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Desire and Death of Emma in Gustave Flaubert’s

Madame Bovary
 February 2, 2021  Muhammad Kamruzzamann
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Muhammad Kamruzzamann

S
eemingly, suicide is a conscious act of killing oneself but Émile Durkheim,
in his Suicide: A study in sociology (1897), presents a groundbreaking
sociological study of suicide asserting that social causes can be responsible Archives
for suicide as well. The book proposes a typology of suicide based on low
and high social integration (Egoistic and Altruistic suicide), and low and high social
 June 2021
oppression (Anomic and Fatalistic suicide). However, this writing revolves around the
character of Emma Bovary to depict the contextual elements which have played  April 2021
signi cant role in shaping the character of Emma in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame  March 2021
Bovary (1856) and, ultimately, led her to drink arsenic.
 February 2021

Gustave Flaubert’s Emma, being driven by di erent aesthetics that con ict with
contextual metanarratives, can be called a modern character, as she, being an
individual, nds di culties in ful lling her desires. The novel, Madame Bovary, as well,
celebrates Individualism, and Emma’s attempt of keeping the exploration of ful lling Categories
her desires alive and her suicide, as an a ermath of her desires, by any means, make
Emma a brave example of individual torment because of being free to choose by
 CREATIVE WRITINGS
forgetting all the conventional limitations associated with human beings, especially
 LITFOLKS ORIGINALS
with women. Besides, Flaubert’s social-realist narrative, indeed, delivers the picture of
the existing double-standard attitudes of people with authoritative access and, at the  বাংলা
same time, illustrates the anxious of an individual as a result of practised censorship
over the freedom of choice of an individual. For example, Emma’s act of reading is
considered as a sin, and Charles’ mother, Madame Bovary senior, decides to prevent
Emma from reading novels and states that Emma needs hard work, manual labour
because reading is making her idle.

The rise of bourgeois-class is mostly the rise of a capitalist attitude and of di erent free
professionals encouraged by, in a sense, Materialism, as in the novel, Madame Bovary,
Emma, being a wife of a village doctor, Charles, becomes conscious about having
“oaken chests, guardrooms, and minstrels.” She, as well, dreams of living in some old
manor house wearing long-waisted gowns. The character of Emma, in fact, is the
victim of a collective consciousness about the standards of a lifestyle set by capable
bourgeois-class, and, at the same time, Emma’s desire for a rise by entertaining her
irtatiousness and her fall, along with destructing the fortune of her husband and
daughter, provide a critical viewpoint about the fascinations of maintaining a certain
lifestyle standardised by bourgeois-class, that, in some senses, can be called a kind of
capitalist exploitation.

Joan of Arc, as portrayed in Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923), has an opposite

personality than that of Emma. Joan utters: “I will never take a husband…. I am a
soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will not dress as a woman. I do not
care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of
leading a charge, and of placing the big guns.” Contrastingly, Emma desires to live like
a lady and dreams of “gazing” at a man riding towards her from “the distant horizon.”
This contrast between Joan and Emma illustrates the e ect of Romantic fallacy––a
misunderstanding of Romanticism resulting from Emma’s improper reasoning about
the dividing line between the reality and the ctional world depicted in the novels,
those Emma reads, dealing with love, “gloomy forests, wounded hearts, vows, sobs,
tears, and kisses.” She dreams of men being brave as lions, humble as lambs. In music
class, she sings only those songs which are about angels and golden wings that give her
an escape from reality and allow her to travel towards “the seductive illusion of
emotional reality.”

There has been a mistake, according to Emma, in getting married to Charles, as

the lack––the desired happiness––even a er her marriage remains a lack, though she
has believed that the felt-love would provide the desired happiness. Fascinatingly, as a
result of the unchanged circumstances, Emma becomes self-conscious of the
concepts bliss, passion, and ecstasy, and, in her real life, tries to explore
these romantic ideas those she found in the books she had read earlier.

As Emma’s father, old Rouault, and her husband, Charles, have failed to provide that
once she dreamed of possessing a certain lifestyle and of becoming one of the ladies of
those romantic novels she had read. Emma, during her maternity, had expected a son
out of frustration, as a woman, living a powerless life. She also claims, in comparison
with a man, “a woman is constantly thwarted.” Besides, Emma talks about the practised
subjugation over women using the law against them, and how convention grasps her
whenever there is an invitation of desire and fantasy.

Paris, as a place, has constantly fascinated Emma. According to the narrative, “She
wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.” But, her husband, Charles never could
satisfy her Paris-centred fascinations. Besides, she, constantly, regretted over her
decision of getting married and, out of frustration, asked herself: “Why in the world
did I ever get married?”. This is because Emma had thought of that her life would
become a life “[i]n the city, with the noises of the streets, the hum of the theatres, and
the bright lights of the balls, they were leading lives where the heart had space to
expand, the senses to blossom.” However, knowing that Charles is incapable of
satisfying her appetite, Emma develops extramarital a airs with Rodolphe, a man with
“an income of at least een thousand francs a year!,” and Léon, “ a clerk who has a
serious passion for prose ction,” to ful l her desire of leading a city life in some old
manor house wearing long-waisted gowns. But they (Rodolphe and Léon) disappointed
her: Rodolphe decided not to elope with her, and Léon, as well as Emma gradually
became tired of each other.

Out of constant discontent, as well as of Emma’s fascination for having luxurious

goods, she develops a habit of buying fancy goods from Lheureux––the fancy-goods
merchant, and an extremely skilful tradesman––who, nancially, exploits Emma and
Charles. Though the exploitation of Lheureux is a kind of capitalist approach, Emma’s
longing for a fancy lifestyle and her naiveness are correspondingly responsible for the
self-destructive consequences that have brought desolation for the Bovary Family.

Durkheim writes, “It is a well-known fact that economic crises have an aggravating
e ect on the suicidal tendency.” According to Durkheim, human desires are not limited
to their body; they wish for more, and their desires have resulted from a re ective
social consciousness. And with all failed attempts of constraining the unlimited desires
along with social, political and religious institutions’ failure to regulate the persuasive
capitalist economy, bankrupted people commit suicide as their desires and economic
condition are con icting. Emma’s self-in icted death can be evaluated as an Anomic
Suicide because her bankrupted condition does not support her to live the life that she
has desired. And Durkheim used the term anomie to de ne the momentary condition
of social deregulation resulted from social, political and religious inability to constrain
the in uence of capitalist economy, and anomic suicide to de ne the type of suicide
resulted because of the failed attempt of social institutions to provide moral
constraints on capitalist economy and its in uences.

Muhammad Kamruzzamann
Muhammad Kamruzzamann is an enthusiastic reader of philosophy, novel,
play, criticism, and critical literary and cultural theory, who loves to eat
movie and admires South-Asian classic (Raaga).

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 Anomic Suicide, bourgeois society, Death, Desire, Émile Durkheim, Emma Bovary, Gustave
Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Modern Society, Need, Romantic Fallacy, Suicide

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