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Walsh Kang

ENGL 1080

Professor O’Har

28 September 2016

Emma and the Blind Man, One and the Same

Uniting two dissimilar concepts makes both of them more memorable: the world

and a stage; love and war; couches and potatoes. Comparison and dichotomy are

commonplace, but Flaubert takes Emma Bovary, the stunning girl with the “smile of angels”

(Flaubert 125), with the blind man with the blueish eyeballs. They are from opposite sides

of the physical spectrum. Both are described with painstaking detail, but the similarity ends

there. Yet Flaubert links the blind man and Emma from her birth to her death. The blind

man is a representation of Emma’s morality, and even Emma herself.

When the blind man first appears, he is singing a song that talks of a young girl and

“birds and sunshine and green leaves” (210). This song seems innocent; it is simply about a

girl lost in the wonders and delights of summer. The first image of Emma is her as an

innocent farm girl, with hair that takes a whole paragraph to describe. There is no hint of

the malice that is to arise from Mademoiselle Rouault. As Emma gets married, and realizes

that her romantic sentiments of love are not satisfied by her simple husband Charles, she

acts upon her instinct for immediate happiness and excitement. She longs for a love that

comes “suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings, - a hurricane of the skies, which

sweeps down on life, upsets everything, uproots the will like a leaf and carries away the
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heart as in an abyss” (84). And she pursues Rodolphe, then Léon. It is no coincidence that

the blind man sings, “Often the heat of a summer’s day / Makes a young girl dream her

heart away” (257). Emma dreams of romance, of love that is as passionate as the burning

desires of her mistaken soul. Emma throws away her morality to satisfy her cravings. She

accumulates both lies and debt. She begs Rodolphe to stay; she begs Monsieur Lheureux for

more money and more time; she even attempts to turn to prostitution to fix the problems

that she has made. The blind man continues to narrate Emma’s journey: “To gather up all

the new-cut stalks / Of wheat left by the scythe’s cold swing. / Nanette bends over as she

walks / Toward the furrows from where they spring” (257). Emma dreams her heart away

with visions of “all the passions of the flesh and the languors of tenderness… the flashing of

precious stones and the golden braids of liveries” (51). And like Nanette, Emma walks

towards these dreams. She spends money on trinkets like gowns and scarves that will

never see the outside of her house, and throws herself onto lovers that will not stay with

her. None of Emma’s desires are fulfilled, and she is driven to madness. She loses taste with

her material things, for they are nothing but toys; they are used only for dress-up. Her

lovers become scared of her “diabolical determination” (236) to sate her appetites. Deep in

debt, and thrown away by Rodolphe, Emma sees no choice but to swallow the arsenic and

let go of the “lying, cheating, and… the numberless desires that had tortured her” (251).

“The wind blew very hard that day / It blew her petticoat away” (258). Emma’s petticoat

was not only her innocence, but her life itself. The blind man and his song mirror her life,

from innocence to her pursuit of happiness to corrupted desperation to death in its finality.

It is no coincidence that he appears when Emma dies, for the completion of his song is also

the completion of Emma’s life.

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The blind man’s song is not the only parallel between the man with blueish eyeballs

and Madame Bovary. His appearance, though disgusting and revolting on the exterior, is

like Emma’s morality and inner conscience. Both cannot be healed. Monsieur Homais tries

to give advice to the blind man, “to drink good wine, good beer and to eat good roasts of

meat. [Yet] the blind man went on with his song” (238). Even Homais, the man of science,

cannot help this cripple. The blind man’s suffering is inherent to his being because his

physical handicap is the pure essence of himself. In the same way, Emma’s willingness to

compensate her morals and married status and maternal responsibilities was her endemic

and inherent flaw. Filled with dreams of heroines from books, and romantic trysts, Emma

would do anything to manifest these outlandish fantasies into reality. Emma tries to avoid

the blind man, like she tries to avoid the fact that her debt is mounting and her love is

unsated and her daughter is growing up without a mother. For Emma, the blind man is the

physical representation of her corruption, and she refuses to admit to her brokenness. At

first, the blind man hangs onto the Hirondelle, desperate for money and attention. Emma is

repulsed by his voice. “It lingered into the night like an inarticulate lament of some vague

despair; and... it had something so distant and sad that it filled Emma with dread” (211).

She sees herself in this man, corrupted and decaying. When they meet next, Emma throws

her whole fortune to the blind man, eager to get away from him and the physical reminder

that she is also decaying. She is only delaying her eventual demise. Their corruption unites

them. They are united even in death, though at first it seems not: Emma is in her three

coffins but the blind man continues to live. The blind man may have well been dead

already; his physical appearance is Emma’s already broken moral compass. The blind man

is dead in the sense that he is cursed to stay as he is, whipped, spit upon, and pitied. He has
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no social value, and everyone looks upon him as hopeless: socially deceased. Emma’s

morality had already died also, as soon as she picked up that first novel in the convent.

Marrying Charles catalyzed Emma to pursue her romantic sentiments, and her own

disregard to her vows led her to Léon and Rodolphe. Their unity in both corruption and

death links these two dissimilar souls.

The blind man and Emma also have the same aspirations in common: they both

aspire to advance social classes. The blind man begs and solicits money for not his own

amusement but to meet his needs. He wants money to perhaps clean himself up, look

presentable; escape the insanity and torture that he is currently in. Emma does not beg, but

also goes to great lengths to advance to the next echelon. Emma “subscribed to La Corbeille,

a ladies’ magazine, and the Sylphe des Salons… She knew the latest fashions, the addresses

of the best tailors, the days of the Bois and the Opera” (50). Emma spent lavishly on her

wardrobe and on decorations for the house. She “took the shades off the candlesticks, had

new wallpaper put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the

sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain and fishes” (28). In

fact, it seems as if Emma went to greater lengths than her crippled counterpart to rise in

status. But both of them fall short. Though the blind man begs every day, he still haunts the

Hirondelle. He cannot possibly lift himself even into a humble social standing because he is

physically flawed. There is nothing he can do about the way he looks; he is trapped. No

doctor could save or heal him. In the same way, Emma’s two inherent flaws are that one,

her reality does not allow her to make her dreams come true. She has little money, and

whatever money she has is squandered in material things that do not add to her title. She is

married to not a doctor, but a man who barely passed his medical exams, an officier de
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santé. Two, Emma has romantic thoughts imbued onto her psyche. Emma cannot abandon

neither her rural, provincial roots nor her fantasies, and so she is suppressed just like the

blind man. Emma and the blind man are one and the same; they cannot rise above their

station.

The blind man appears later in the novel; Emma Bovary is not the first Madame

Bovary to arrive. Yet both are key players in the novel, and both illustrate the demise of one

without morals, and a propensity for desire. The blind man, although wildly different in

countenance and figure, is still the same as beautiful Emma when looking at their goals in

life. The man with blueish eyeballs is repulsive to even read about, and when looking at

Emma’s motivations, the reader should be as disgusted. The world is a big stage, with many

actors and actresses, and the blind man and Emma share the entrance, lines, and exit.
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Works Cited

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Ed. Margaret Cohen and Paul De Man. New York: W.W.

Norton, 2005. Print.