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‘Madame Bovary’, written by Gustave Flaubert (1857), and ‘Crime and Punishment’, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)‘The women in these novels only come to life through loving the men’. Discuss, making reference to your course texts.
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Both ‘Madame Bovary’, written by Gustave Flaubert (1857), and ‘Crime and Punishment’, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) are products of western culture of the nineteenth century. Both authors are men writing from within a fiercely patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a social system of rule that ensures the dominance of men and the subsequent subservience of women. In this society relationships between men and women are built on inequality. However, patriarchy goes much further than this; not only does it involve the subordination of women, but it is also a social process or conditioning whereby women come to accept in their own thinking the idea of male superiority. From this position it is easy to see how ‘women in these novels only come to life through loving the men’. Both these authors appear to consider this concept in different ways. Flaubert seems to accept that women aspire to be their idealised images penned by men and creates an environment of reality whereby the absurdity of the ‘romantic novel’ can be exposed. Dostoevsky shows how such a system can be equally as damaging for men. In ‘Madame Bovary’1 Flaubert creates a bored, middle class, wife of a doctor, living in desperately dull circumstances in a provincial French setting. Emma Bovary is the daughter of a spendthrift farmer, Monsieur Rouault, who, though he seems to show much affection for his daughter, marries her off to Charles Bovary, a man he thinks ‘rather puny’ as ‘she is of little use to him in the house’ and Charles would ‘strike no hard bargain in the matter of a dowry.’(Page 21). Madame Bovary ‘had received a good education, had learnt dancing, geography, drawing, embroidery and to play the piano’ (Page 15) and it is because of this education that she discovers the romantic novel. Madame Bovary is an avid reader and immerses herself in literature rather than face her isolated life, at first on the farm with her father and later, with Charles who ‘could not rouse emotion in her, nor laughter, nor excuse for dreams.’(Page 36) The words she uses to voice her thoughts reflect the romantic ideas she has internalised: ‘Love, she believed, should come with the suddenness of thunder and lightening, should burst like a storm upon her life, sweeping her away, scattering her resolutions like leaves before a wind, driving her whole heart to the abyss.’(Page 89). In the pages of the novels she reads Emma finds a world more adventurous and fanciful than her reality. She, like the characters in the stories, searches for truth beyond that which we encounter in everyday experience, she believes the myth created by the author and, in a sense, her story becomes literary criticism as the romantic believer is exposed to life’s harsh realities. Realism versus romance. Through Emma, Flaubert comments on the power of literature to shape and define our world, Emma is the product of a masculine imagination whose very existence is questioning the validity of female stereotypes established by largely male authors. The realism in the novel is strikingly accurate. Flaubert’s style and aesthetic transformation of the ordinary and, sometimes, vulgar reality of life in Provincial France is the perfect backdrop for this tale. Emma’s sense of style and its importance, along with her aristocratic airs and graces seem in sharp contrast with her surroundings of rural simplicity: ‘Her own daily scene – a tedious countryside, a half-witted, middle-class society, an unceasing round of mediocrity- she saw as an exception to some more glorious rule, as something in which, by mere ill-chance, she had been caught and held’ (Page 52) Emma clearly believes that she is destined for great things.
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