Speaking of the French writer Flaubert, I have to mention this novel "Madame Bovary", which made him fight a lawsuit. Madame Bovary is a masterpiece of Flaubert's life and a masterpiece that he spent five years creating. After its publication, this work caused a huge sensation in the French literary circles, but because of its content theme, it was accused of corrupting morality and was once almost banned. Thanks to the defense of lawyer Sele, the book was successfully published, giving us a glimpse of this symphony of romanticism and realism.
The protagonist of the book, Charles Bovary, is based on real life and is based on the young Eutel Delamar. Until 1834, eutel had been interning at the Hospital de Rouen, presided over by Flaubert's father, and later married delphin Coultier, a beautiful peasant girl. However, Delphine was promiscuous by nature, fond of the affair, repeatedly infidelity during the marriage, and eventually lost Deramar's property and committed suicide by taking poison. This realistic tragedy, written full of misfortunes of small people, has become more turbulent, explicit and directly striking under Flaubert's artistic processing.
Unlike most extramarital affairs, in "Madame Bovary", Flaubert not only made a nuanced description of the protagonist's psychology of betraying the marriage, but also added more of his own exploration of human nature and money. In the materialistic real world, in addition to unreliable marriages, there are also humble lives shackled by money. As Lao She said: Love or not love, the poor have to decide on money, and the "love seed" is only born in the rich family. The distance between man and love is separated by thoughts, by money, and by thousands of mountains and rivers.
Before being given Bovary's last name, her name was Emma. Emma's mother died young, and her father was a generous farmer. As a girl, Emma was sent to a nearby monastery to study. But she seemed to have a natural rebellious element in her, and when the other girls still adhered to the precepts of the monastery, she had become more restless.
During her days at the convent, Emma became less and less mindful of the so-called precepts, and especially liked to hear the touching love stories told by an old nun who had married someone. In the constantly woven kingdom of love, Emma is the queen and rules the world.
So when the country doctor Charles Bovary appeared in Emma's life, she thought she had found her lifelong romance. At that time, they snuggled up to each other in the garden, talked about the monastery together, talked about the school together, from the music book, to the late mother. Both men thought it was love.
Whether it was the long-term boring monastic life, the repressed romantic ideals, or the loyalty and obsession of the Shire, Emma's heart was accelerated. Catalyzed by the flower of lust, the two soon married. It's just that young Emma still doesn't understand that the ignorant love under this impulse blooms only because of fantasy. Mune's honest Bovary, in fact, is far from carrying her enthusiasm and desire.
Surprise when bland marriage replaces love. The gap between Emma and Bovary in their concepts and ideas of life gradually became apparent. Bovary was no longer emma's perfect companion. Emma likes gentle and considerate men, but Charles actually does not understand the style, and will only foolishly cater to submission, not only in life can not give Emma romance and excitement, let alone the joy of bed.
But in this backwater married life, it is she herself who can pay for Emma. Emma is a naïve and romantic woman by nature, with a unique charm for men. But when this naïve and unrealistic romance is overdone, only sloppiness and stupidity remain.
Before marriage, Emma fell in love with Charles as she fell in love with her own imagination of love. Therefore, before she could examine their three views, personalities, and respective life habits, Emma was eager to surrender herself. This sloppiness became a major source of her unhappy marriage.
Following the disillusionment of the ideal of romantic marriage, what really caused Emma to suffer was the shock brought about by the Marquis Dance. After that dance, Emma, who experienced the prosperity and sophistication of the upper social circle, began to yearn for the life of the upper class. When she got home, she imitated the style of these upper-class women. She did not allow the maids in the house to wear soft hats and asked them to call themselves "Mrs."
Facing her husband in front of her, who was wearing old clothes, mud shoes, and untrimmed, she fantasized: her Prince Charming should wear a velvet tuxedo, soft leather boots, a pointed hat, gloves in her hands, and slowly approach her side and kiss her hand to the beat of music.
She was carried away by desire, mistakenly believing that the extravagant enjoyment of the senses was the true pleasure of the soul, and the elegance of her demeanor was the delicacy of feelings.
But in reality, the husband is still wooden and dull, and he is completely unaware of her transformation. Emma resents this unstoppable stability, and the differences in thinking have gradually plunged their marriage into irreconcilable contradictions. "The closer they get in life, the farther they get from each other psychologically."
Soon after, Emma fell ill. Dignity status, romantic love, she did not have. To this end, Emma was immersed in the pain of gaining and losing all day long. In order to cure this "heart disease", Emma fell in love with enjoyment and profligacy. She dressed herself with expensive fabrics, arranged the rooms in fancy shapes, cut beautiful paper trays for candles, ordered the most fashionable publications in Paris, and took them out and turned them over.
Once, Charles took Emma to an opera. Emma, who was originally lacking in interest, couldn't help but show a dark and proud smile on her face when she saw the other spectators hurrying to the aisle on the right, while she walked to the box on the left, posing like a duchess.
In a bland and numb marriage, using the luxury of money to find a little pride has become the source of all emma's spiritual pleasure. In order to maintain her own value, Emma began to intensify her efforts to order valuable items from merchants. It was not until eight thousand francs were owed that it was too late to understand the regret. Faced with bills and court judgments, mortgaged family property, Emma borrowed money everywhere, bargaining, fighting for every penny, borrowing when she saw people, and even selling her own flesh. But he still couldn't pay off the bill in his hand, and finally took poison and committed suicide.
Petronius said in the Fragments that when a ship sinks, gold will lead its owner to the abyss.
Many attribute Emma's self-destruction to her inflated materialism. But in fact, Emma's deepest tragedy stems from her failure to regulate desires. For a woman who has been educated by the nobility since childhood, the pursuit of a more wonderful life and more abundant material enjoyment is understandable, but the complete romanticism does not allow Emma to clear the gap between her thoughts and reality.
Before realizing this path of desire, in fact, everyone has two paths, one is to accelerate the satisfaction of their desires and demands through continuous improvement of ability, through self-struggle and hard work, and the other is also very realistic. When our ability is not worthy of ambition, people must know how to regulate their desires, so as to be down-to-earth and live the real life in front of us.
No matter which path you choose, in the face of desire, the most precious thing for a person is to be his own master. And Emma, because she can't see this clearly, only makes luxury and pleasure the main theme of life, and becomes a slave to money. The eye can only see the result of going up to the sky, and it can only step into the abyss underfoot.
In the novel, in addition to the persecution of the money society, what really pushes Emma to become spiritually disillusioned is her two unsustainable extramarital affairs.
In Emma's mind, love for her, "is like a storm falling from the sky, sweeping across life and shocking people's hearts, like a fierce wind sweeping leaves, uprooting people's will." The monotonous and romantic-free Charles was not even an appetizer in her mind.
Emma's first lover was Leon, a literary young man in the town. Now, Leon is an ordinary little clerk, but after reading a few more books and listening to some things that others don't know, he began to talk in general, full of spit stars. But hearing Emma's heart, it was like finding a confidant who was rare in a hundred years.
They talked about the novels they had read, about the Parisian shows, the new four-team dances and the world they didn't know. When the man appears in front of Emma with a prickly cactus in his arms as a gift, despite the thorns in his hand, she is fascinated by this unusual "romance" and sees the other party as a soul mate. But not long after, as the passion for stealing joy faded, the young Leon quickly left Emma for the sake of his future, and went to Paris alone, leaving Emma alone to secretly hurt himself.
But even if she was emotionally deceived by the first lover, Emma still did not change her naïve fantasy of romantic love. Therefore, Rodolph, a veteran of the love scene, let her fall with only three words and two words. She can't wait to be happy, and she is fascinated by the long-desired love.
The end is clear. Emma, like all mistresses, was as fresh as the mosquito blood on the wall and the white grains of rice on the hem of her clothes, leaving only naked monotony and boredom. After a fruitless attempt to encourage Rodolfo to elope, Emma is abandoned again, and her enthusiasm is "all nonsense" and becomes a laughing stock.
Looking back on Emma's life, it is a web woven with lust. I net myself, and I net the shire. The two cornered extramarital affairs reflected the reality and indifference of the capitalist money society at that time, and also illuminated the tragic roots of Emma's life.
It has been repeatedly mentioned in the novel that Emma's romantic love ideals and the pursuit of exquisite life are all reflected everywhere in the fact that she vaguely understands the nature of marriage and love. As an "idealist", Emma fantasizes about a thrilling, bustling life, always passionate and radiant, preferably every day is an adventure.
But when love transitions to a specific marriage, life cannot always be a flower dance, and chai rice oil and salt is the main theme of life. Whether Emma's original choice was charles or not, there is no denying that time will always take away the passion of love and replace it with a calm heart. Because of this, each of Emma's lovers abandoned her after the passion.
On the other hand, Charles, the seemingly honest man, is the guardian of Emma's life, even if Emma despises him and despises him in her heart. But until the truth came out, the poor man even wished that he was Emma's lover. How pathetic!
If the essence of love is hormonal passion, the essence of marriage should be more responsibility, support and companionship. But Emma framed her marriage with the principle of love. As a wife, she betrayed her husband several times; as a mother, she did not fulfill her parenting responsibilities for her children. Just obstinately going his own way, pulling again and again in the unrealistic ideals of the self, gambling on the whole life. At the end of the novel, Emma, who is dying, makes her final confession:
"I am blind, I groped along the long road of cruel life, and now I have been scaled and even lost my life, but I still can't see the future, I can't see the hope of being alive, I can never get what I want, I will be locked in eternal darkness." 」
In Flaubert's pen, although Emma is stupid, greedy, and vain, she is essentially a sad woman who lives for the pursuit of ultimate love and dies for the ultimate romance.
What is even more tragic than this is that the romantic love and extreme materialism she has pursued all her life are only a shadow in her fantasies, such as the flower in the mirror and the moon in the water. Emma pins her imagination on the utter romance and desires of herself on men who don't understand her.
Rather than saying that she has found romance and sought vanity satisfaction in these men and the lives she has experienced, it is better to say that these seemingly romantic and vain are just a series of psychological desire projections made by Emma with self-centeredness. And picking flowers in the mirror and fishing for the moon in the sea, it is destined that her life will be a beautiful futility.
After reading Madame Bovary's story, you may find that desire is not terrible, what is really terrible is that the process of pursuit is easy to lose one's original goal, just as Emma, who regards the luxury of the senses as the pleasure of the heart, the elegance of the demeanor, the delicacy of emotion, and spends her life looking for flowers in the bush of thorns.
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