Precocious Naturalism in Gustave Flaubert`s "Madame Bovary"

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Philip Bixby
English IV, 6th period
11-29-2012
Bovary’s Fate:
Precocious Naturalism in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
“Madame Bovary c’est moi.” – Gustave Flaubert
Who better to expound on the vain struggles of man’s nature against the unforgiving reality of the
world than one who had experienced them himself. That man was Gustave Flaubert, whose influential
novel Madame Bovary was published in 1857. Flaubert was born in Rouen, France, in 1821, into a family
of bourgeois doctors. He excelled in his education and started publishing his own stories by age sixteen.
Despite his “proper” upbringing, Flaubert never married. Instead, he consistently subjected himself to
numerous affairs with women during his early-adult years. His dissatisfaction in these relationships would
lead him to stray radically from the optimistic Romanticism that was dominating the literature of his time
(“Gustave Flaubert”). His first novel Madame Bovary, which he wrote at age thirty-five, epitomizes this
transition from idealism to realism. Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary near the beginning of the
book. Charles is a doctor, but the Bovarys live a middle-class existence. Eventually the couple is invited
to a ball hosted by a wealthy marquis, whose stunning opulence infatuates Madame Bovary. From this
point onward, she despises her marriage to Charles and continually fantasizes about high-class society.
She manages to have two extramarital affairs, each of which ends in her intensified frustration with her
unfulfilled fantasies, as she realizes that the world is not the romanticized idyll she wishes it to be.
Through her careless and vain squandering of money, she brings incredible debt upon her family. Finally,
having lost everything and fully feeling the meaninglessness in her life, she poisons herself and dies.
Vanity and frustration are two major themes that appear throughout the novel, and are often coupled
together. Emma Bovary experiences the emptiness and vanity of her affairs – which are incomparable to
her fantasies – which leads her to an exacerbated frustration. She believes her existence with Charles to be
miserable, but finds her attempts to transcend and escape her situation to be just as unrewarding. While
Fleming correctly argues that Madame Bovary is a Romantic constantly seduced by ideals but
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inaccurately extrapolates his argument too far in claiming that she is nothing more than a bundle of
seductions, Perkins correctly argues that Madame Bovary is actually a Naturalistic writing far ahead of its
time which characterizes Emma Bovary as a victim of her natural dispositions and the stifling bourgeois
society into which she attempts to rise.
Firstly, Fleming’s assertions in his essay “The Trouble with Bovary” must be addressed. The crux
of his initial argument remains strong and very supportable: that Madame Bovary herself is a hopeless
Romantic and is thus inevitably seduced by Romantic ideals. Fleming claims that Emma “fantasizes her
life with Rodolphe [her first lover] in a haze of crags and fountains, fruit and fisherman worthy of the
worst of Byron” (Fleming). This can be seen consistently throughout Flaubert’s novel and is very closely
related to Emma’s experience with Romantic literature beginning in her youth. Near the opening of
Madame Bovary, Emma is introduced as a character that does little else but read. In her Romantic fiction,
Madame Bovary continuously encounters “gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, impossibly
virtuous, always well dressed” (Flaubert 57). Already the reader is experiencing Emma Bovary’s
Romantic idealism, even before the scene at the Vaubyessard ball in which she first comes in contact with
high-class bourgeois society (Flaubert 65). Fleming also claims that Bovary is “seduced by time” and,
like all Romantics, she “is taken by the Age of Chivalry; she dreams of her own childhood, or she dreams
of the future with Rodolphe, of a second ball, of something, anything, that is to happen” (Fleming). This
accurate assertion is supportable throughout the novel but still has its origins in Emma’s readings. These
predispositions in Emma become the basis of her seductions. She persistently desires something beyond
what she has, some fantastical ultra-reality instilled in her soul. She dreams of running off with her lover
because she assumes that the ideal reality in her mind is attainable (Flaubert 131).
Up to this point, Fleming’s argument is solid and reasonable. However, he then attempts to draw
his conclusion too quickly by claiming that “Emma is not a character with a personality at all, but rather a
walking textbook of seductions” (Fleming). To him, Bovary is essentially a character without feeling or
reason, who is simply an object swept along by the tides of her seductions without realizing it. He claims
that Emma kills herself “simply because she has had affairs with all the available men that Flaubert has
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introduced” (Fleming). However, this view fails to explain Emma’s feelings of frustration, vanity, and
despair which are so inherent in this novel, and which consummate in her suicide. Emma may be
immature and lacking in common sense and will, but she certainly has a realization of her seductions.
This is most evident when her seductions fail to please her. For example, in her longing for Léon (her
second lover), “she was suffering the same lifeless melancholy, the same numb despair she had suffered
after their return from La Vaubyessard” (Flaubert 131). By the end of the novel, she fully realizes the
source of her frustrations: “how wistful she was about the indescribable ideas of love she had tried to
imagine for herself from books” (Flaubert 266). These selections do not imply a soulless bundle of
seductions. Instead they show a pitifully passionate individual with a highly flawed and imperfect
character, who comes to understand that the real world will not give her the pleasure which her idealized
fantasies promised. She is not the automaton that Fleming claims; rather, she is a Romantic individual
stifled and eventually crushed by her character, society, and the vanity of reality.
Based on the character of Emma Bovary alone, Madame Bovary could be easily classed as a work
of Naturalist fiction, and this is precisely the view put forward by Perkins in her “Critical Essay on
Madame Bovary.” Perkins claims that, at the outset of the novel, “two biological factors help determine
Emma’s fate: her innate sensuality and her Romantic imagination” (Perkins). These two qualities of
Emma’s character are closely linked and have been sufficiently discussed, but it is important for us in this
context to view them through a Naturalistic lense. Naturalism is a literary philosophy based in the idea
that heredity and environment determine one’s character. As a literary movement countering the optimism
of Romanticism, Naturalism’s outlook was direct, realistic, and pessimistic, and most often portrayed a
very unstylized and unidealized world in which free will is basically an illusion (“Naturalism”). As
Perkins shows, “Emma’s passionate nature and her vivid imagination combine with the social forces of
her age to determine her fate” (Perkins). When Emma first encounters bourgeois society (Flaubert 65),
this becomes one of the environmental stimuli (in a very Darwinian sense) necessary to shape and
influence her predispositions towards Romanticism for the rest of the novel. Emma’s dwellings upon
bourgeois society, riches, and fantasies of love all function in determining her unavoidable demise
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(Flaubert 301). It is because of her inherent character flaws coupled with the society in which she lives
that Emma Bovary commits suicide; no matter the extent to which she wills herself to escape from her
situation and transcend into her Romantic idyll, she is constrained by the very nature of her character and
the reality of the cruel, unrewarding true world. Being of a lower class, it is inevitable that Emma will
remain there. If we were to accept Fleming’s extended argument, then Madame Bovary would still be
fated to follow her passions and seductions, but would be entirely mindless by the end as to the effects
they have had on her life. In my opinion, this view inappropriately detracts from Emma Bovary’s
significantly pitiful and hopeless characterization. Although she is “passionate” (Perkins) and does realize
her flaws (Flaubert 266) – and is thus not Fleming’s bland seduction-machine – Emma never improves,
since her temperament, ingrained in her nature, cannot be altered.
This is directly in line with the philosophies of Naturalist literature. Take, for example, Jude the
Obscure, the 1895 novel by Thomas Hardy, arguably the greatest English Naturalist. The story of Jude is
very similar to that of Emma. Instead of striving towards Romanticized bourgeois society, Jude strives
towards his Romantic ideal of education (Hardy 10). During the course of his life, Jude also has two
affairs like Emma, both of which fail to live up to his ideal fantasies of love. By the end of the novel, as
he hears the procession of college graduates and wishes God had killed him before he was born, Jude dies
a miserable death (Hardy 413-14). The striking parallels between Madame Bovary and Jude the Obscure
are further evidence that Flaubert’s novel is a work of Naturalistic fiction. Perkins realizes that
“Flaubert’s compelling portrait of a desperately unfulfilled woman… places the novel firmly in the
Naturalist tradition as it engages readers in a tragic study of free will and determinism” (Perkins). In the
same way that Jude is left unfulfilled and dead at the end of Jude the Obscure (Hardy 414), having never
been able to rise from his natural situation, so is Emma left unfulfilled and dead at the end of Madame
Bovary (Flaubert 303), fated from the beginning because of her natural conditions and position.
Finally, if we accept the conclusion that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is a work of Naturalist
literature, we must address what makes this fact significant. Firstly, Naturalism as a movement in
literature was fully and consciously developed by the writers a generation after Flaubert (those born in the
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1840s). It is most closely associated with Émile Zola in France, whose epitomizing Naturalist works were
being published in the 1870s and 1880s (“Naturalism”). The fact that Madame Bovary was written nearly
twenty years before any other work pedagogically labeled “Naturalistic” would be fully enough to reveal
the novel’s literary significance as a forward-looking novel. But Madame Bovary’s significance as
Naturalist fiction becomes exponentially more astounding when we realize that the novel was also
published before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the work considered by many scholars to be the
genesis-point and inspiration for all Naturalist literature and philosophy. On the Origin of Species
presented a radically different view of the natural world than the Romantics had done earlier. Nature was
no longer a loving sanctuary in the style of Byron or Emerson, but a powerful and unforgiving force
which shaped and controlled the fates of all living things. This revolution of scientific determinism went
on to heavily influence the world of literature in France (Zola, Maupassant), England (Hardy), and
America (Crane, London, Dreiser, Steinbeck) (“Naturalism”). But Flaubert published Madame Bovary in
1857, fully two years before Darwin published his crucially important book (1859). It is in this fact that I
believe we see the full genius of Flaubert. He recognized the overbearing unidealism and determinism in
the world and expressed it in his literature long before the Naturalist movement proper, and even before
Darwin. This realization begs the question as to whether Naturalism’s origins lie in the ideas of Flaubert
instead of Darwin. Besides, the first Naturalist writers were French, not English, and both Zola and
Maupassant were protégés of Flaubert early in their lives (“Naturalism”). However, this is not to discredit
the discoveries of Darwin, merely to show the comparableness of Flaubert and Darwin. Darwin came to
his realizations through careful observation of the natural world. In the same way, it could be argued that
Flaubert, through the experiences and affairs of his early life (his “observation”), came to very similar
conclusions on the interaction of environment and humanity. Flaubert’s novel thus stresses very real and
applicable understandings of life, namely fate and the flaws in human nature, that must be continually
addressed and accepted, lest man stray into fruitlessly optimistic and impractically escapist idealism,
which, though powerful, only promotes a helpless disconnect from reality.
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Works Cited
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Tr. Mildred Marmur. New York: Signet Classic, 2001. Print.
Fleming, Bruce E. “An Essay in Seduction; or, The Trouble with Bovary.” Emma Bovary. Ed. Harold
Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994. 165-173. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Criticism. Ed. Kathy D. Darrow. Vol. 220. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27
Nov. 2012.
“Gustave Flaubert.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. 1992. 821-22. Print.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Print.
“Naturalism.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. 1992. 559-60. Print.
Perkins, Wendy. “Critical Essay on Madame Bovary.” Novels for Students. Ed. Jennifer Smith. Vol. 14.
Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Nov. 2012.