Madame Bovary

The first thing to say is that - Flaubert is not intentionally a feminist writer, however, he has created a female character in which we can learn of feminist issues.

Emma ( Madame Bovary) marries a rural doctor, Charles, and they live in a provincial part of the France. From the beginning of the marriage we can see an almost existential conflict between art and science but neither of them has had access to very good education and perhaps they both have average intelligence. Charles is a "run of the mill", unimaginative Doctor but carries out routine problems successfully and comes unstuck when he tries to experiment on a patient. Emma has an artistic temperament, playing the piano and at first inventing ways to please Charles hoping in return he will give words of love and understanding, praise and companionship.  But Charles has no imagination and doesn't understand the theatre when they go and although he loves her unconditionally, it is a love of a paper shadow of who Emma is.

Emma has no opportunities, to perhaps perform at the piano or create in any other way but domestically.  The apothecary suggests that in the future women will teach their offspring, but for now Emma is trapped in a boring marriage in which women at that period in history are not allowed to divorce and do not bond with their babies.  She is dependent on her husband's economic support and is emotionally stultified.

She glimpses another world at a ball and she has conversations about limited artistic journals with Leon, but at that stage remains loyal and moral. Then a sexual predator meets her and admires her beauty and cunningly seduces her from boredom. Rudolph is handsome wears expensive clothes , and owns expensive possessions. She is reminded of the men she met at the ball and as he gives her protestations of love she is naive and psychologically vulnerable to his advances. He becomes the love of her life, her ideal man and she falls hook , line and sinker.

When the eventual rejection from Rudolfe comes, it is a cruel and humiliating blow to her psyche and totally fragments and shatters her ego. She has a manic depressive breakdown spending days in bed. We can imagine a rural doctor not knowing psychiatry and she cannot tell him the reasons because she has been corrupted into and by deceit.  She already knows there is no understanding from Charles, they are two separate people. She is alone and bereft.

As we read with horror as she descends into metal illness, both excessive sexual appetite and spending excessively are symptoms of a manic depressive illness, she seems to have no redeeming quality, even to herself, nothing we can empathise with. She has another fling with Leon but it is purely sexual and extreme, even he becomes frightened of her. She eventually commits suicide which is how many manic depressive illnesses end.

The question for me is why Flaubert created this female character?  Is she Flaubert's alter ego and it is only through this element that he can describe his own mental illness?  Given the century it is possible he suffered in silence. He had few friends accept George Sands who was a feminist. He possessed an artistic sensibility which is evident in his descriptions of the natural world and of rural people and life.

We know that Flaubert had a breakdown at eighteen. Did Flaubert have a crushing love or sexual humiliation at the age of eighteen something so terrible to his psyche that he could not speak of it? Was it a woman or perhaps a man?

He produced an almost clinical description of a person with a mental illness and was Charles a characterisation of the Doctors Flaubert might have met in real life?

It is very tempting to read Emma's personality as being at fault, and she is not likeable as indeed we shy away from mental illness in the present day, but if we see her as a victim and perhaps also that the artist author who created her as a victim too, then we will get a real sense of the feminist perspective.  It is not all about the patriarchal society although that is always a factor, but also the limitations we have been dealt in our lives and how we cope.

Zoe Ainsworth Grigg holds a  Diploma in Psychoanalytic Psychology, Certificate in Person Centred Art Therapy and also studied feminist literature as part of a BA degree in Hiumainities.  www.zoeainsworthgriggbooks.com