Moral hypocrisy and female rebellion in Flaubert's Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary was a major shock to the reading public in the nineteenth century, leading to charges of obscenity and a court case on the issue. Emma has an adulterous affair as one of her actions trying to escape from the banality of her existence, and her actions were seen as a direct challenge to the accepted middle class virtues of the time. In part, this was a reaction by Flaubert to the hypocrisy of the middle class at a time when France was still undergoing the social upheaval that started with the French Revolution in 1789, followed by the reign of Napoleon. Flaubert was tried for a violation of public morals, but he was acquitted. The trial served to make the novel even more notorious, while its quality generated critical praise that would make the book recognized as among the most important novels ever written.

The idea held by society about the Seven Deadly Sins was that committing one of these actions imperiled the soul. In truth, there is no scriptural support for this idea, but popularly these sins are held out as the cardinal sins that one must not commit. For Flaubert, though, this idea was largely for show as he saw the middle class committing them all. Flaubert approached his subject in a very realistic fashion and so countered the prevailing romanticism of the day, and this approach included a more realistic depiction of sex for the day, probably the main reason the novel encountered legal problems. Emma is a woman who seems devoted to the accepted code of conduct of the day but who also flouts those conventions in her private life. Her rebellious attitude would have been criticized in a man as well, but for a women to behave as she does was a major scandal and also went against the prevailing view of women as docile, subservient, and controlled by their husbands. Emma's rebellion was a major attack on the m idle class and the values of French society at the time, and this included a religious challenge against the supposed supremacy of the Seven Deadly Sins as "crimes" that would lead to damnation. Each sin is closely linked to another, leading to other greater sins. The seven deadly sins are pride, envy, anger, sloth, gluttony, avarice, and lechery, all the result of a failure to control the flesh.

The Novel

The story of Emma Bovary is told in a way that deliberately avoids grand moral dilemmas and dramatic action, though moral dilemmas are inherent in the material. The main character, Emma Bovary, interacts with several men in the course of her story. She is seen as rebellious in the long-term, but she begins with a belief in high ideals, though this is also part of her dedication to a romantic and adventurous life. Emma is always seeking something other than what she has. This desire on her part for romance and adventure contrasts with the banality of her middle-class existence, and Flaubert emphasizes this difference as a way of illuminating Emma's character by showing the difference between her dreams and her reality. Her high-mindedness could be a source of ambition and a spur to greater effort to achieve the ideal, but the effect in this novel is to make Emma more dissatisfied, make her hyper-critical of her surroundings and the people she knows, always make her ready to move from one person to another. Her high-mindedness contrasted with her actual behavior also makes her seem more foolish. The affairs she has are with men she believes to be as noble and grand as the characters in fiction, but once more she is bound to be disappointed in the reality and is betrayed again and again as a result. Rodolphe betrays her openly by disappearing, while Leon betrays her with the reality of his personality so that she becomes bored once more and drops him. Emma's affairs are not noble or grand as she believes they should be.

When we first meet Emma Bovary, she is a woman already bored by her existence and showing it. When she is conversing with Charles, she is described in terms that show how social conventions and the resulting boredom affect her:

She had been complaining ever since the spring began of fits of deafness... She would have liked to live in town, at all events during the winter months, although perhaps the long days made the country still more boring in the summer... her voice would be clear, shrill, or, suddenly sinking into languor, linger in modulations which ended almost in a whisper, as if she were speaking to herself?-now joyfully, with wide-open, innocent eyes, now with lids half-closed, and a look of boredom, as her thoughts wandered aimlessly. (Flaubert 39)

When Emma comments on the need to observe the laws of society, Rodolphe points out ways of getting around that:

Yes, but one must observe the laws of society more or less, and obey its moral code."

Ah! But there are two codes," he replied. "The lesser one, the conventional, the man-made code [and] the other, the eternal." (Flaubert 251)

For Emma, man-made codes are stifling, such as the social code that relegates women to a secondary role and that prevents them from following the sort of romantic fantasies she finds in books and believes men can follow. Emma faces the social conditions of the country in particular and finds that they lead to boredom, while the social conditions in the city offer more choices and more opportunities for something to do. In truth, though, all life in her society produces boredom for Emma because that life will never rise to the level of excitement and romance she finds in fiction. Her own life would be viewed as comfortable by most people of her time, for she and Charles are middle-class, not wealthy, but well-off enough to afford luxuries and to have a sense of security. That alone seems to add to her boredom -- she does not have to fight for anything in life and so begins to question what she already has.

French society and politics have been marked by regional divisions along with economic and social divisions. During the ancien regime, referring to the period prior to the French Revolution, an absolutist monarchy and a provincial aristocracy dominated French society. Industrial and urban development came in the late nineteenth century. This was uneven, leaving French society dominated by rural and small town interests up to the 1950s and fostering income differentials considered among the broadest in Europe. Ideological differences have also been stark and firmly held in a nation suffused with utopian philosophical idealism. Throughout the post-Revolution era, the country has been bitterly divided between those on the Left who have favored the transfer of power to a democratic, representative, and republican legislature and who have tried to foster effective local government, individual and press freedom, and secularism, and those on the Right who have sought order, stability, and unity through a strong, autocratic, and centralized executive form of administration supported by a respected Catholic Church (Derbyshire 1-2).

Setting

The setting for Madame Bovary is significantly a smaller and more provincial town on the French landscape, one of the many more rural towns that dominated the country in Flaubert's time. In such a setting, the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins and of the threat of sin itself would likely have more power than in a large city like Paris. The setting has particular power in this novel because the countryside, while on the one hand producing people with narrower points-of-view and with more religious fervor, also stands as a symbol of fecundity and sensuality. Phillip a. Duncan finds that the colors emphasized in the novel help illustrate the themes, and he says blue and green are the dominant colors. Blue is used as a sign of happiness or promised happiness, such as those moments when Emma dreams of escape to rare and idealized places where love is eternal. Green is used "to reinforce the dreary social ambiance or, more generously, in other contexts as a sexual and/or Satanic allusion" (Duncan para. 1). He nots that green is always a sign of springtime and fertility, and that this is soon turned to a sign for human sexuality and love. In the novel, green is often used as an association with the arousal of sexual desire in Emma. For instance, when she and Leon are walking through the fields, the undulating green grasses through which they walk suggests sensuality and sexual desire. The color is also used when she meets Rodolph and is soon intoxicated by her desire for him: "Here twining vegetation (implicitly green) is an emblem of Emma's sexual vulnerability. Rodolphe pursues his strategy of seduction" (Duncan para. 4). Duncan writes,

Emma's health fails when Rodolphe abandons her. At a moment of crisis she asks for communion and again experiences that illusion of the disintegration of formal matter and the coincident release and expansion of her spirit. It seems to her, says Flaubert, that her being, rising toward God, is going to be annihilated in love like burning incense that dissipates in vapor. But her response during this phenomenon remains curiously erotic... The waving of the green palm leaves relates this scene to the previous scenes of sexual seduction. (Duncan para, 5)

At times, the green in the novel moves from springtime to the idea of the presence of Satan, the Tempter, coming into Emma's Garden of Eden with blandishments to sin. Earlier in the novel, Emma's relative tranquility is interrupted by the appearance of a stranger wearing green and carrying a green box. This is Lheureux, "an eruption of the occult in the dismal stagnation of provincial life" (Duncan para. 9). Lheureux is a man with no clear origins and the only outsider in the community. He also serves to bring two of the Seven Deadly Sins together in his person:

Lheureux... links together the themes of adultery and usury in Flaubert's novel. His first convocation seems to endorse Emma's tentative seduction by the "refined" and Romantic Leon, and his green box is a cornucopia of frivolous rarities which solicit Emma's sexual and esthetic cravings and invite her to excess. Emma's aspiration to perfect love (mired in lust) and her desire for rich and beautiful surroundings damn her. Lheureux stimulates both "sins." (Duncan para. 12)

Whitaker and Darrow consider the nature of the provincial world that produces Emma and against which she rebels in her way. They cite the surprising banality of the subject matter in the novel and note the relentless way Flaubert examiners it in the minutest detail. Part of the surprise involves the common nature of Emma and other characters in the novel:

Emma and her provincial neighbours are little in moral stature, limited in intelligence, stunted in their ambitions, sordid in their private thoughts, and ridiculous in their public prating and posturing. Around his centrally placed married couple, locked into their miseries, Flaubert has laid out a gallery of unedifying stereotypes: Homais the self-seeking pharmacist, who represents secularism and republican virtue at their lowest ebb; Bournisien the fleshly priest, much given to empty ecclesiastical exhortation; Rodolphe the well-to-do landowner and full-time rake. No trade or profession escapes Flaubert's derision. No individual represents true decency. How can a serious novel, a work of high art, be made from material of this kind? And how can an artistic project aiming so low be sustained over hundreds of pages? (Whitaker and Darrow para. 3)

The authors also note the picturesque qualities of the town in which Emma lives and see this as part of the social order meant to be protected by the religious strictures of the time, making Emma's breaking of the code all the more threatening. They cite an early scene in which people arrive for a party and are greeted by an insufficient number of stable boys, so that the male guests in their dress clothes get down to help. Whitaker and Darrow note,

On the one hand, the narrator seems to be having fun at the expense of his country folk, and to be suggesting, by way of a determined transfer of attention from persons to clothing, that local festivities of this kind are nothing but show and pantomime: all right if you live in a village, as Gertrude Stein once remarked, but if not, not. Failures of dress sense have been sorted into a jeering catalogue by one who clearly knows better about such matters than his Norman neighbors. On the other hand, however, something more akin to a musical exposition is also going on in this paragraph. There are three thematic kernels -- dress coats, frock coats, and jackets -- and each of them is no sooner stated than subjected to an elaborate process of variation. Flaubert's prose speaks of an ordinary world that is becoming fantastical even as each separate notation is set down: these country-dwellers are beginning to flap like birds and to grow eyes in the back of their jackets. And it speaks, too, of a playful, self-delighting intelligence at work upon whatever undistinguished fragments of the real world it finds to hand. (para. 7)

The usual assessment of Emma is that she is a product of this particular corner of the world but is somehow warped by reading romantic fiction, though the depth of her temptation and the universality of it must be seen in much broader terms. As Robert Wooster Stallman states,

Her plight applies to human beings everywhere and always, the romantic pursuit of happiness being a permanent part of our nature. In the passion-pinched multitudes who crowd our movie-palaces, Emma has her present-day counterparts -- the movie-screen fulfilling for them all the impossible passions which Emma Bovary failed to obtain. Flaubert's theme, namely, that the quest for happiness cannot be realized in the world of everyday experience, is a theme of universal validity. Our world, no less than Emma Bovary's, is split by the same tragic disparity between inner dream and external reality. We, too, are betrayed by reality at every turn. (Stallman para. 2)

Emma's challenge of the Seven Deadly sins is not played up by Flaubert because he does not see her as a religious martyr or as a saint being tested the way Antoine was. Instead, he sees her as a normal individual, a product of a society that imposes rules and stifles opportunity. Society does this even more for women than for men, but both the woman and the men of this village generally acquiesce in being kept in their place by fate.

The Role of Women

Emma Bovary is a woman who lives in a society that is repressive and particularly so toward women. Emma does not fit easily into such a society because she has a romantic nature, one which is nurtured by her daydreams and her desire for excitement and change. In her world, a woman is expected to marry and then to subsume herself to the life of her husband, in essence disappearing into marriage and no longer being thought of as an individual even to the slight extent that she may have been before marriage. Emma, however, has been spoiled by the romantic notions she has acquired from romance novels she first read to escape the boredom of the convent. She is an example of someone who lives with an illusion about life and is disappointed to find that the illusion is not the same as the reality.

The life of Emma Bovary is fully developed in the course of the novel, and the novelist shows how her early life has influenced the development of her personality and the ways in which that personality is manifested in later life. Flaubert implies that the child was always sentimental in her outlook, and this sentimentality was nurtured over time rather than dissipating in the face of the realities of life. For one thing, the child was insulated for much of her life. She was sent to a convent, isolating her from the world, and it was there that she further nurtured her daydreams with the romance novels that gave her a false picture of life, a picture of heightened emotions, sentimentality, and excitement. Marriage in these novels offered the same sort of distorted picture, so it was inevitable then Emma would discover real marriage to be quite different when she encountered it in her own life. The romantic dreams of her youth could not be satisfied by the reality of marriage.

This is precisely what happens. She marries Charles Bovary with pictures of a romantic and dashing heroic figure in her head, but in truth Charles is a dull man who works as a country doctor and who is perfectly happy to remain in the same place doing the same thing for his whole life. Charles is contrasted with the more romantic figure of his father, someone who might be more to Emma's liking in terms of her vision of what a man should be like. Charles finds that nothing comes easily to him -- he must work hard for everything, and hard work is part of his nature. He is also a man who has always been dominated by women -- first his mother, then the first wife chosen for him by his mother, and now Emma. Charles is also blind to the real nature of Emma or to her feelings, and this blindness is also part of his assumption that the world is always the same, much like himself.

Emma seeks adventure, and Charles would not understand adventure. He does not seek it, and he cannot see that Emma does because he thinks she is as happy and contented as he is. Emma is always looking for something better than she has and even for something better than she is -- she believes in high ideals and grand gestures such as she has read in romance fiction. She has affairs with men she believes to be as noble and grand as the character of fiction, but reality betrays her.

Emma was trained to follow the accepted religious truths of her age, though her boredom causes her to seek excitement outside of those norms. Eileen Burchell notes how Emma was raised when she writes,

The daughter of an improvident, widowed farmer from Normandy, Emma receives a convent education in Rouen, intended for girls well above her social station. Acting to reinforce bourgeois norms, the Ursuline sisters try to socialize her to be an obedient daughter, faithful wife, and loving mother. Her role as housekeeper is idealized to compensate for lack of power in the public realm where she cannot divorce, travel freely, or vote. As Emma's imagination and sensuality develop in adolescence, she is taught to repress sexual desire in imitation of the Virgin Mary. Her surrogate mothers portray marriage as the only outlet for emotional and physical satisfaction. Money becomes a metaphor of forbidden sexual desire, seen later in Emma's consumerism. (Burchell 181-182)

Again, two of the seven sins are thus linked, sexual desire and the love of money. As Emma makes her way through life, she shows considerable strength in spite of the way society views women as weak and compliant, or perhaps her strength is as great as it is because that is the perception that allows her to do more than other women just because she wants to and is certainly stronger than her husband and most of the other men she meets.

What gives Emma the vitality that her husband lacks is that, unlike him, she does not surrender: she makes mistakes, she takes risks and attempts to break free from mediocrity. If it is true, as Edmund Wilson maintains, that a romantic is always a rebel, then Emma is both romantic and rebellious. Returning to "bovarysme," Emma's sin is that she confuses reality and imagination in her girlish mind and has no clear idea about the sort of man who might be able to satisfy her. The Viscount fascinates her, but this is probably because of his social status: she is swept away by the embodiment of an enduring image from her childhood. In fact, the Viscount gives the impression of being less valid as a man than Charles, whose patients are very devoted to him (and to whom Pere Rouault is surely grateful). Emma is not capable of understanding her husband's complex ambivalence; she certainly does not understand the extent to which Charles's long-standing grudge against his possessive mother poisons his love for his wife and, above all, how much she herself needs someone to hate, someone who can make her suffer. All of this brings us back to the morbid relationship that binds the couple not only to each other but also to Emma's lovers. (Speziale-Bagliacca 22)

Emma had these ideas even before she married Charles. Indeed, she marries Charles Bovary with pictures of a romantic and dashing heroic figure in her head, but in truth Charles is a dull man who works as a country doctor and who is perfectly happy to remain in the same place doing the same thing for his whole life. Charles is contrasted with the more romantic figure of his father, someone who might be more to Emma's liking in terms of her vision of what a man should be like. Charles finds that nothing comes easily to him -- he must work hard for everything, and hard work is part of his nature. He is also a man who has always been dominated by women -- first his mother, then the first wife chosen for him by his mother, and now Emma. Charles is also blind to the real nature of Emma or to her feelings, and this blindness is also part of his assumption that the world is always the same, much like himself.

Emma seeks adventure, and Charles would not understand adventure. He does not seek it, and he cannot see that Emma does because he thinks she is as happy and contented as he is. Emma is always looking for something better than she has and even for something better than she is -- she believes in high ideals and grand gestures such as she has read in romance fiction. To a degree, such a belief can be beneficial and can make one strive for something better, but it makes Emma dissatisfied, hyper-critical of her surroundings and the people she knows. The affairs she has are with men she believes to be as noble and grand as the character of fiction, but here again she is bound to be disappointed in the reality and is betrayed again and again as a consequence. Rodolphe betrays her openly by disappearing, while Leon betrays her with the reality of his personality so that she becomes bored once more and drops him. In truth, Emma's affairs could not be seen as noble or grand in the romantic tradition except that she is so bored with her life with Charles. After all, Rodolphe is a farmer, not a knight, and the affair with him is tawdry one rather then the romantic seduction of novels. Leon is a lot like Emma, always looking for something more romantic. He finds that -- and a good deal more confidence -- in Paris, but he is pretending to a degree of sophistication he never possesses. He can impress Emma for a time, but neither of these people really understands the world to which they aspire.

Erik Erikson offers a theory of personality development that shows Emma to be someone who has never made the transition fully from one stage to another. Erikson's approach is a psychosocial theory of development which describes a series of eight stages in the development of the individual throughout life, based on the interaction of biological, psychological, and social processes. The stages are described by Erikson as psychosocial "crises," and the reason for this is that they are intended to represent periods when the individual is particularly sensitive or vulnerable to certain developmental issues. Each of the crisis stages is described by Erikson in terms of its positive outcome or strength "versus" its negative outcome or weakness, and the relative degree to which the resolution of each crisis can be considered favorable or unfavorable serves as one factor determining the outcome of later stages. Each stage thus relates to every other stage (Whitbourne and Weinstock 13).

In these eight stages, each critical encounter with the environment will dominate at a particular period in the life cycle. The conflicts are not completely separated -- all eight conflicts are present in the individual at birth, and each of the conflicts continues to play a role, if a minor one, throughout life. Emma fails particularly beginning with the fifth stage is identity vs. role confusion. Identity here refers to the confidence that others see us as we see ourselves, and if an identity is not formed, role confusion may occur, often characterized by an inability to select a career or to further educational goals. The sixth stage is that of intimacy vs. isolation. It occurs in young adulthood when people are expected to be ready for true intimacy and when they must develop cooperative social and occupational relationships with others and select a mate (Liebert and Spiegler 88-92). Emma's illusions prevent her from integrating these changes properly. She is isolated and fails to achieve intimacy with another because she sees a veneer and not a person, an illusion and not a reality. When reality intrudes, the illusion of intimacy is also lost.

One of the interesting elements in Madame Bovary is that she is dissatisfied with her life and her role because of her reading, and so Flaubert, the writer, seems critical of the act of reading because it creates false desires that can never be fulfilled. Emma dies because she has tried to make her life into a novel. Emma has been deluded by literature. She seeks romance and excitement such as she has found in the pages of a book. She seeks an out from her boring country life with a series of men who all fail to deliver the romantic image she seeks -- one is a cad, one a coward, and all the time she wastes time with these men and n=ignores the boring husband and child who really adore her and who never question her nature. She wants a more spiritual life than she can find as the wife of a bourgeois country doctor, but in trying to find such a life, she finds only Self-destruction.

She wants her life to have meaning, though she ignores the meaning it does have in her quest for something more. She represents the growing alienation of women from their social role, something that would become more powerful over the next century until it produced first the Suffrage Movement and then the Women's Movement.

In the novel Anna Karenina, Tolstoy expresses his concern that people are moving from the rural area to the cities and leaving behind important values and traditions. Levin is the character who maintains his belief in those traditions, and seems the most sympathetic character in the novel. Anna is not unsympathetic, but she does lack the power or the will to overcome her environment. She feels enclosed by that environment, something that is brought more and more to the fore because of her boredom with the country life, a boredom that itself shows she has been alienated from the old values that Tolstoy holds dear. What is clear is that by the end of the novel, he no longer blames her for having this response, for it is the society itself which has lost the old values and shaped a world in which Anna ultimately does not fit. She is not the only character in this novel who want to be accepted by society for the prestige involved than they want to live up to any moral or ethical standards. Her relationship with both Vronsky and her husband does not fulfill her, and she is left always seeking something more, not unlike the yearning Emma Bovary feels in her unfulfilling society. Anna contrasts with Levin throughout the novel, and as she sinks deeper into despair, Levin stands as a symbol of life and success as a human being. When Anna dies, Levin is just beginning his life with Kitty.

Anna lacks important qualities that would help her in her life and in her social circle. She is more interested in a position in society than in spiritual matters, and this lack of values leads to her death because there is nothing in this world that will ever satisfy her needs without the guidance and anchor of tradition. For Emma, a lack of some larger anchor is also a contributing factor to her suicide, though for her it is more an image of what society should be than what society is that contributes to her downfall. Anna experiences the power of her inner emotions, and these conflict with the society in which she lives. Anna lacks the anchor to tradition that would make her stronger, for she has lost the traditional values and cannot withstand the artificial urban society that stands in opposition to them. Emma is bored with the traditions she sees around her and does not see them as an anchor at all.

Boredom is not as central a motif in Anna Karenina as it is in Madame Bovary, for the boredom of Emma Bovary is the motivating factor in many of her actions and the ultimate reason for her suicide. If Emma were not as bored as she is, she would never pursue the men she does because they are not anything like the romantic image she has of a man than is her husband, Charles. Rodolphe is not a knight in shining armor but a farmer. Her affair with him is not a grand romance, either, but a secret affair in hidden places, as distasteful as that sort of thing sounds. Leon is man who is more like Emma than the other men and is himself always seeking a more romantic encounter. He is still not the image that Emma has of the sophisticated lover, however, though he does pretend to be just that. He is able to impress Emma for a while, for she is so desperate to find this sort of relationship that she is a gullible target for someone like Leon.

Pace notes how Emma truly relates to this lover:

He is not a person to her, merely the object onto which she projects her own imaginings -- as she had done, just before their reunion, with the tenor singing in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Rouen theater -- and through whom she satisfies her desires. When their love cools, and adultery proves as dull as marriage, she tries to stimulate her dying feelings artificially by an effort of the imagination... She becomes avid, insatiable, ruthless, and reckless. Always adept at self-deception, she learns to deceive others, becoming involved in the most tangled web of duplicity (Pace 120).

Neither Leon nor Emma, though, understands that the world they seek does not exist and never has but is only a romantic image conveyed in literature.

Bersani refers to the role literature plays in Emma's life and finds that it has not served her well. He seems to blame the literature itself, whereas Flaubert seems to blame Emma for being so gullible as to accept this literature as real life:

Literature has served Emma very poorly indeed. It makes sense of experience for her, but experience doesn't confirm the sense she brings to it. And this is especially disastrous since Emma can't really return to literature... Flaubert's novel is an extraordinarily subtle dialectic between literature and sensation; the movement between the two crests a rhythm less immediately obvious but more profound that the alternation between exalted fantasies and flat realities (Bersani 24).

Both novels depict women who fail in their relationships and who are bored with their society and their possibilities. In the end, they see those possibilities as so limited that they choose death rather than continuing in a society that is either spiritless or so different from what is depicted in books that life loses all meaning. Both Flaubert and Tolstoy blame society in some degree, for the boredom felt by women is a result of the fewer opportunities allowed women in the nineteenth century.

Mary Nieland finds that the description of the administration of the last rites by Flaubert is an effort to define Emma's life in terms of the Seven Deadly Sins. She also stats that he does not limit the influence of the Seven Deadly Sins to Emma alone, for he "also associates imaes of the Devil's entourage with Lheureux" (Nieland 168).

Various critics have associated Lheureux with traditional diabolic imagery: "The salesman reflects the physical characteristics of Envie too. Lheureux is permanently bent over and makes a strange whistling sound, two features of the description of Envie" (Nieland 168).

The Seven Deadly Sins are held out a temptations to test the mettle of those being tempted. Porter writes about one of Flaubert's other novels,

In Flaubert's novel, the saint is tempted on a number of different levels: first by the seven deadly sins, then by the heresies of Arianism and Gnosticism that were widespread in his day, by philosophy (or "science") and by pantheism, and finally in the quintessential temptation of desiring to become one with God. Only after refusing these temptations is Antoine able to return to prayer. His atonement with God is signaled at the conclusion by the radiant apparition of Christ's face in the sun. (Porter 322)

This novel is La Tentation de saint Antoine, and Porter notes how Flaubert uses the fact that traditional theology identifies two master forms of temptation, which are in essence the same experience seen from two different perspectives and representing two possible outcomes. The first is Tentatio subversionis (subversion) and is the Devil's attempt to trick us into committing acts -- mortal sins -- that will damn us irrevocably. Only if God grants us a portion of the supererogatory merit accumulated by the saints and through Christ's sacrifice can this be overcome. Porter cites literary examples he says are more common in the dour world of certain Protestantisms, such as Matthew "Monk" Lewis's the Monk, Charles Williams's Descent into Hell, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. The second is Tentatio probationis (trial, ordeal) and is the temptation that God allows us to undergo ("permissive evil") in order to give us the opportunity to strengthen, refine, and purify our character so as to merit the grace of salvation. Porter cites literary examples of this as well, such as the Book of Job, Goethe's Faust, C.S. Lewis's the Screwtape Letters, or Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest:

Convincingly to describe the "higher" spiritual state achieved after temptation presents a difficult literary problem that is often solved by obliterating the protagonist's memories of his or her sins and tribulations. After destroying all Job's sons and daughters (Job 1:18-19), for example, God eventually gives him a new set of children (Job 42:13-15) -- but wouldn't he miss the first ones? After seducing, impregnating, and abandoning Gretchen and being responsible for the deaths of herself and all her family, Goethe's Faust has his memories erased at the beginning of part 2 so that he can continue to function. Flaubert wisely avoids such issues by cutting La Tentation short at the ending and suggesting that Anthony's renewed ability to pray -- his spiritual reunion with God -- is a full and perfect resolution. (Porter 322)

Emma in Madame Bovary is certainly not being tested by God, so her temptations are in the form of Tentatio subversionis, and from the strict religious point-of-view of her day, she fails.

The Road to Death

The traditional view of the Seven Deadly Sins is that they would imperil the soul, and while this might be assumed to refer only to what happens after death, in the mind of many punishment might come in this life and come swiftly. A person who flouted the conventions and committed one or more of these sins would be ostracized from the community and would suffer great losses and tragedy as punishment, though this is not what happens to Emma. Her suicide itself is not ascribable to the usual sense of guilt for her sin, for instance, though a casual reader might think this is the case: Characters in fiction would tend to experience terrible and swift punishment for their sins, but Jacqueline Merrow Paskow notes how the story of Emma Bovary is different:

Unlike most nineteenth-century novels of female adultery in which the heroine's unhappy end is a function of her having broken social taboos, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary presents us with a heroine whose suicide, contrary to the reader's expectation, cannot be explained in terms of any social or personal havoc caused by her adulteries. (Paskow 323)

Paskow likens the novel to "other canonical, male-authored realist novels of female adultery of the nineteenth century" (323), and she again finds differences:

Unlike them, it is not a cautionary tale warning women of the painful consequences of domestic infidelity. The eponymous heroines of Effie Briest (Fontane) and Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) are punished for their marital trespasses by their husbands' vindictiveness, by society's scorn, and by their own feelings of guilt. And they suffer terrible consequences. Effie spends the rest of her life a virtual prisoner in her parents' house, excluded from society and deprived of the right to see her daughter. Anna commits suicide to end a life made unbearable by her husband's punitive behavior and by her tortured conscience. But Emma, by far the most wayward of these three fictional adulteresses, is not repudiated by her husband. Nor is she ostracized as a fallen woman by those citizens of Yonville who know of her affairs. nor, even, does she show signs of remorse for being an unfaithful wife, a negligent mother, an undisciplined housekeeper, or for lying, stealing, and behaving profligately. It is no doubt owing to the absence in the novel of any obvious source of censorship of Emma's behavior that its author was brought to trial for 'offence to public morals.' (Paskow 323)

Of course, Emma does commit suicide, though her motives for doing so are not what was common in the novels of the time. Many of the more common motives that Flaubert suggest ar actually "ironic false leads offered by the impersonal narrator" (Paskow 323).

Lee rejects the idea that Emma is concerned about what her neighbors will think about her, since she has shown no such concern before this. Another possibility raised is that of bankruptcy, since Emma has been running up a huge debt for some tome without her husband knowing about it. Lee finds that Emma killed herself because she despairs of ever finding the great love she sought, because she may now see that it is not possible in her terms, and that she is simply bored by waiting.

Roy Chandler Caldwell Jr. cites the events leading up to Emma's suicide, and he sees her death as a form of absolution she takes unto herself. She escapes from the problems of her lovers and her debt. Caldwell wants to emphasize the way Emma dies, for she dies while laughing. Caldwell finds that when critics have addressed this fact at all, they have given it only cursory treatment. He cites Michael Riffaterre that it is a bitter laugh coming from a sudden knowledge of her fall, while Stephen Heath sees it expressing "the atrocious farce of existence" (Heath 84-85). Victor Brombert calls it a "sinister laugh" which "does not bespeak the peace of a soul about to be released from human bondage" but a laugh that "sounds much rather like a Satanic expression of scorn in the face of life's ultimate absurdity, death" (Brombert 75).

Indeed, Caldwell finds that laughter is used throughout the novel as a comment on social customs:

Again and again, laughter signifies the pleasurable recognition of a momentary breach in social decorum. Emma laughs when she takes her scandalous walks in the company of Leon (160), laughs at the Commices agricoles when Rodolphe abruptly dismisses the bothersome Homais (202), and again when Madame Bovary mere reproaches her for allowing Felicite to receive gentlemen callers at the Bovarys' backdoor (260). Emma takes pleasure from being scandalous. From her first appearance in the novel her laughter reveals her propensity to risk violating social convention. At her father's farmhouse Emma laughs when she offers to drink with Charles, and again, in a description with a high erotic charge, as she drinks... This is no Bergsonian laughter, no laughter which represses eccentricity, which serves as social corrective by inspiring fear in the object of ridicule... This laughter dismisses society. Emma laughs when she senses herself suddenly outside the small world which holds her imprisoned. (Caldwell para. 28)

The laughter is in keeping with the underling tone of the novel and with the theme of flaunting the social conventions and asserting personal freedom.

Conclusion

The idea of the Seven Deadly Sins may have ha importance in the Church in this era, and it may have affected the way the people of a small village like the one in Madame Bovary viewed the world and the plight of their souls. It did not have a great effect on Flaubert, though he was certainly aware of it, and it had little effect on the main character of Emma Bovary.

Madame Bovary is similar to several novels of the time that depict women who fail in their relationships and who are bored with their society and their possibilities. In the end, they see those possibilities as so limited that they choose death rather than continuing in a society that is either spiritless or so different from what is depicted in books that life loses all meaning. Both Flaubert and Tolstoy produced such works, and both blame society in some degree. The boredom felt by women is a result of the fewer opportunities allowed women in the nineteenth century. Also, the committing of the Seven Deadly Sins is not left to Emma alone, and others in her society show a severe tendency to be envious of others; to have an overweening pride in what they do, especially in their chosen profession; to anger; to overeat; and so on. In this social group, the seven sins are committed daily. Emma herself is most given to lust and avarice, but she is not alone in either of these sins, either. There is a satanic figure in the form of Lheureux who seeks to entice her to all manner of debauchery, though she is really only lustful herself in search of the perfect romantic love she has gleaned from her reading of romantic fiction. The way Flaubert presents the sins and the people committing them, thee sins are mostly not what they used to be, and the consequence are also not as they once were, either. In Emma's case, all this sinning is simply boring and leaves her laughing at the way some place great importance on a moral life as defined by the Church and by the community. Emma really respects neither of these institutions.