Madame Bovary is/is not a feminist novel

Madame Bovary is the story of an unhappily married woman who seeks escape through
forbidden relationships with other men. The book could be viewed as an expose of the situation
of women in the 19th century; women who had not yet been emancipated and were expected to
obey their husbands, to stay in their homes while the men went to work, or left for months on
end to fight in wars. Emma Bovary's "rebellious" attitude against the accepted ideas of the day
reflects Flaubert's views of the bourgeoisie. Emma Bovary is a victim of the suffocating
patriarchy of the time that demanded she be no more than wife and mother, or alternatively a
nun, which she contemplated becoming in her youth and looks back on in fits of “what if”
melancholy.

We can call Madame Bovary a satire on bourgeois life, but not because Emma was a victim of
the bourgeoisie. She was an unsuccessful aspirant to an imaginary high-bourgeois world where
the money flowed freely. (And the various non-bourgeois worlds where she might have been
happy were all imaginary too.) The feminist reading would be that Emma is the way she is
because women are like that when they're unfree. By the end of the book Emma controls the
family finances -- how could she be more free than that? But not only does she squander the
family money, but all of the financial agreements she signs are bad and disadvantageous.

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. Flaubert was no feminist but
he was critical of the ways in which women's lives were circumscribed by men. The point
Flaubert appears to be making is similar to the distinction commonly made today between sex
and gender: sex is a matter of biology and gender a matter of social conditioning. Flaubert is
doing something really quite radical for his age: he locates a fundamental problem for women,
namely, that their identity has been defined by men. Although it would be quite wrong to claim
that Flaubert was a feminist - for Flaubert all progressive movements such as feminism or
socialism were forms of romantic illusion and bêtise - he does express an intelligent grasp of the
conditions of women's lives in the nineteenth century. Men have provided models of feminine
behavior convenient to their own interests. Flaubert presents the whole question of male and
female roles and shows social and cultural conditioning to be a major factor in gender behavior.

Madame Bovary is very much a book about the bourgeoisie, very much a portrait of a class in
the process of finding and defining itself and consolidating its position in society. Particularly in
the characters of Homais and Lheureux we see bourgeois money on the move in search of new
profits and power. The main action of Madame Bovary is much financial as it is
erotic. Madame Bovary is full of scenes of buying and selling, borrowing and lending. Even
personal relationships fall under the sway of financial considerations. For example, Charles's
first wife is chosen for him by his mother on the grounds that she is a wealthy widow - she
manages to outwit a grocer who has the support of the village priest in the competition for her -
and Emma's father allows Charles to marry Emma because he is unlikely to try to haggle over
the dowry.
Flaubert contextualizes Emma’s hopes of transcendence, or escape from her fate as Charles’
wife, with the banal comparison of her life with the county fair: “-Swine category, prize shared by
Monsieur Lehérissé and Monsieur Cullembourg; sixty francs! …Rodolphe gripped her hand, and
he felt it warm and trembling like a captive turtle dove that strives to take wing again…”
(Flaubert 119-120). The irony of this scene not only demeans Emma’s attempts at transcendent
resistance, but also renders such attempts hopelessly futile by placing them in the midst of an
ordinary and rather insignificant occurrence. In effect, Emma’s “romantic epiphany” is both
preceded and followed by numerous other instances in which she tries to resist the stagnant
existence of her bourgeois life as a young wife and mother in Yonville, France. With tooth and
nail Emma defies the roles to which she has been assigned by a patriarchal society; she
continues to read her books, take lovers, write impassioned letters, dress as a man, and spend
money that she doesn’t have.

Madame Bovary is written as an ode to the trials and tribulations of women in a strictly
patriarchal society. While the men are self-defined, women are defined by their husbands,
fathers and sons. Indeed, men are so dominant that the story does not introduce us to Emma,
the main character, until after we have learnt the history of her future husband – the mundane
Charles Bovary. The fact that we meet Emma only after reading of the man who will, essentially,
be her keeper foreshadows the tone of all her relationships; she gets neither the first word, nor
the last, as throughout the final chapters she is deceased. This lack of control leads to her
demise – in short, the only way that she can gain even an illusion of self-empowerment is to
adopt masculinities.

Emma Bovary is a bored, frustrated housewife whose dreams of romantic love—primarily

inspired by the popular romantic novels of her time—are unfulfilled through her marriage to a
simple country doctor, Charles Bovary. She attempts to realize her fantasies through love affairs
with a local landowner and a law clerk and, later, through extravagant purchases. Unable to pay
her debts and unwilling to tolerate or to conform to bourgeois values, she ultimately commits
suicide by poisoning herself. Charles is comfortable with his bourgeois simplicity, in contrast
with his wife's rage and frustration at the limitations of her life. Throughout the story, Charles
becomes increasingly happy and content with his married life, as Emma secretly grows to hate
him. Emma Bovary was in some respects the prototypical “Desperate Housewife,” a manic-
depressive spendthrift with eating and panic disorders who makes her life into a novel to escape
the emptiness of her existence in rural France. Emma seems essentially foolish, escaping from
her kindly but tedious country doctor husband with romantic affairs and spending way beyond
their income. Her path to ruin is no high minded break for freedom, no plea for the emancipation
of women but for her life to be more glamorous. Emma flirts with local landowner Rodolphe
among the prize winning vegetables and the clodhopping yokels. Rodolphe expresses the
double standard applied to the sexes, "What is not forgiven women is soon enough forgiven
men".

At convent Emma is taught that passion and joy may be found in marriage. This belief does not
correspond with her experience. The story of Emma is in part about her attempts to resist a role
she finds limiting. Emma is unable to see that her husband, the kindhearted but hapless Dr.
Charles Bovary, is the only person who loves her unconditionally. 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. The mountain of debt that Emma has accumulated through
loans from the crafty Monsieur Lheureux, who plays to her femininity to make her buy things on
credit, comes crashing down on her. She is tarnished by villagers with that ultimate female
pejorative –slut. Then Léon and finally Rodolphe reject transparent invitations to climb back into
the sack with her if they would only float her reputation-saving loans. In despair, Emma
resolves her predicament by taking her own life. (The manipulations of this high-maintenance
heroine result in unfulfilling liaisons with men who also aspire to the finer things in life but are as
shallow as she is. They include Rodolphe, an icily manipulative local landowner who tires of her
once the initial thrill is gone and throws her over on the eve of their planned elopement, and
Léon, a law student who eventually tires of her insatiable demands.) In a final act of selfishness
that leaves her daughter an orphan, she swallows arsenic. But she is unfulfilled even on her
death bed. The romance that she saw in this ultimate act is supplanted by grotesque pain, and
she is for the last time rendered as a caricature of herself and not the feminist that she could
have been.

Emma is an essentially tragic figure, a figure of epic proportions whose ideals are thwarted by a
petty and money-grabbing society. She is a truly epic heroine in thrall to an excessive but
splendid passion. She has heroic potential but has the misfortune of inhabiting a mediocre
environment far too small for her considerable energies. 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. She becomes morally corrupt and
detached from the world she lives in. The phases of her life are depicted in a character that
shows up later in the novel, the beggar, who starts off singing songs of beautiful women to
singing songs of a vulgar, sexual nature. His physical ugliness mimics Emma's moral corruption
and the change in the theme of his songs shows the path of her life and foreshadows her tragic
end.

Emma craves sophistication, sensuality and passion; these desires cause her to lapse into
extreme fits of boredom and depression when she doesn't get what she wants. Emma lacks
maternal instincts; also she doesn't believe she has time for such trivial things as children.
Occasionally she feels guilty because of the way she treats her husband and child, causing her
to repent and bury herself in religion and dedication to be a good housewife. However, these
feelings are usually short-lived and she quickly switches back to her careless self. Emma is a
character who expects that she can do whatever she pleases and still maintain a good
reputation and that everything will work itself out for her.

Emma also rejects good economic management, thrift, hard work and parsimoniousness and
dedicates herself to style. Flaubert was opposed to the active success of the practical world of
the bourgeoisie with their `can-do' attitude and concern for commercial and industrial success
and it is tempting to see in Emma a portrait of the artist. Emma's attitude, for all its triviality, may
be viewed as constituting a serious critique of her society.

Emma's downfall can be viewed as mainly due to her being a woman in a society in which
women's roles were both limited and clearly circumscribed and in which any transgression was
punished. One might argue that the central conflict in Madame Bovary is that of a woman who
tries to shrug off the reductive definitions of woman conceived by patriarchy. Emma, of course,
is not a particularly self-conscious character and does not conceptualize her dilemma in these
terms. However, she does actively resist the position she is allotted in life and seeks a
problematic fulfillment through adultery, an act which unsettles the stable categories of wife and
mother.
Emma doesn't behave like women are supposed to behave. For example, the day after her
wedding we are told that it is Charles who behaved like the virginal bride. Charles finds
satisfaction in his job as a medical officer riding from village to village; intelligent, imaginative
Emma languishes in the confines of domesticity and continually dreams of travel. Emma can
never locate or define herself in terms of the roles and positions offered to her by marriage and
by motherhood.

Emma is in a precarious situation considering her place in 19th Century French society, where
males were effectively free to adulterate outside their homes, women faced imprisonment if they
did so. Even setting her gender aside, her illusions of fleeing her social class and rising in ranks
are completely unobtainable. These facts alone are enough to set such an ambitious soul as
Emma on a course to disaster. To accentuate her dire situation she tries to bring meaning to her
life with material goods, shopping becomes Emma’s way of defining her life while all her other
plans sour – this habit propels her towards her end even faster. Emma falls into debt through
this behavior, and a local shop keeper, M. Lheureux, is more than happy to aid her in doing so –
a male once again placing her in an ever escalating situation of need. The more she shops, the
more she owes, and the more in debt she becomes the more she panics and the more she
shops; it is a cycle that can only end in despair.

Madame Bovary's indiscretions and her obsession with Romance lead to her downfall, which
not only appeases the guardians of morality, but shows us Flaubert's view of the world wasn't
one of naive optimism.

Women in nineteenth-century France were denied most of the freedoms women enjoy today.
Under the terms and conditions of the Napoleonic Code Civil women were regarded as
perpetual minors. Fathers and husbands were the time-honored guardians of women. The Code
Civil had transformed marriage from an essentially religious sacrament to a legal contract in
which authority was henceforth invested in the husband. A law prohibiting divorce was passed
in 1816 - which was to last until 1884 - making women the virtual prisoners of their husbands.
There was no provision for secondary education until 1880 and what education was available to
women was little more than ideological indoctrination since they were taught to become virtuous
wives and mothers. The moral, intellectual and physical inferiority of women was inculcated in
women from birth. Women had no positive role, only a passive one restricted to the confines of
home and garden. Women were seen as possessions, as decorations to men's social standing
and success.

In nineteenth-century France, and particularly during the Second Empire, the franchise was
extended to only a few and it was not until the introduction of universal suffrage in 1944 that
women could vote. Far more insidious than the legal oppression they faced was the ideological
oppression of which they were the victims. The conventional view of women in the nineteenth
century was unfavorable: they were the `weaker sex', constantly prone to illness and hysteria.
But Madame Bovary is a book written by a male author and as such it raises all sorts of
questions about the degree to which a man can fully understand what it is to be a woman.
Despite this initial doubt, one could make the valid claim that Madame Bovary represents an
advance, a step forward in the representation of female characters.

The portrayal of gender roles has also received attention in recent years. Several critics have
emphasized the novel's depiction of a society in which women received a relatively useless,
"ornamental" education, with Emma Bovary's largely superfluous social position being viewed
as one of the sources of her malaise and unhappiness.

Emma, her heartbreak and subsequent illness are in some ways a product of the society in which
she lives. Rodolphe himself blames the end of their affair on “fate,” but Rodolphe does have control
over the end of the love affair. As a wealthy man, he has much more power than Emma. As a
woman with no way to support herself, Emma can’t gain freedom by leaving Charles, nor does she
have the means to pursue Rodolphe. Furthermore, Rodolphe’s life of ease, combined with his status
as a man, allows him great sexual liberty. He has had so many lovers that he is detached and cold.
As a result, he can abandon Emma with no great feelings of regret. At the end of Part Three,
Chapter V, Leon wonders, “Her depravity was so deep and so dissembled as to be almost
intangible: where could she have learned it? (327-328)” The answer is Rodolphe. A man is
responsible for even Emma’s deepest corruption.

From Wikipedia:

Madame Bovary takes place in provincial northern France, near the town of Rouen in Normandy.
The story begins and ends with Charles Bovary, a stolid, kindhearted man without much ability
or ambition. As the novel opens, Charles is a shy, oddly-dressed teenager arriving at a new
school amidst the ridicule of his new classmates. Later, Charles struggles his way to a second-
rate medical degree and becomes an officier de santé in the Public Health Service. His mother
chooses a wife for him, an unpleasant but supposedly rich widow, and Charles sets out to build a
practice in the village of Tostes (now Tôtes).
One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg, and meets his client's daughter,
Emma Rouault. Emma is a beautiful, daintily-dressed young woman who has received a "good
education" in a convent and who has a latent but powerful yearning for luxury and romance
imbibed from the popular novels she has read. Charles is immediately attracted to her, and
begins checking on his patient far more often than necessary until his wife's jealousy puts a stop
to the visits. When his wife dies, Charles waits a decent interval, then begins courting Emma in
earnest. Her father gives his consent, and Emma and Charles are married.
At this point, the novel begins to focus on Emma. Charles means well, but is boring and clumsy,
and after he and Emma attend a ball given by the Marquis d'Andervilliers, Emma grows
disillusioned with married life and becomes dull and listless. Charles consequently decides that
his wife needs a change of scenery, and moves from the village of Tostes into a larger, but
equally stultifying market town, Yonville (traditionally based on the town of Ry). Here, Emma
gives birth to a daughter, Berthe; however, motherhood, too, proves to be a disappointment to
Emma. She then becomes infatuated with one of the first intelligent young men she meets in
Yonville, a young law student, Léon Dupuis, who seems to share her appreciation for "the finer
things in life", and who returns her admiration. Out of fear and shame, however, Emma hides her
love for Léon and her contempt for Charles, and plays the role of the devoted wife and mother,
all the while consoling herself with thoughts and self-congratulations of her own virtue. Finally,
in despair of ever gaining Emma's affection, Léon departs to study in Paris.
One day, a rich and rakish landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger, brings a servant to the doctor's
office to be bled. He casts his eye over Emma and decides she is ripe for seduction. To this end,
he invites Emma to go riding with him for the sake of her health; solicitous only for Emma's
health, Charles embraces the plan, suspecting nothing. A three-year affair follows. Swept away
by romantic fantasy, Emma risks compromising herself with indiscreet letters and visits to her
lover, and finally insists on making a plan to run away with him. Rodolphe, however, has no
intention of carrying Emma off, and ends the relationship on the eve of the great elopement with
an apologetic, self-excusing letter delivered at the bottom of a basket of apricots. The shock is so
great that Emma falls deathly ill, and briefly turns to religion.
When Emma is nearly fully recovered, she and Charles attend the opera, on Charles' insistence,
in nearby Rouen. The opera reawakens Emma's passions, and she re-encounters Léon who, now
educated and working in Rouen, is also attending the opera. They begin an affair. While Charles
believes that she is taking piano lessons, Emma travels to the city each week to meet Léon,
always in the same room of the same hotel, which the two come to view as their "home." The
love affair is, at first, ecstatic; then, by degrees, Léon grows bored with Emma's emotional
excesses, and Emma grows ambivalent about Léon, who becoming himself more like the
mistress in the relationship, compares poorly, at least implicitly, to the rakish and domineering
Rodolphe. Meanwhile, Emma, given over to vanity, purchases increasing amounts of luxury
items on credit from the crafty merchant, Lheureux, who arranges for her to obtain power of
attorney over Charles’ estate, and crushing levels of debts mount quickly.
When Lheureux calls in Bovary's debt, Emma pleads for money from several people, including
Léon and Rodolphe, only to be turned down. In despair, she swallows arsenic and dies an
agonizing death; even the romance of suicide fails her. Charles, heartbroken, abandons himself to
grief, preserves Emma's room as if it is a shrine, and in an attempt to keep her memory alive,
adopts several of her attitudes and tastes. In his last months, he stops working and lives off the
sale of his possessions. When he accidentally comes across Rodolphe's love letters one day, he
still tries to understand and forgive. Soon after, he becomes reclusive; what has not already been
sold of his possessions is seized to pay off Lheureux, and he dies, leaving his young daughter
Berthe to live with distant relatives and eventually sent to work at a cotton mill.