Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert\'s Novel,

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert's novel, "Madame Bovary," first serialized in La Revue de Paris in 1856, is about Emma, a middle-class doctor's wife, and her adulteries, extravagance and eventual self-destruction. The novel so scandalized the moral fiber of public prosecutors of the time that a court suit was brought against it. While it narrates intense desire and pursuit for wealth, romance and social status, it also exposes the unstable and unsettling place of women in society during her time, which ultimately puts an end to her intense pursuit and wild indiscretions. This unstable and unsettling status of women in society is clearly established in each of her relationships and interactions with the main characters.

Brought up by an uneducated farmer father, she comes to loathe rural and simple life. As a girl in the convent, she reads romantic novels, which add to the discontent and begins to dream and desire for the highest and most impossible forms of love and wealth at the expense of other, better or truer forms of beauty in the world already hers. This is why she does not take second thoughts in accepting the marriage proposal of Charles without due consideration of his qualities or the lack of these in realizing her wild dreams.

Charles Bovary is a dull, incompetent and unimaginative man who is a country doctor by profession but not very good at it, not even qualified to called a doctor. Although he is her first main step to acquiring and fulfilling her wild dreams, he is an unexciting, common and boring husband and man, despite his unfailing devotion to her. It is that very unfailing devotion, which may in fact, have made him unexciting and unfulfilling to Emma's steeply demanding dreams and her own person. He represents both the society and the very personal characteristics she hates. Not without reason, though, because Charles is un-romantic and does not apprehend Emma's person in their relationship. He appreciates, perceives and experiences Emma's person in his terms, in his own image, rather than for what she is. He notices and delights over Emma's gaudy clothes and her beautiful skin and hair. But he is insensitive of her aspirations and depressions or does not deal with these. They hardly have a sensible or meaningful dialogue. He is a fumbling practitioner whom Emma, his patients and other people cannot admire. He may even be ugly and disgusting as Emma sees him. His love for her is revealed when she forgives her for her infidelities. He comes to rescue her when she falls ill. Charles' qualities are, in fact, the opposite of Emma's - he is simple-minded, without aspirations and undue ambitions. In general, Charles has a good heart and steadfastness, which Emma does not. But it is precisely Charles lack of ambition and simplicity, which limit Emma's possibilities of realizing the raging dreams she has relished from childhood. In marriage, she is limited to him as the partner who should make things possible for the other. Charles is self-content and content with Emma's beauty. Her discontent over the boredom and emptiness of provincial life do not bother him. Emma invested in that marriage to fulfill her aspirations and it is not well worth the investment. Emma experiences a bottomless type of frustration in her marriage and, when other opportunities present themselves in extramarital affairs, she considers them for the sake of her deep-rooted fantasies and dreams.

Leon is that first other opportunity. He appears to match her perfectly as he parallels her romantic ideas and dissatisfaction for the common life. He also exhibits the inner appreciation Charles has failed to show her as a person. At first, Emma and Leon are unable to actualize their shared romantic expectations. He is more sensible and practical about the impossibility of a romance with her for as long as she remains married. Although he shares Emma's adventurous and ambitious spirit, he is not limited to her because he is unmarried and a man who can embark in other, better or more practical pursuits. When they meet in a more cosmopolitan environment in Rouen, Leon is more self-assured and feels able to live up with their romantic ideals. But as the relationship progress, it bores and disgusts him, especially because of Emma's financial distress, which dims whatever romance they have started. He makes excuses for failing to help her financially and eventually marries someone else after Emma's suicide. Leon is Emma's second attempt at realizing her romantic dreams of being pursued, wanted and appreciated for herself but using her body as the means to that end. That is only half of all she dreams of and the truth about her being a married woman and in financial trouble gets on the way to the brief affair and nips it. Abandoned by a lover who satisfies her desire for romance, Emma must contend with the truth of an unstable and unsatisfying existence of a woman in a society of men.

Her third opportunity is Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy landowner to whom Emma is only one in a string of mistresses. He is calculating, selfish and manipulative. He designs the seduction of Emma with strategic precision, runs an affair with her and leaves her when he gets bored of her romantic fancies and emotional demands. He represents the fulfillment of the rest of her intense dreams of wealth and class. She has the body and sensual means for it for a while, but her misplaced romantic ideals and demands do not fit the designs of Rodolphe, especially when she becomes indiscreet. Her beauty and the risks and excitement of adultery make her desirable to Rodolphe to feed his ego, but not her desires and personal requirements. Like Leon, Rodolphe has the options, which Emma does not have in a society, which puts women at a disadvantage and at the pleasure of men.

From the start, the male characters have shaped the direction and the very life of Emma and of women in general. From the start, Emma can only dream but the fulfillment of her dreams depends on the men around her. Her idealism as a young girl and woman disables her from catching this reality. She is misled by the romance novels she read as a child that romantic ideals are possible. She assumes that marriage can bring her dreams to reality and she is frustrated. Romance novels are one thing and reality is another. She loses sight of the glaring fact that women are powerless in a society, which caters to men. Advancing her social and financial status is also men's option. She takes a major risk in marrying Charles in the hope of achieving her ideals but she ends up being stunted in a country town and a boring and dry husband for a mate for life. What makes it most painful is that, as a woman, she does not have the option even to escape this unstable, unsettling condition. She is further limited to what her husband does not have much of: money. Her society does not allow her an independent mind and independent options outside her marriage and her husband's decisions and options. She uses the only weapon society allows her, her beauty and sex, to obtain what she has dreamed of all her life. But she realizes in the end that these tools can bring her only shame and frustration because of her lack of option in a chauvinistic society.

Emma is also constrained by her mother role to Berthe, whom she wishes were a boy. Unconsciously, she exercises the same wish as her society's for a male offspring because men exercise the power and major options in that society. It nearly crushes her when she gives birth to a girl who like herself is condemned to be powerless in a society and to be used only by men at their convenience and pleasure.