and modest role in sexual relations and the male's physical and mental superiority to the female."

With that as a premise, readers see Chopin's rebellion against Darwin (and, through 19th Century society's morals and values) through Chopin's character, Edna Pontellier. Indeed, Edna selects love on her own terms, based on her own sexual needs and desires, rather than for the reasons put forward by Darwin (which was because "civilized women" are "largely influenced by the social position and wealth of the men").

The theme of transformation is strong and clear when one looks at the Edna's awakening to her sexual feelings and her own ability to express those feelings through actions - notably, her affair with Robert. The woman of the 19th Century is no longer the timid wife and mother who obeys her husband's directions and demands, lock-step with his perception of what is right for her.

Before examining further Edna's breaking away from Darwin's ideas, it is worthy to point out that Darwin saw civilization as evolving largely because "a woman's modesty curbs the male's eagerness to couple," Bender continues (488). But Bender also quotes Ruth Bernard Yeazell as saying, as a critique of Darwin, that "...females are at once less lustful and more discriminating than males... [and] the satisfying conclusion to Darwin's story preserves the ideals of motherhood and the modest woman who knows nothing of appetite or sexual desire."

Are we talking about women with no appetite for sexual desire? Not in Chopin's characters. She clearly follows a pattern of both accepting and rejecting Darwin, which Bender only scratches the surface with. Chopin is likely embracing Darwin through the many images of the sea that connect Edna with evolution, if you will. "Edna is a post-Darwinian woman-animal who had evolved from the sea in a world without gods," Bender explains.

Edna is a wife, and a mother, but she is also a person who has desires and needs beyond what her family requires - a "woman-animal" connected to the sea, a woman who chooses to die in the sea - and the sea theme seems drawn from Darwin's evolution story.

And Edna is also used as a counter-point to Chopin's argument with Darwin, as Bender points out (494) in the passage in which Edna is chatting with Mademoiselle Reisz about what love really means. Chopin - in Chapter 16 - gives Edna's character wisdom that Chopin will not give to Reisz, a woman whose "avoidance of the water" is funny and portrays accurately Reisz' basic lack of sexuality. And then the thumbs down to Darwin is brought in, as Edna barks that Reisz is either lying or has "never been in love." After which Edna says, "do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself: 'Go to! Here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities. I shall proceed to fall in love with him...[or with] this financier?"

Beyond the specific issues Bender takes with reference to whether or not Chopin is using Darwin's theories as vehicles to send her characters scurrying into fields hitherto unvisited by 19th Century novelists, the themes of transformation and transgression are hot and heavy in this novel.

Transformation: the book itself is a transformation from the rather conservative, lightly-sexy novels that were acceptable in the publishing world, into a world of the "shocking, morbid and vulgar" (PBS Kate Chopin A Re-Awakening). Kate Chopin's career was "devastated when The Awakening was published in 1899," according to a Web page from PBS promoting a re-visitation of the life and times of Chopin. Again, her work got her into the veritable black hole of publishing, but it was a way of path-finding, plowing the new fields of literature for other women and other writers who would not shy away from realistic writing, and hence, The Awakening was and is seen as a transformation to newer more honest writing from tired old literary traditions.

Transgression: It was in itself a transgression for Chopin to take her writing so far to the edge of the literary envelope. She went well beyond the norm, and into the storm of controversy that she probably expected. She sinned, if you will, as did Edna, one of her main characters, when Edna carried on an adulterous relationship.

It was a transgression for Chopin to create an entirely sensual novel. And it is sensual, as every line is deliberately written with a flair for the sensual.

To wit, in a scholarly article published by Women's Studies (Biggs, 2004), Kenneth Eble - who reportedly "rediscovered" The Awakening in 1956 - is quoted as saying that The Awakening is "...not only...about sex, but the very texture of the writing is sensuous, if not sensual, from the first to the last" (147).

Every action, every "conversation, every description, every figure of speech, refers forward and usually backward in the text...reinforcing the cyclical rhythms of the novel's core themes..." Biggs writes.

The care with which The Awakening is put together, Biggs continues, "is most evident when the 'voice of the sea' paragraph in chapter 6 repeats verbatim in chapter 39, just before Edna dons, then sheds, her bathing suit and swims to her death." transgression is also found in the above-mentioned fact that "nothing of importance occurs only once. Everything is repeated, but in a different context or in a different way." This is not a moral transgression, but rather a breaking away from the style fully in place during this literary period. "To say that The Awakening is not about sex exclusively, or even primarily, is not to say that sex is unimportant..." (148) Biggs asserts. And yet, "The full range of the senses, the full gender-transcending range of personal possibility, and the full range of means of sexual expression..." were very clearly understood by the author, and are "intermingled in her fiction" (148), according to Biggs' analysis.

What Biggs meant in her line alluding to the "gender-transcending range of personal possibility..." is that she believes both Edna and Robert may be gay. That would certainly be a transgression in the conservative social world at that time, and would also represent a transformation from the typical lovers (infidelity-splashed lovers at that) one would read about in a novel. To bolster her theme - and in doing so, Biggs bolsters Bender's assertion that Chopin "resisted corollaries concerning the female's passive and modest role in sexual relations and the male's physical and mental superiority" (487) - Biggs (156) says readers "never see [Edna and Robert] actually kissing or embracing..."

The closest Robert comes to making an advance is when he twice rests his head on Edna's arm while she paints" (156) Biggs theorizes. And as to Edna's apparent dearth of sensual or feminine charms, Biggs brings several phrases into focus: Edna is "almost devoid of coquetry" (23); Edna's face is "handsome" but never depicted as "pretty," (which both Madames Ratignolle and Lebrun are portrayed as); Edna's body is described as "strong," "firm," and "different" - but never "soft" or "lovely"; Edna "understands horseracing, courts risk, bets high, and wins - even staking her Kentucky Colonel father, who also wins" (23).

Further, Edna paints as a business, not a hobby, which (Biggs 160) "displaces her accustomed wifely work"; she has a "voracious appetite" and "drinks brandy like a man" (26). She eats like an animal at one point in the book (13), "wolfishly 'tearing' a brown loaf of bread with her 'strong, white teeth'."

As for Robert's lack of normal masculine traits, Biggs finds a plethora of instances that leave the reader with the impression that he is an un-inspired suitor. On page 36 of the novel, Biggs writes that Robert "abandons Edna at the very brink of carnal consummation. When she insists that he confess his love, he calls her 'cruel'." Robert says (36) to Edna: "...you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it..."

On page 161 of her scholarly investigation into The Awakening, Biggs explains that "In important ways, then, Edna seems more masculine than Robert and he more feminine than she." Chopin, Biggs continues, "uses comparison, and more subtly, the metaphors of autoeroticism and twinning to dramatize their gender transcendence and resemblance, and also the irresistibly magnetic pull of same-sex love." By "twinning" she suggests a kind of androgynous pairing; and on page 7 of the novel, readers get a first glimpse of Edna and Robert: "...the two seated themselves with some appearance of fatigue upon the upper step of the porch, facing each other, each leaning against a supporting post." "Twins are not lovers," Biggs continues on page 162 of the Women's Studies piece, "yet like lovers, they cannot imagine surviving alone."

Though Biggs' theories can't be proved - only advanced and speculated upon - if indeed Edna and Robert are "twins" in the sense that they each literarily appear to repudiate gender stereotypes, then Bender's contention that Chopin shows "ambivalence toward the idea of sexual selection" (487) and hence Bender's spin on her rejection of key passages in Darwin's The Descent of Man makes sense.

Chopin's infatuation with Walt Whitman's Song of Myself comes into play in the novel, too, according to Bender's analysis. Edna is twenty-eight years old at the outset of the novel, and, Bender writes (490), "...was ready to become a woman like the one Chopin knew in Whitman's Song of Myself." The number twenty-eight appears in Whitman's poem (section 11): "Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome' end in the vision of her bathing with twenty-eight young men." And likewise, in the Chopin novel, in Edna's twenty-eighth year, she will, Bender continues (490) "discover the watery, erotic innocence that Whitman had dreamt for his women."

Edna, in fact, on August 28th, will experience "the first-felt throbbings of desire" and will soon be ready to love "young men" to allow her hand to "descend tremblingly from their temples and ribs..." (Whitman's section 11), following her midnight swim with Robert (in Chapter 10).

Another Whitman connection in Chopin's novel, Bender explains (491): "In tracing the story of Edna's development from her twenty-eighth to her twenty-ninth year, Chopin begins where she must - 'by the shore', as Whitman did in section 11 of Song of Myself."

As for the capacity critics have to read the pivotal meanings and symbols of other important works into novels such as The Awakening, Biggs writes, poignantly: "What is not stated but only implied is more important, overall, than what is told directly."

Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary - Viewpoints and Critical Positions

Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Emma Bovary "writes herself out of existence" and becomes, in fact, not herself anymore but rather "the romantic heroines that she has been so possessed by in her reading"(411). That having been said, a reader can immediately see how transformation plays into this novel, as Emma apparently transforms herself from her own real world into the world of stories and characters.

Meantime, as brilliant as she is in conveying her understanding of the novel, the sometimes esoteric Bronfen has a tendency to create some confusion in the mind of the average student looking into analyses of Emma, when she writes sentences such as the following: "The conjunction of death with the image resides in the fact not only that death is the radical opposite of the stability and wholeness an image evokes but that the image itself produces an ambiguous division in its spectator and is itself also the location of death."

That aside, Bronfen makes it perfectly clear (412) that "From the very beginning," Emma's imagination "connects unfulfilled romantic desires with death." She is not happy in her marriage, because the desires in her, and the expectations, which were produced by her submerging herself in the act of reading romantic literature, are not fulfilled. In Part I, Chapter V, Emma is upstairs in the house she and Charles would share, and sees a bouquet of orange blossoms, "tied with white satin ribbons" in a bottle - a bouquet apparently used by Charles' first bride. "Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it up to the attic, while Emma seated in an armchair...thought of her bridal flowers packed up in a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she were to die."

That passage - juxtaposing wedding-related images with death - helps Bronfen make her point about the connection of "romance" with "death." It also conveys a point (however subtly) that it was perhaps a transgression to leave bridal flowers from a previous marriage out so that one's new bride could see them and be perhaps hurt a little by their presence. And was it a foreshadowing that perhaps, just perhaps, since her own bridal flowers were out of sight, would her marriage too be soon put in "a bandbox" and shipped off to oblivion?

Signs of her unhappiness (due in large part by her living in a literary dream world?) are abundant in Part I, Chapter IX. She (80) was upset that Charles "had no ambition," and when he kissed her forehead "with a tear in his eyes," she was "angered with shame" and "felt a wild desire to strike him." He disgusted her (80) by cleaning "his teeth with his tongue" and when drinking soup "he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful." He was becoming obese, and thus "the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples."

She tried to tell him exciting passages from stories she had read that day (81), since he "was something" (and the logs in the fireplace which would listen to her anecdotes were inanimate, and not "something") but she didn't get much response. She dreamed of seeing a "white sail in the mists of the horizon," and though she didn't know if it would be "laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes," nevertheless, every morning "she hoped it would come that day..."

So here we have an unhappy wife, living in a fantasy world, "saddened" at sunset because her mythical ship did not come in and sweep her away, longing "for the morrow" when that ship with white sails might arrive after all. This scenario - her eyes were like "shipwrecked sailors" reflecting the "solitude of her life" - can certainly qualify to be linked with the concept of transgression. After all, she goes "beyond the limits" in her fantasy obsessions. She daily is know to "pass beyond or go over the limits or boundary" of normal living standards. She "listened to every sound," Flaubert writes on page 81, "sprang up with a start..." hoping that that mythical ship would arrive and sweep her away to a better place (even death, perhaps?).

On 82 she gives up music. "What was the good of playing? Who would hear her?" Those lines seem to suggest that she was not even part of herself anymore, that she was now removed from her own reality, since she would certainly hear her play the piano, were she actually there to hear her play. She didn't sew anymore ("sewing irritated her"), and (83) she shut her door, "put on coals, and fainting with the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weight more heavily than ever."

All the "bitterness in life seemed served up on her plate, and with the smoke of the boiled beer there rose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness" (85). This is a sick woman, who on page 87 of Chapter IX "grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart." And what was worse, "everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her the more."

Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that, notwithstanding Emma's seemingly twisted psychological situation and poor physical condition, and "despite the novel's rich medical subtext" (Krueger 2003), at no place in the novel "do we find a serious attempt to diagnose and treat Emma," according to a piece in the Literature Film Quarterly by Cheryl Krueger. Readers can clearly identify, both in "Emma Bovary's adulterous behavior and in the novel's unusual narrative style, manifestations of hysteria," Krueger explains.