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 universe the Heroines DilemmaThe essence of the happenings of ordinary contemporary life incurmed toFlaubert to make up not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonic men and forces, but in the prolonged chronic state whose surface actis mere empty bustle, while underneath it there is another movement, intimatelyimperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic,and social subsoil appears relatively stable and at the same timeintolerably charged with tension.1The high school 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 booming 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 distressf ulness writerslike Flaubert and Ibsen attached to the power society wields in moldinga womans life and role into the model it deems appropriate. Theirfictions show how terrific the consequences may become should a womansneeds breathe dormant or fail to be fully realized. Among the needs thatgo unfulfilled in the women of these literary works are their innerones, which is wherefore 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 indite 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 entertainment from what is so near that she cannothave it nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless supervene uponof herself with the other without any possibility of identifying eith er(31). Indeed, as we can see in these literary works, the oft overlooked(or merely misunderstood) subject of womanish sexuality, if even grantedits own status, remains a threat to masculine control in such 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 ultimately succumbs to suicide, stands as a fitting example ofa culpable character for those readers alarmed by the willful orindependent woman. In this analysis, sexual and personal latitude,Emmas case certainly suggests, breeds destruction of what mostnineteenth-century burgher considered the core of existence strictadherence to the social and moral codes maintaining a proper and