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

A Selection from Perpetual Masquerade Marriage,Sexuality and self-annihilation in Madame Bovary Introduction the Heroines DilemmaThe essence of the happenings of ordinary coetaneous life seemed toFlaubert to consist not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonicmen and forces, but in the prolonged chronic arouse whose surface movementis mere empty bustle, while underneath it thither is another movement, almostimperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic,and genial subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same time intolerably charged with tension.1The high incidence of suicide among women who peoplenineteenth-century fiction and drama, as illustrated in Flauberts MadameBovary and Ibsens Hedda Gabler, among others, often is viewed as theheroines ready(a) and relatively easy way of escaping from her problemsand from the complexities of life. The shock of suicide, especially as itis presented in Madame Bovary, brings to the fore the ser iousness writerslike Flaubert and Ibsen attached to the power society wields in moldinga womans life and character into the representative it deems appropriate. Theirfictions show how dire the consequences may become should a womansneeds lie dormant or fail to be full realized. Among the needs thatgo unfulfilled in the women of these literary works atomic number 18 their familiarones, which is why so many of these novels and plays center on sexualawakening and on the dissatisfactions of marriages of a conventionalkind. The amount of research make and material written on this topicspeaks to its significance when considering the issue of gender bothfor the characters in the aforementioned novels and for women ingeneral. In This Sex Which is not One, for instance, Luce Irigaray saysthat Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannothave it nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchangeof herself with the other without any possibility of identifying eit her(31). Indeed, as we can see in these literary works, the oft overlooked(or exactly misunderstood) subject of female sexuality, if even grantedits own status, remains a threat to male control in such androcentricsocieties.Particularly freehanded in the discussion of the place of andentitlements for female sexuality is Flauberts protagonist. Emma,because of her enemy to womens pre-mandated roles and becauseshe eventually succumbs to suicide, stands as a fitting example ofa culpable character for those readers alarmed by the willful or self-directed woman. In this analysis, sexual and personal latitude,Emmas case certainly suggests, breeds goal of what mostnineteenth-century bourgeois considered the core of existence strictadherence to the fond and moral codes maintaining a proper and