Sympathy for the betrayers and the betrayed. Cresseid and Madame Bovary are dissimilar to Emma in so far as they experience a development as a result of their infidelity, the former explicitly and the latter implicitly.

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Alfie Collins

More than would be imagined, it is sometimes more difficult to sympathise with the victims of infidelity; easier than we might have imagined to sympathise with the betrayers themselves.’ To what extent do you agree with this estimation in relation to the three texts chosen? 

 

In none of the three texts can it be said that the adulterers elicit or deserve greater sympathy than the victims of adultery. Despite this imbalance, it would unconsidered and possibly rather supercilious to simply judge the betrayers on their actions without meditating on the reasoning behind the actions and the circumstances in which the adulterers have found themselves. All the adulterers within the text (apart from Jerry in Betrayal (1978), and Rodolphe in Madame Bovary (1857)) merit a degree of sympathy, yet despite this, their actions cannot be wholly justified, and the characters cannot, therefore, be fully exonerated. 

 

The savage destruction of Emma Bovary by Flaubert, and Cresseid’s gruesome infliction of leprosy are certainly a cause for sympathy in both cases. Emma Bovary’s death is a painfully drawn out event in which ‘she turned whiter than the sheet at which her fingers kept clawing’ and ‘soon began to vomit blood. Her limbs were contorted, her body covered with brown blotches.’ It is interesting to note the contrast between the description at the beginning of the novel in which Flaubert erotically describes ‘the tip of her tongue poking between her beautiful teeth, delicately licking the bottom of the glass’ and the description post-arsenic in which ‘her entire tongue protruded from her mouth; her rolling eyes dimmed like lamp globes as they fade into darkness.’ Notably, Flaubert focuses on the body and its indignities, which is in contrast to Madame Bovary’s romanticism Similarly, in The Testament of CresseidHenryson depicts a disease so realistic and visceral that, as early as 1841, Sir J. A. Y. Simpson was able to diagnose the exact type of disease Cresseid has. (1) Henryson's detailed description gave rise to at least one suggestion that he himself was a physician. The Gods marred her, declaring, ‘Your eyes so bright and crystal I make bloodshot / Your voice so clear, unpleasing, grating, hoarse / Your healthy skin I blacken, blotch and spot / With livid lumps I cover your fair face’. Cupid’s declaration of, ‘Your mirth I hereby change to melancholy’ is one of a series of semantically opposite, yet alliterative words, which in this instance, are used to display the unfavourable contrast of Cresseid’s existence before her punishment and afterwards, whilst also augmenting the malicious and sadistic nature of the Gods. In Heaney’s translation he writes, ‘your high estate is in decline and fall’. The is a reference to Edward Gibbon’s work ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ (1776) the literary allusion conveying the suddenness and inexplicability of Cresseid’s physical decline. The bleakness of her situation is summarised in the description of her having to ‘make do with a cup and clapper. They remain’ - Her whole life has been reduced to this alliterative phrase, whilst the caesura indicates the sudden nature of her loss. 

 

Not only does Cresseid receive a gruesome affliction, the reader is also left with the feeling that her punishment is undeserved. The reason for her sentence is blasphemy, since ‘whoever blasphemes… all Gods offer insults.’ Betrayal is heavily frequented with profanities such as ‘Good God’, yet nothing results. In Madame Bovary, Charles ‘addressed curses to the heavens, but not so much as a leaf quivered.’ The triviality of Cresseid’s offence in contrast to the magnitude of her chastisement displays an injustice in the name of justice, and this is borne true in the lack of consequence fastened to blasphemy in the other two texts. When Cupid retorts indignantly of Cresseid’s claim that ‘I was the cause of her misfortune,’ one notes an irony given that all the Gods share an overwhelming involvement in all her actions and hence her misfortune. Cresseid is a puppet of the pagan God’s whims, and her lack of volition means that she should not be blamed. Fate is recurrently referred to, in for example, the lines, ‘Cresseid’s most miserable and fated death’ (‘fatall destenie’), ‘Of Troy and Greece, how it could be your fate’, and ‘Fate is fickle when she plies the shears.’ This predestination is not a problem with which the adulterers in the other two texts must face. Further, the scornfully humorous description of the Gods, particularly Saturn who ‘behaved in a churlish, rough, thick-witted manner,’ and had a ‘rucked and wrinkled face, a lyre like lead’ and a ‘steady nose run’ creates a further sympathy for Emma, since those that condemn her are rendered in an absurd, grotesque and humorous light. Henryson goes further when he describes Cupid as ‘a boar that whets its tusks, he grinds and fumes,’ since it goes beyond anthromorphism to zoomorphism; and the description of Gods that ‘raged, grimaced, rampaged and bawled and scoffed’ is a display of Gods that have unlimited power and limited judgement. 

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Whilst Madame Bovary does not have to contend with predestination, her actions are still restricted by society’s ambits and the limitations placed on women in the mid-nineteenth century. In societal terms, she has to live in the mediocrity of her provincial surroundings. It is important to note that the novel’s sub-title is ‘Provincial Manners’ - they frustrated Flaubert, and he used Emma Bovary’s disgust with her class as a way of conveying his own hatred for the banality of the middle-classes. Madame Bovary shows how ridiculous the attitudes of the bourgeoisie can be. Homais’s haughtily flamboyant speeches are used by Flaubert to display the pretensions of the bourgeois. The less grandiose act by a woman who received a 25 franc award for 54 ...

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