The Meanings of Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary is the portrait of a woman trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage in a prosaic bourgeois town. Her attempts to escape the monotony of her life through adulterous liaisons with other men are ultimately thwarted by the reality that the men she has chosen are shallow and self-centered and that she has overstretched herself financially. In despair, Emma resolves her predicament by taking her own life.

What should we make of this rather slight story, initially based on the life of a real woman who, like Emma, scandalized her village with her affairs with other men and her extravagant lifestyle? Is there a lesson or a moral to be drawn from Emma's folly and the tragedy of her death? Part of the difficulty - and, indeed, of the pleasure - of reading Madame Bovary is that Flaubert refuses to embed the narrative within an overriding moral matrix, refuses explicitly to tell the reader what lesson s/he should draw from the text. Madame Bovary was a novel shocking to its contemporaries because it did not appear to articulate a clear and unambiguous moral viewpoint and it is because of the ambiguity of the novel's moral stance that Madame Bovary found itself taken to court for its offence to public and religious morality. The challenge today's readers are left with is how to make sense of Emma's story.

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A common interpretation of the novel maintains that Emma Bovary's downfall is due to the fact that she is both foolish and romantically inclined. Emma comes to a tragic end because she has been self-dramatizing and impulsive and, above all, because she has believed in the ideals of the Romantic literature of which she has been an avid consumer since adolescence. This is the view adopted by many critics who have viewed Emma as mediocre and trite, her dreams shoddy, second-hand and second- rate. The literary critic Allen Tate, for example, described Emma as a `silly, sad and hysterical woman' (quoted in Brombert: 1966, p.84). For further discussion of this reading click on . Another view holds that Emma is an essentially tragic figure, a figure of epic proportions whose ideals are thwarted by a petty and money-grabbing society. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, however, saw Emma as a heroic creation and described her as `très sublime dans son espèce, dans son petit milieu et en face de son petit horizon' (Baudelaire: 1976, p.83). She is a truly epic heroine in thrall to an excessive but splendid passion. She has heroic potential - Baudelaire was a writer keen to discover and celebrate what he called `l'héroïsme de la vie moderne' - but who has the misfortune of inhabiting a mediocre environment far too small for her considerable energies. In this particular interpretation Emma stands out as a figure representing a challenge to the sterility and materialism of the new `bourgeois century'. Emma is almost an artist, almost a rebel in her challenge to the priorities and ideals of her age. As such, she is ultimately an awe-inspiring and tragic figure. For further discussion of this reading click on .

Another possible interpretation of Emma's downfall is that it is primarily due to her being a woman and not to her being foolish. In this essentially feminist reading, Emma is a victim of patriarchy, destroyed by a society that can conceive of no other role for women than that of wife and mother. Emma is essentially in revolt against the patriarchal order, although, of course, she lacks the insight and the vocabulary to conceive it in those terms. For further discussion of this reading click on .