Gustav. Flaubert's book Madame Bovary, which describes the tragic story of the commoner woman Emma's lifelong pursuit of passionate and passionate emotional life, ended up in debt and even committed suicide by poisoning, has been a hot topic of discussion among critics for more than a hundred years. So how did Emma's tragedy come about? This article will attempt to explore the tragic causes of Madame Bovary from a personality, psychological point of view, and in contrast to the similarity and typicality of "Golden Plum".
As a classic of 19th-century critical realism, Madame Bovary has epoch-making significance in the history of French literature. Madame Bovary, Emma, is the heroine of the book and is also typical of the world literature gallery because of her complex and charismatic image. Emma's life can be described as vigorous, in order to pursue the ideal of beautiful love, disregarding ethical constraints and family life, twice with her lover fornication, ended up in bankruptcy and suicide. Although the ending is sad, it is not difficult for us to find that such a tragedy is doomed. Emma's indulgence in romance novels and her habit of thinking about wrongs, unrealistic fantasies and impulsiveness towards her partner, doomed her to the end of the downfall.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" >: passion is supreme, unrealistic and unrealistic and untruthful and extreme personality</h1>
"Character tragedy" was originally a description of Shakespeare's type of tragedy. It means that the tragic cause of the character in the literary work is not predestined, but is caused by the action of his personality, and the opportunity for the tragedy to occur is caused by the weakness of the character's character. The tragic end of Emma's fate is directly related to the romantic impracticality of her personality, the pursuit of passion and desire. Emma was the daughter of a farmer, but she was educated in the convent by her father. As a father, Lu Ou's father wants to use up resources to create a good educational environment for his daughter so that she can have capital to choose a good husband in the future, and realize the class leap to live a delicate and beautiful aristocratic life, but such a practice makes her daughter Emma lose her self-awareness in the process of receiving education, and has the illusion that she is an aristocrat or can become an aristocrat, which undoubtedly sows the seeds of vanity for her heart.
First of all, from emma's study in the monastery, it can be seen that there are basically only life skills and codes of conduct, and the only guidance and education that can be called spiritual level is only to teach Emma how to become a qualified wife or mother in the feudal society at that time, which is contrary to nature and extremely superficial. Secondly, Emma's father, Papa Luo, sent his daughter to the monastery to study precisely because of his rudeness and ignorance, and it can be said that in the spiritual education of Emma, reason is completely absent, which creates the impulsive and emotional side of Emma's personality factor. These boring and depressing learnings of individuality led her to transfer the passions of her nature to her love of everyday things and romantic literature:
"She is fanatical and practical, loves the church for the flowers of the church, loves music for the words and phrases of songs, loves literature for the passionate stimulation of literature, she rebels against the mystery of faith, and the rules of the court are incompatible with her character...".
These love novels depicting obsessive men and women fill in the spiritual world of Emma in her teenage years while further catalyzing her romantic and stimulating personality and longing for passionate love. The environment shapes character. Emma, who has such a growing environment, has formed this deformed personality with lack of rationality and passion in her teenage years.
Again, husband Charlie. Dr. Bovary's honest, cowardly, incompetent, and obedient character to his wife was also the catalyst for this character tragedy. Because of his infatuation and cowardice, he can endlessly condone Emma's behavior. Flaubert has a wonderful description of Charlie's infatuation: "For Charlie, the world is no bigger than Emma's silk petticoat. ”
He worked diligently only to satisfy his wife's materialistic desires and so-called "artistic pursuits", and tried his best to obey Emma's requests in all matters, no matter how big or small, and even after learning of Emma's bad deeds, he still did not change his mind and buried her with his remaining savings. Such bottomless indulgence undoubtedly fueled Emma's greed and selfishness, causing her to act more boldly and debauchery, forming a twisted character of almost hysterical and extreme blind selfishness in the later period. Charlie's spiritual acquiescence and even material satisfaction are like nourishment nourishing the "flower of evil" in Emma's personality, and the false satisfaction and spiritual stimulation brought about by evil drive her to deviate again and again in the balance of ethics and desires, and finally to go to ruin.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > two: "Slaves of Desire"—the dual drive of the Libido complex and the artistic complex</h1>
The term "complex", first coined by the Swiss psychologist Jung, refers to a group of important, intense and unconscious impulses that exist in the subconscious realm of the human mind. The libido complex, or original desire complex, was proposed by the Austrian psychologist Freud to refer specifically to the primordial driving force of sex at the unconscious level. The impulses of the sexual instinct can be directly vented or satisfied, and can even destroy reason with the power of destruction. The "complex" enters everyday language, which refers to the uncontrolled unconscious obsession of a person indulging in something and unable to extricate himself. Reading through the whole book, it is not difficult to find that Emma's various behaviors are either implicit or ostentatiously expressive than polyamorous and artistic complexes.
Emma is dominated by original desires, and in the most fanatical way she violates the constraints of morality, reason, and family in order to obtain the satisfaction of passion and love. At first, the affair with Rodolfo satisfied Emma's desire for passion and sexual desire. Indulging in a fantasy "love life", she began to accelerate the pace of depravity, allowing the never-ending release of sexual desire and passion. Even if the husband has realized it, he has no remorse, but resolutely abandons his husband and daughter, and carefully prepares to elope to complete her fantasy love fairy tale. At this time, Emma was already in a state of irrationality, and the passion brought by her physiological instincts had made her forget.
By the end of the novel, during her extramarital affair with Leon, Emma has completely become a slave to her desires, and her strong dissatisfaction with reality and the previous love affair exacerbate her emotional desires. She began to abandon everything completely, unscrupulously interpreting the manic lust in her heart. She dared to openly run to the lawyer's office to find Leon, and acted debauchery all night long in the midst of secret pleasure:
"Clothes, take them off when you say... As soon as the door was closed, I took off my clothes naked..."
In addition, when Emma indulged in lust, she spent dr. Bovary's savings and did not hesitate to sell her land to borrow usurious loans, and kept buying on credit, so as to please her little lover with a luxurious life and gifts. These irrational acts of obeying desires had sown the seeds of her later tragic end.
In addition to her instinctive desires, Emma's actions are driven by her increasingly exaggerated artistic complexes. Emma was sent to the monastery by her father at the age of 13 to study, and in addition to daily education, she was exposed to a large number of romantic chivalric literature, and longed for the love story of ancient knights and idiot men and women. These things contributed to the formation of Emma's artistic complex. The author Flaubert deliberately shows the artistic characteristics of Emma's personality, so emma's subconscious artistic complex can be seen almost everywhere in the book. For example, before marriage and after marriage, Emma wrote poetry, painted and played the piano like a noblewoman, and when she married, she adopted the ceremony of lighting a torch in the middle of the night, showing obvious characteristics of performance art. The act of reading the newspapers read by the nobility, dressing herself like a noblewoman, the sewing box is ivory, and the thimble is gilded, also shows Emma's deliberate artistic use of family life to satisfy her inner artistic interest. Emma's actions at all stages show a strong artistic complex deep within her. Once the artistic complex is formed, it is rooted in the personal unconscious, leaving Emma unable to extricate herself. Jung argues: "It is not man who dominates the complex, but the complex that governs man." "The original desire complex and the artistic complex are like reins and shackles, tightly dominating and framing Emma's various behaviors, making her a slave to desire, unable to escape the tragic end of burning to death in the fire of desire.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > three, "slut" or "warrior fighting against fate"? - The identity tragedy of the middle class</h1>
At the beginning of the publication of "Madame Bovary", it caused a strong backlash in the French orthodox literary circles, and the fate of China's "Golden Plum Bottle" was similar, both of which were despised by the social and academic circles because of the suspicion of adultery. It can be seen that the conflict between original desire and reason in Madame Bovary has a commonality. In addition to Pan Jinlian in "Jin Ping Mei", there are similar female figures such as Rinzi in Junichi Watanabe's book "Paradise Lost" and Zhou Fanyi in Cao Yu's drama "Thunderstorm", all of whom are women who have lost their rationality in desire and are willing to sink. But can the mere use of "slut" sum up the full meaning of their lives? I can hardly agree with this.
Looking at the experiences of several women, there are actually many similarities. Most of them are from good families and have certain knowledge and talent. Therefore, most of the visions of love are based on personal qualities and cognition, but what restricts their actions is precisely out of class differences. Good family wealth is only for the general civilian family, this kind of typical image of women in a well-off or middle-class family, with the social concepts of the time to dominate women's education, their families tend to use all the resources in their hands to let them receive education beyond the existing class, with the spiritual "aristocratic talk" to win the love of the middle class and even the upper class, so as to find a good son-in-law to achieve class transition or maximize the interests of the same class. This kind of concept and practice is also regarded by a certain group of people as a guideline and not contradictory, and the Shanghai celebrities some time ago are a good example.
But this leads to a problem, and a common problem of the petty bourgeoisie: they are already in sync with the rich class in their spiritual life and aesthetic tastes, but they are stretched thin on material conditions and in the pattern of vision that touches the fundamentals. Such a great sense of separation between spirit and reality will cause some people to distort their minds, and then take various measures to try to get closer to the class they fantasize about, and use all means to verify the symbolic value of their own unique identity in society. In the eyes of the sociologist Bourdieu, this middle class is "mannerist and rigid", embodying an ambiguous class nature: it wants to avoid identifying with the working class, but it lacks the necessary capital to cultivate the way of life of the ruling class it imitates. In terms of specific images, there is a ridiculous and sad "princess disease"-like personality tragedy like Emma in "Madame Bovary", but behind such a ridiculous personality is the embarrassing and anxious identity dilemma of the middle class.
"In contrast to the calm and skillful aesthetic taste presented by the ruling class, its (middle class's) efforts to show its unique identity reveal precisely an embarrassing contrivance and pretense." - [Law] Bourdieu
If the ideal situation is changed to the situation of developed information communication and free love in today's society, they may not be unable to find their soul mate, after all, they are both middle-class, such men are not in the minority, they can be a pair of equal opponents, strong and powerful partners. Unfortunately, fate makes people, and the era or social environment they live in is a male-dominated world. Under the oppression of the feudal social etiquette shackles in Europe or the Ming Dynasty, such women could only be used as an appendage of patriarchal or husband power, making a "virtuous inner helper" or a beautiful vase at home. At that time, women did not have a sense of economic independence, let alone spiritual independence and freedom of resistance, and the housewife who had been living in a deep boudoir could not access the outside world, and their vision and state of mind became more and more narrow. Emma marries Dr. Charles, thinking that she has realized the fairy tale dream of "prince and princess", but the reality shatters her dream: she can only marry a middle-class ordinary person with equal status and outstanding ability but lack of aristocratic life. The "Emmas" adopt the practice of cheating or indulging in lust, which is their struggle against their own fate dominated by their husbands, and the extreme approach they take is also an indulgent catharsis in personal emotions that cannot be solved by the anxiety of middle-class identity.
Women like Emma, who prove their existence with passionate satisfaction, finally defend their own concept of love in a crazy or suicidal manner, and issue a miserable but loud cry to the world of power. The hateful must have pity, and Flaubert had mixed feelings when he wrote Madame Bovary. He punished Emma with the end of his death, but after writing the book, he cried to his friends about "Emma's death" to express his deep pity for Emma, because through Emma's female identity, he saw the self who was not willing to be manipulated in the world of power system and class struggle and was temporarily powerless to solve it. Therefore, Emma and the "slut" who fights against fate like her deserves to be interpreted and interpreted from more perspectives.
The root of Emma's tragic fate lies in the fact that in the process of realizing her self-worth, she dedicated all her feelings and life to love, and the perfect romantic fantasy of love became the shackles that bound her life. Su Tong once said:
"The lamp moths are blindly and enthusiastically thrown at the fire, if Emma is fire, Mr. Bovary is the lamp moth, when he proposed, he waited for 30 minutes on the road outside Emma's house, and when he looked back, the window opened, Emma agreed to his marriage proposal, the fire summoned the lamp moth, and the fate of Mr. Bovary and Madame Bovary was decided in an instant."
Emma is a flame, and the love she yearns for is as fierce as a raging fire. I have named this book review of Madame Bovary the Burning of The Desire of Slavery, but this "desire" is not only Madame Bovary's long-suppressed sexual desire and love, but also about the deep class relations presented, Madame Bovary, the middle class, trying to get rid of the delusion and unwillingness of identity anxiety. Unfortunately, the violent happiness will inevitably produce a violent ending, and the kiss of fire and gunpowder will only disappear in the most proud moment. She uses the key of fate to open the door of love, but after the door is opened, it is the abyss.