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

A Selection from Perpetual Masquerade Marriage,Sexuality and Suicide in Madame Bovary Introduction the Heroines DilemmaThe essence of the happenings of ordinary contemporary life seemed toFlaubert to dwell not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonicmen and forces, but in the prolonged chronic state whose surface movementis uncorrupted empty bustle, while underneath it there is another movement, almostimperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic,and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same timeintolerably 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 quick 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 seriousness writ erslike Flaubert and Ibsen attached to the power ordering wields in moldinga womans life and character into the model it deems appropriate. Theirfictions show how dire the consequences may become should a womansneeds lie dormant or fail to be fully realized. Among the needs thatgo unfulfilled in the women of these literary works are 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 done and material written on this topicspeaks to its significance when considering the issue of sexuality 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 either(31). Indeed, as we can see i n these literary works, the oft overlooked(or merely misunderstood) subject of female sexuality, if even grantedits own status, remains a threat to male control in much(prenominal) androcentricsocieties.Particularly prominent in the discussion of the place of andentitlements for female sexuality is Flauberts protagonist. Emma,because of her resistance to womens pre-mandated roles and becauseshe eventually succumbs to suicide, stands as a fitting cause ofa culpable character for those readers alarmed by the willful orindependent woman. In this analysis, sexual and personal latitude,Emmas case certainly suggests, breeds demise of what mostnineteenth-century bourgeois considered the core of existence strictadherence to the social and moral codes maintaining a proper and