Rathee 1

Sidharth Rathee

2020ENG1009

Dr. Saikat Ghosh

B.A. English Hons.

08 Nov 2022

Role of male characters in precipitating the crisis in Emma Bovary’s life

Don’t you know there are some souls that are

constantly tormented? They need dreams and action, one after the

other, the purest passions, the most frenzied pleasures, and

it leads them to throw themselves into

all sorts of fantasies and follies (Flaubert 2.8)

A tragedy, a social commentary, a warning for those who sacrifice what “is” for what

“can be” - Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is a quintessential piece of 19th century realist

literature. The novel aims to depict the Petite Bourgeois class which was just an outer husk of

commodity fetishism with no actual substance inside. At the heart of this provincial setting is

Emma our protagonist through whose journey we witness the fate of those who attempt a free

fall into the blackhole of idealism, materialism, and hedonism.

In this paper we will look at how Emma, who found the reality of her life contemptuous and

rather led herself on a destructive pursuit of adventurism, idealism and visualizing a

romanticized world which led to disastrous consequences for her and those around her and what

was the role of the males in her life in precipitating this disaster for her.
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The tragedy in Madam Bovary was the corollary of Emma’s self-destructive disposition on one

hand, exacerbated by the influence of the male characters, especially Charles, Leon and

Rodolphe on her life on the other hand. We will talk about both of these aspects, starting with

describing our protagonist Emma and her impractical tendencies.

The novel portrays Emma as an individual who is irresolute and impulsive, she loves initiating

new endeavors but is just as quick in dropping them as soon as she realizes that they do not

match with the unrealistic expectations she herself creates in the first place. This explains why

she was so quick to grow bored of her marriage, affairs, her short spells of religious devotion and

her parenthood since she clearly looked at everything through the rosy-tainted glasses of her

fantasies and never bothered looking deeper into the substance. For example,

“In her enthusiasms she had always looked for

something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers,

music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions

and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as

she grew ever more restive under discipline,

which was antipathetic to her nature.” (Flaubert 1.6)

All the conjunctures she made about every aspect of life – love, marriage, parenthood etc. found

their basis in these unrealistic standards she had picked up from the stories she had devoted most

of her youth reading. For example, the text provides us with Emma’s notion of love that was

completely detached from any sense of realism –

“Love, she thought,

must come suddenly, with great out-bursts and lightnings-

a hurricane of the skies,

which falls upon life,

revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf,

and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.” (Flaubert 2.4)

Rather than looking for long term stability and intrinsic value of things her psyche demanded

immediate satisfaction both materialistically and romantically.

“Familiar with the tranquil, she inclined, instead.

Toward the tumultuous…she discarded as useless anything that did not lend

itself to the heart’s immediate satisfaction” (Flaubert 1.6)

With these existing glaring flaws in her personality, she had her first interaction with one of the

most significant male characters in her life – Charles Bovary, with whom she married and

experienced her first most despairing disillusionment that pushed her into the rabbit hole of

ruination.

Charles is the embodiment of human contentment and tranquility, he had a pragmatic outlook on

life, he desired nothing more than what was served. Bred in rustic and bucolic manners of

Provincial town, he is the representative of those classes who had fewer resources and scope for

education, work, and marriage.

As a result, Emma and Charles’ provincial marriage was done in a humdrum and mundane

fashion which is contrary to the romanticized concept of Emma’s expectations about marriage.

Even after their marriage the strain in their relationship kept on increasing due to two-fold
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reasons – First because Emma’s expectations about her idealized marriage, love and her partner

were not met and second, due to Charles’ failure in noticing Emma’s disillusionment and her

desires to escape the drudgery of this dysfunctional marriage as Flaubert wrote –

“He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very

happiness she gave him.” (Flaubert 1.7)

She doubted whether she ever actually loved Charles as he was nothing like she had idealized. In

fact, Charles’ personality was quite anti-thetic to Emma’s. While she dwelled in the realm of

fantasies and imaginations he is described as –

“Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's

ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion,

laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at

Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim,

nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of

horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold

activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all

mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing”

(Flaubert 1.7)

If Emma harbors aristocratic class’s ideology whose predilection lied in luxuriant things in life –

depicted for example by her fixation on balls and Paris, Charles needed only the intrinsic values

required for human happiness.

Each day of her monotonous married life was growing increasingly unbearable for her as she

longed for a change.

“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen.

Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life,

seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.”(Flaubert 1.9)

Hence, Emma started desiring a way out for herself by finding solace in other men’s company

which ultimately forms the cornerstone of her march towards doom and destruction.

“Even his gentleness pushed her to rebellion. Domestic mediocrity drove her to sumptuous

fantasies, marital caresses to adulterous desires”

(Flaubert 2.6)

Next crucial characters who came into Emma’s life and altered its course on full speed towards

tragedy were the accomplices in her an extra-marital love affair - Léon Dupuis and Rodolphe

Boulanger.

Leon, just like Emma, harbored a sense of weariness with the life he was living. As mentioned, –

“Leon was tired of loving without having anything to show for it; and then he was beginning to

feel that dejection which comes from a routine life when there is no interest to guide it or hope to

sustain it. He was so bored with Yonville that the sights of certain people and certain houses

irritated him almost to the breaking point” (Flaubert 2.6)

Thus, the primary cause for their immediate fascination with each other was their similar

quixotic temperament. Hence, Emma and Leon’s relationship was rooted in a desire for escaping
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the monotonous and sad reality. More than love the relationship was hinging on sympathy for

each other, two helpless idealists in search of an object for projection of their escapist tendencies

and they found this object in each other. We say object because they never truly saw one another

as a human being living in real world, with real personality and real situations rather they created

this ideal image of one another - an illusion of the other person in their minds. For example –

“This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now

fitting his past life. Speech is a rolling mill which always stretches out the feelings that go into

it”

(Flaubert 3.1)

Clearly, we can say that Leon was the male counterpart of Emma’s imaginative personality. A

masculine form of her feminine imaginations and like any illusion, this one too was momentary

and soon came crashing down in front of their eyes. Their second meeting after Emma’s

separation with Rodolphe led to sexual rendezvous unlike their previous simply sentimental

adoration for each other. Physicalizing the affair turned the fanciful state into reality and led to

their quick loss of interest in each other, depicted in the text as – “And Leon suddenly appeared

to her as remote as the others”

Rodolphe, on the other hand, was not nearly as sentimental romanticist as either Leon or Emma,

on the contrary he can be considered as the physical manifestation of primordial human desires

that are banal, physical and libidinal. Her amorous escapades with Rodolphe gave Emma a sense

of freedom she had never experienced but there was clearly an incongruity in their relationship

and their perception of each other. For Rodolphe - "Emma was just like any other mistress; and
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the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of

passion, always the same forms and the same language."

On the other hand, the hold Rodolphe held on Emma’s idyllic psyche was disproportionately

enormous as he “made her into something compliant and corrupt. She remained under the

influence of a kind of idiotic infatuation, full of admiration for him and sensuality for herself, a

blissful torpor; and her soul, sinking into that intoxication, shriveled and drowned like the Duke

of Clarence in his butt of malmsey” (Flaubert 2.12)

In escalating the impending doom that was waiting for Emma, Rodolphe’s withdrawal was the

last nail in the coffin. Her dissatisfaction that was previously directed towards the external world

turned towards herself and got internalized as her growing rancor towards her fading youth and

beauty.

“Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird,

she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young

again”(Flaubert 3.6)

In attempts to mask her insecurities she immersed herself in frivolous extravagance leading to

her financial ruin and her inadvertent loss of her self-esteem as well –

“She set out towards La Huchette, unaware that she was hastening to offer

what had so angered her a while ago, not in the least conscious of her

prostitution.” (Flaubert 3.7)

Here we can briefly talk about a character who remains less important as compared to others but

still had a huge role in playing out the crisis in Emma’s life and that is Monsieur Lheureux. He is

the embodiment of a materialistic society that capitalizes on the insecurities of women.

Refusing to look at her pitiful reality in the face Emma Bovary, a broken, penniless woman

ended her own life by consuming arsenic.

Emma’s wistful life and her tragic demise can be beautifully summed up in these lines –

“What happiness there had been in those days! What freedom! What hope! What an abundance

of illusions! She had none left now. Each new venture had cost her some of them, each of her

successive conditions: as virgin, wife and mistress; she had lost them all along the course of her

life, like a traveler who leaves some of his wealth at every inn along the road”(Flaubert 2.10)

Emma Bovary’s tragedy is not the tragedy of an individual, rather it is a phenomenon of the

society as a whole. Emma stands as the representative of the society - a part of the whole, a

mirror to this society that was there in Flaubert’s time just like it exists today in 21st century,

unchanging in its materialistic and superficial ways. It acts as a didactic note for all, urging us to

remain grounded in reality and to contain our fantastical desires for adventurism, it is a

admonishment for those who overstep their boundaries.

Works Cited

1. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Classics, 2010.