Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary

¶ … Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary

Both Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Emma Bovary of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary use extramarital sexuality as a means of self-expression. However, Flaubert presents Emma's lust for new experiences in the arms of a lover as an enactment of childish wish-fulfillment. Emma wants her life to resemble the lives of the heroines of the romantic novels she has read. Emma lacks real feeling, although she believes she does. However, she is ultimately performing a romantic narrative she has read about in books and exists only in books. She thinks she is challenging the limits of bourgeois society, but in reality her conventional immorality is just as superficial as her obsession with consumer culture. Emma's fascination with her own appearance, her fixation on acquiring beautiful and expensive consumer goods, and, when she was a child, the superficial representations of religion all show the limits of her perception. Madame Bovary thinks she wants a transcendent existence, but like all manifestations of her bourgeois existence, the means by which she seeks fulfillment are petty.

In contrast, Kate Chopin portrays Edna Pontellier as in search of something 'real,' a real sense of fulfillment her society is unable to bestow upon her. Unlike Emma, who carries on her affairs in secret from her husband Charles, Edna openly breaks with conventional morality. She does not see herself as a romantic heroine; she is seeking an authentic sense of worth. There are individuals in Edna's life who seem authentic -- her friend Adele clearly loves motherhood, and finds contentment within its limitations, Mademoiselle Reisz devotes her life to her music. But Edna has difficulty embracing both aspect of her divided self: she is a wife and mother but also a human being. Unlike Emma who wishes to be a different kind of woman, a woman of fantasy who does not really exist, Edna wants to become a fully actualized person.

Emma is portrayed as a sensual being from the beginning of the novel, even though she is disappointed with Charles. She falls quite naturally into the affair. Her various lovers' beauty seems consistent with her love of beautiful material things and her admiration of herself as a beautiful object. For Emma, having an affair is another celebration of material goods -- her lover is an object that marks her as worthy, just like having the best clothing and furniture that money can buy (or can be borrowed). Her love is not for Leon or Rodolphe anymore than her love of her clothing is for the piece of cloth -- she seeks out men for what they can do for her, so she can engage in an enactment of her fantasy of herself as a star of a romance. Flaubert underlines this fact by having Emma fall in love during various representations of provincial life that represent consumerism or superficiality, such as a local agricultural fair or watching an opera.