A Selection from Perpetual Masquerade: Marriage,Sexuality and Suicide in Madame Bovary :: Research Papers

A Selection from Perpetual Masquerade: Marriage,Sexuality and Suicide in Madame Bovary Introduction: the Heroine’s Dilemma The essence of the happenings of ordinary contemporary life seemed to Flaubert to consist not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonic men and forces, but in the prolonged chronic state whose surface movement is mere empty bustle, while underneath it there is another movement, almost imperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic, and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same time intolerably charged with tension.1 The high incidence of suicide among women who people nineteenth-century fiction and drama, as illustrated in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, among others, often is viewed as the heroine’s quick and relatively easy way of escaping from her problems and from the complexities of life. The shock of suicide, especially as it is presented in Madame Bovary, brings to the fore the seriousness writers like Flaubert and Ibsen attached to the power society wields in molding a woman’s life and character into the model it deems appropriate. Their fictions show how dire the consequences may become should a woman’s needs lie dormant or fail to be fully realized. Among the needs that go unfulfilled in the women of these literary works are their sexual ones, which is why so many of these novels and plays center on sexual awakening and on the dissatisfactions of marriages of a conventional kind. The amount of research done and material written on this topic speaks to its significance when considering the issue of sexuality both for the characters in the aforementioned novels and for women in general. In This Sex Which is Not One, for instance, Luce Irigaray says that â€Å"Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either† (31). Indeed, as we can see in these literary works, the oft overlooked (or merely misunderstood) subject of female sexuality, if even granted its own status, remains a threat to male control in such androcentric societies. Particularly prominent in the discussion of the place of and entitlements for female sexuality is Flaubert’s protagonist. Emma, because of her resistance to women’s pre-mandated roles and because she eventually succumbs to suicide, stands as a fitting example of a culpable character for those readers alarmed by the willful or independent woman. In this analysis, sexual and personal latitude, Emma’s case certainly suggests, breeds destruction of what most nineteenth-century bourgeois considered the core of existence: strict adherence to the social and moral codes maintaining a proper and