The Significance of Suicide in Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary

One of the very first novels in which a woman killed herself as a final way to escape her marriage was the novel Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. According to Dermitzakis, "it is the intense pressure of male dominance in a patriarchal society where [her] only way out becomes adultery" (1), and that pressure is what causes her to eventually commit suicide. What Dermitzakis attempts to answer with his article is the ever present 'why', and the question of why Flaubert chose "such an end" (Dermitzakis 1) for his adulterous heroine.

Dermitzakis first points out the hopeless situation Flaubert creates for Emma; she is so filled with despair at her seemingly terrible situation, a life lacking excitement and wealth, that she forces herself into her own problems. Since his first marriage, "Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life" (Flaubert 7); Emma, on the other hand, sees marriage in a dreamy way, something that will give her the fairy tale life she dreams of. She fusses about silly details of the marriage, and while she walks to the groom all she can think of is her dress: "Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistledowns, while Charles, empty handed, waited till she had finished" (Flaubert 17). What Emma finds is that marriage is not what she had hoped, and she instead turns to other men to give her the life she desires. Yet even with adultery, Emma does not find happiness; she "cannot persuade her lover to take her away and leave [her] husband and country" (Dermitzakis 1), because "he is not in love with her, and their relationship in his eyes is nothing but a casual love affair like so many others he has had so far" (Dermitzakis 1). The situation Flaubert writes Emma into leaves, in her mind, very few options; finally, "abandoned as she is by her lover, and immersed in debts" (Dermitzakis 1), she sees no other way to escape than to take the cowardly way out and kill herself. With Madame Bovary, Flaubert "consciously seek[s] to portray a woman's emotional deprivation and turbulent psychology" (Dermitzakis 2), creating a complex web into which Emma weaves herself. When Emma does commits suicide, she finally comes to see reality: "she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream" (Flaubert 318).

It is still a mystery, however, as to why Flaubert feels Emma must die. Dermitzakis makes the interesting connection to the society of the time period when Bovary was written, in which women were treated as property and there existed double-standards concerning adultery. While a man was socially allowed to take on a mistress, it was considered worthy of death in some cases if a woman should stray from her husband. Yet instead of punishment at the hands of others, Dermitzakis emphasizes Flaubert's need to punish Emma for her acts through yet another self-deprecating action, connecting it to Freudian critical readings of the novel: "for women adultery is an expression of both sensuality and sexuality, a situation where the (Freudean) Id conquers the Superego, thus violating its prohibitions. In the fictional dramatization of this Freudean view of the matter, our three writers degrade their protagonists not by their adulteries but by the women's suicides" (Dermitzakis 3) Dermitzakis also hypothesizes that Flaubert "chose suicide as an end for [his heroine] in order to appease society's implicit and explicit demand of punishment for adultery" (Flaubert 3). This connection to society, Dermitzakis argues, was purely subconscious however:

The plot is often an acting out of the writer's own suppressions and rationalizations, a disguised emergence of the suppressed material of the unconscious into the fictitious world of the novel. The biographical material offers the basis of the deconstruction of the novel, and the discovery of the hidden intentions of the novelist, often diverging greatly from the explicit ones. And in the case of the [great author] mentioned above, we can deduce that [he is] subconsciously less tolerant to a married woman whose frustrations lead her to commit adultery. (Dermitzakis 5)

What Flaubert thought as he crafted Madame Bovary is a mystery; one of the largest questions still raised is why he felt the need to murder his heroine. Dermitzakis actively seeks to answer this question, for which the reader may never now the answer. Dermitzakis does provide a convincing argument, however, in his article "Observations about the Suicide of the Adulteress in the Modern Novel".

Works Cited

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. New York: Anchor, 1994.

Dermitzakis, Babis. "Observations about the Suicide of the Adulteress in the Modern Novel".

Comparative Literature and Culture. Purdue University.Vol. 1, Issue 2. June 1999. 14 May 2007.

Mercedes A, Abstract: Analysis of the Suicide of an Adultress in Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Associated Content.