the Limits of Feminist Individualism

A Sympathetic Solipsist: Madame Bovary and the Limits of Feminist Individualism

Natasha Roy, New York University

In the introduction to The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir writes that the drama of woman lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood. To herself, a woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is inessential and secondary: defined on the terms of her relationship to men. Emma Bovary, Flaubert’s famed heroine, tragically lives out this jarring conflict in the eponymous Madame Bovary. Emma sincerely believes herself to be extraordinary; she longs for a more exciting and passionate life, but is continually trapped by marriage, motherhood, and means (or lack thereof). Yet, it would be facile to attribute her bleak arc simply to these material realities. Emma cannot craft herself a more meaningful life because her ambitions are, ultimately, superficial. She builds fantasies based on appearances and adopts such a solipsistic attitude that she refuses to recognize the little agency she does have. In her mind, things happen to her: she cannot reckon with the gravity of her own choices. Suzanne Leonard describes a veritable “Americanization of Emma Bovary” that has gained sentience over the last several decades (649). She points to “Emma Bovary’s surprisingly widespread appearance in twenty-first-century American women’s media culture, wherein she has transitioned from cautionary figure to postfeminist icon” (648). Emma is a curious choice for such iconization given her shallowness and penchant for escapism; these are highly feminized characteristics usually rebuked by the milieu of feminists Leonard invokes. And yet, Flaubert’s writing glitters such that Emma, despite her myriad flaws, remains profoundly likeable. It feels incredibly easy to attach your persona onto hers, as do so many conflicted film and television heroines in recent decades (Leonard, 647). Leonard describes “a critical turn” that took place circa the 1980s “whereby stories of female limitations were read as sympathetic to female difficulty rather than as tacit endorsements of the status quo” (655). During this period of second wave feminism,“feminists exonerated Emma of her multiple failings on the grounds that her dilemmas, particularly with respect to marriage and motherhood, could

be recast in gendered terms.” Emma Bovary has benefited from “feminist rescue” offers Leonard, partially because of a continued intrigue in her ennui and adultery, and partially because second and third wave feminists have “laid blame for her sad fate on the biases of a culture inhospitable to women who stray from prescribed roles” (655). This sort of reading does the crucial work of situating Emma within the gendered traps she must navigate. Nonetheless, it can also overlook other nuances of the character. She has agency, she makes choices, and more often than not these choices add to her chains. It is a testament to the novel’s study of a woman’s interiority that it continues to cause such a frisson among contemporary women who have, for all intents and purposes, complete access to all the freedoms Emma so helplessly desired. By situating Emma Bovary among contemporary feminist blindspots, I attempt to answer Leonard’s question: “If, as postfeminist rhetoric is so fond of pointing out, these constrictions have been rendered largely obsolete in contemporary American contexts, why does Emma Bovary still serve as such a handy metaphor for modern women?” (648). The novel’s applicability to contemporary discourses lies in its portrayal of a woman trying desperately to cultivate agency under capitalism, both by ascribing significance to material objects and by seeking comfort in escape fantasies and rejecting collectivism.

I. Labels and Love.

While on the one hand a beneficiary of feminist resurrection, Emma Bovary also emerges as an easy target for critiques of narcissism. Christopher Lasch invokes her in his landmark book The Culture

of Narcissism, describing her as the “prototypical consumer of mass culture” (171). Yet, Flaubert’s use of tactile references and material language reveals how Emma’s body holds her soul hostage; the material supersedes all aspects of her life. Emma’s consumption of mass culture therefore speaks to her underlying desire to express her interiority using only the material tools ather disposal. For Leonard, Emma’s interest in the material draws yet another line between her and contemporary women who may not share her other gendered confines.

“As we might remember, Madame Bovary offered a scathing indictment of the attitudes and operations of female mass culture in the nineteenth century, a critique it made primarily through a portrayal of a woman seduced by the generic notions of love, romance, and sexuality on offer in women’s magazines and pulp novels. Despite long-standing critiques of such coercions, American postfeminist popular culture (including some of the books, films, and television shows listed 23

here) offers similar fantasies: romantic intrigue coupled with passionate love, visions accompanied by consumptive excess, and nonstop diversion. The resulting comparison between Emma Bovary and modern-day heroines is perhaps inevitable: assessed in terms made popular by Sex and the City, Emma’s raison d’être also appears to be her pursuit of “labels and love.” (648)

There is certainly no more perfect embodiment of market consumption—of a woman swallowing and regurgitating market ideals—than Emma Bovary. She internalizes consumerist ideals so completely that she spends all her money and runs her family into debt. She does indeed spend much of the novel pursuing “labels and love,” as Leonard puts it, but her interest in “mass culture” stems from a more sympathetic underlying desire to experience new freedoms and new planes of emotion. It feels almost redundant to point out that Emma Bovary is highly preoccupied with appearances and aesthetics. She tortures herself over maintaining the image of the perfect and loving matriarch, yet makes no concerted effort to properly parent her daughter, Berthe. Similarly, she clings to the idea of

freedom instead of making a meaningful effort towards liberation. Before the Marquise’s ball in Part I, Emma “[prepares] herself with the meticulous care of an actress at her debut” (Flaubert, 42). Flaubert is almost comically explicit about the degree to which our protagonist performs an entirely crafted identity. At this same ball, she looks at “the windows of the chateau for a long time, trying to guess which were the rooms of all those people she had observed the night before. She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become a part of them” (Flaubert, 46). Constantly frustrated with the material and gender confines of her own life, she yearns instead to slip into other people’s lives. She cannot, however, envision a life that is wholly her own, because she has resigned herself to the idea that she has little to no agency. She has no framework for complete independence, so she cannot imagine it. Instead, she dreams of being someone else, and, as such, is wholly severed from herself. At this same ball Charles kisses her on the shoulder and she rebukes him saying “Leave me alone!...You’re rumpling me” (Flaubert, 43). She does not tell him that he is rumpling her hair, attire, or any other part of her physicality. Rather, she feels that he is rumpling her as a person: diminishing and degrading her propensity for greatness. She makes this jump in part because she has so totally used aesthetics as her currency that even the slightest smear of her appearance becomes an attack on her entire personhood. It is an understandable affront on her person, given that capitalism and patriarchy at their

intersection train women to base their worth on their ability to perform aesthetic value. The way in which Emma equates her gown to her person speaks to the corporeal politics of her world. For women—who lacked mobility, financial independence, and general intellectual respect— exterior markers such as clothing had far more value than personal interiority, which was barely recognized as a standin for interiority. By fixating on “labels.” Emma therefore aims in part to temper the divide between her inner and outer self; to use material articles to express her personhood. In the weeks following this ball, Emma asks herself, “Would this misery last forever? Would she never find a way out of it? And yet she was certainly just as good as all those women who lived happy lives! She had seen duchesses...with heavier figures and more vulgar manners...she would think with envy of tumultuous lives, nights at masked balls, outrageous pleasures, and all the wild emotions, unknown to her, that they must inspire” (Flaubert, 57). She truly believes that her ticket into high society shall arrive in the form of manners, body language, and clothing. She is perennially shallow, to be sure, but her preoccupation with status and glamor alludes also to a desire for emotional release. In the early, stultifying days of her marriage to Charles, Emma tries “to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books” (Flaubert, 30). The words “bliss,” “passion,” and “intoxication” share tonal echoes with Emma’s later yearning for the “tumultuous lives,” “outrageous pleasures,” and “wild emotions” that she ascribes to high society women. Emma’s fixation on status speaks, quite simply, to her desire for electricity. She has been so profoundly shaped by consumer culture that she falls prey to the flimsy belief that she can find this electricity in material goods. And yet this preoccupation follows the internal logic of a novel that so heavily employs tactile, material language. At the pinnacle of her depression before she moves to Yonville, Emma laments:

“It was above all at mealtimes that she could not bear it any longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the stove that smoked, the door that creaked, the walls that seeped, the damp flagstones, all the bitterness of life seemed to be served up on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other gusts of revulsion.” (Flaubert, 56)

These material markers of Emma’s provincial life cage her: the stove, the walls, the repetitive meals, all become maddening as her life remains static. This passage evokes a claustrophobia so palpable that we too grow revolted with Emma’s stale experiences. In doing so, it reveals that Emma is 25

condemned to live on an entirely material plane. Situated among such sensory and tactile language, our protagonist is left to craft meaning through materialism: objects become metonyms for relationships: a house becomes the cloying reification of her depression. After the Marquise’s ball, Charles spots a cigar case on the ground and Emma brings it home. It quickly emerges as a material reification of her unhappy marriage, and reappears when, as Rodolphe becomes her lover, she offers him a replica of the same cigar case. Stuck in her mundane life, Emma routinely pulls out the cigar case and peers at it:

“She would look at it, open it, and even sniff the fragrance of its lining...Who did it belong to?... The vicomte. Perhaps it was a gift from his mistress...A breath of love had passed among the stitches of the canvas; each stroke of the needle had fastened into it a hope or a memory, and all those interlaced threads of silk were merely an extension of the same silent passion.” (Flaubert, 49)

The cigar case serves as the only tactile reminder Emma has of her magical night at the ball: it thus becomes a profound mimesis of the social strata she cannot penetrate. The cigar case as an objective correlative thus reveals Emma’s steadfast belief that objects can interpellate emotion: that hopes and memories become tactile if stitched into a green silk cigar case. A harsh, Laschian reading would denounce her a magpie, ascribing inane meaning to flashy objects. A more sympathetic reading recognizes that in a culture that so violently denies women their interiority, exterior articles—a gown, a meal, a cigar case—become paramount. Crucially, the gown and cigarette case don’t just signify class—though that’s certainly important here. Emma connects the objects to some kind of elusive emotional release. If Emma’s raison d’etre is labels and love, then we can feasibly say that it is also labels as a means to

attain love—or at least passion of some kind, which Emma only knows to recognize as love. Others around Emma question and minimize her spiritual needs, further denying her of her interiority. In Part II, during a conversation with Bournisien, the town priest in Yonville, Emma offers blankly, “I’m in pain,” adding that “it isn’t earthly remedies I need” (Flaubert, 97; 98). She alludes, of course, to an entirely existential affliction, but the clergyman can only comprehend physical or economical pain. When Emma asks about the pain felt by women “who have bread, but have no…” he cuts her off, insisting that pain cannot exist “when one is warm, and well fed” (Flaubert, 99). Emma dissolves into a paroxysm of frustration/agony—”My God! My God!”—and we can understand why. This ex-

change reminds us that in literature “Heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men” (Tolentino, 120). In life as in its mimesis there emerges a violent denial of the woman’s interiority. We discuss women in terms so material, so corporeal, so limiting, that to then denounce a character like Emma for becoming seduced by shallow materialisms feels facile. Crucially, Emma is not uniquely shallow within the world of her novel. Flaubert presents us with a culture that is superficial at large, thus sympathetically contextualizing Emma’s particular superficial analysis of the world. Emma’s highly aesthetic worldview is endemic to the novel’s French society across multiple stratas. For example, Homais acts as the prototypical effete, educated, and bourgeois foil to the quotidian Charles. He ostensibly represents the French bourgeois intelligentsia, and yet his arc is one of deceit and dishonor. He concerns himself with knowledge only superficially: giving convoluted speeches about science while engaging in malpractice and displaying limited medical knowledge. Despite his guile, he ultimately receives the prestigious Legion of Honor. As such, on paper, he represents the sort of intellectual and high society life that Emma craves, but we can gather that his milieu is equally as superficial as the provincial one, if not more perniciously so. Flaubert is not a didactic writer, but he lays out the realities of these environments such that we can pull from his writing a simple, if bleak, lesson. An obsession with appearance will not only render your life meaningless, but it will also cause anguish for those around you. It is significant that we see this dynamic play out among bourgeois and provincial characters alike. Even though the provincial class is decidedly myopic, we can ultimately surmise that this superficiality is endemic to every class. Ma-

dame Bovary is therefore less a critique of its central character than it is a critique of an entire culture of appearances.

II. The Feminist Collective.

In her critical study of The Second Sex, Nancy Bauer offers:

“The first thing Beauvoir has to say about herself is that she is a woman. This means that unlike Descartes Beauvoir begins with a fundamental investment in the significance of her body, so that her thinking will not be able to accommodate a Cartesian mind-body split. Furthermore, since her inquiry is rooted in a sense of herself as being an instance of the generic concept “woman” a certain Cartesian threat of solipsism is avoided from the start: to call herself a woman is to start 27

with the idea that other beings like her exist—that is, other beings who are called, or call themselves, women.” (60)

Emma by requirement of her gender must remain invested in her body, yet in doing so she cannot, as Beauvoir does, situate herself in a collective. She adopts a highly solipsistic worldview that bars her from recognizing the agency she does have and from contextualizing her struggle as a broader one. For example, she yearns for a son through whom she can live vicariously and forget the trappings of womanhood. When Berthe is born, she makes an incisive criticism of her society in this context:

“She wanted a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this idea of having a male child was a sort of hoped-for compensation for all her past helplessness. A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.” (Flaubert, 77)

Emma makes a bleakly sophisticated assessment of her life’s gendered limitations; here, she is at her sharpest and most perceptive. She understands the material limits of her own life, but her analysis of gender revolves almost entirely around herself. Sexism matters to Emma Bovary only insofar as it prevents her from achieving the satisfaction she craves. She does not, however, care that it will hinder every other woman of her milieu in the same way. Her desire for a son reveals her childlike desire to slip away from her trials instead of working around them. Crucially, she does not view Berthe’s birth as an opportunity to raise an assertive woman who may be able to more skillfully navigate the limitations of womanhood. Emma recognizes gendered injustice through a highly solipsistic lens: she focuses only on the ways in which gender imprisons her. She does not conceptualize her struggle as a collective one, and therefore cannot meaningfully understand the world outside of herself. She does not wish to free Berthe from her gendered prison; she only cares to free herself. In fact, her lack of empathy for her own daughter is striking even beyond any gendered readings. And while Emma’s desire for liberation feels warranted and just, it is ultimately too myopic to ever materialize.

And though Emma arraigns social conventions, her insistence on a woman who “flutters with every breeze…[who] always [has] some desire luring her on” plays into sexist tropes. Emma criticizes

the trap of womanhood because she is unhappy about being trapped, but not necessarily because of any cogent broader social criticism. To borrow Bauer’s language, Emma recognizes in this passage “that other beings like her exist,” but she skips the crucial work of situating herself in a collective. In Emma’s world womanhood is a great personal inconvenience rather than a system of oppression to be widely challenged. To rehabilitate her as a feminist is therefore so overly complimentary as to be innacurate.

Emma’s monomania with her particular suffering—or, her disinterest in the collective—manifests in language of escape. She repeatedly expresses desire for a change of physical scenery—if only she and Rodolphe could run away to the Alps or a tropical island! In the midst of her affair with Leon, Emma laments that “everything, even she herself, [is] unbearable. She [wishes] she could escape like a bird, and grow young again somewhere far, far away, in the immaculate reaches of space” (Flaubert, 259). Emma’s desire to “escape like a bird” to a distant realm reveals her fundamental inability to address her problems. She wants always to fly away, free, and refuses to reckon with the material realities of her life. Instead of choosing to productive channel her frustrations with gender into transgressively raising Berthe, she fixates on the useless hypothetical of a son.

One of the central tragedies of the novel lies in the discrepancy between Emma’s yearning for an avian (free) life and the omnipresence of bovine (provincial and limited) imagery in her surroundings. Her very name, Bovary, serves as a cruel reminder that for all her dreams of upward mobility, Emma is constantly mired by provinciality, as represented by the bovine. The novel’s full title—Madame Bovary:

Provincial Manners—again reminds us again how adamantly women are framed in terms of their material realities, to the point where interiority becomes entirely elusive. The Cartesian mind-body split that Bauer references cannot exist for Emma when she is constantly reminded that she will only ever be what she already is: provincial, a wife, a woman.

We can therefore understand why Emma so wishes to fly away from her life, her family, her body: escape seems to be her only avenue through which to individuate. And yet, the language of flight and fantasy speaks to the vast distance between envisioning a life free of gender confines and subscribing to a theory of change that could realistically materialize this. Perhaps Emma remains so beloved to contemporary feminists, myself included: it is just so much easier to inhabit an escapist ideology than

it is to meaningfully push the gender needle. For contemporary feminists, a forgiving look at Madame

Bovary acts as a sort of palliative. The easier we go on her, the less inclined we feel to confront the fact that comfort and liberation are, in the business of gender, mutually exclusive. Emma’s propensity for escapism prevents her from recognizing the active role she has played in tarnishing her own life. When she receives a court order after acquiring massive debt, she immediately proccalims “do you know what’s happening to me? It must be a joke!” (Flaubert, 260). A sensible observer would read the situation as Emma facing the consequences of her continued reckless spending, but she reframes the situation; this is yet another tragedy that is happening to her. Emma is therefore trapped not only by her material conditions but also by her inability to recognize her own autonomy, for better or for worse. As much as the world strips her of agency, she unwittingly strips herself of any

agency she does have. By shirking responsibility for her actions and retreating always to a fantasy of escape, she spurns her own autonomy. In her 2019 book Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino argues that for women in fiction, “love and money, or the lack of them, calcify a life” (95). She adds that, “ultimately, these characters are aware of the trajectory they’re stepping into” (103). Emma Bovary’s awareness of her reality waxes and wanes, but even in her sharpest moments she never gives up on her escape fantasy.

Feminist individualism presupposes this strange Catch-22. The worldview is predicated on the nation that it is within an individual woman’s power to blithely self actualize in a world designed to hinder her from doing so. And yet, standard feminist rhetoric subordidnates this idealized, powerful woman by absolving her of criticism: smoothening over her choices and chalking them up to gender trouble. To lend “feminist rescue,” as Leonard describes it, to Emma strips her of her agency in a bid to aknowledge her lack of it. Perhaps this is why the character has remained so extant: in her tale of provincial ennui, marriage, immobility, Emma Bovary still somehow speaks to a contemporary feminism that has moved largely past these particular facets of the patriarchy.

Tolentino argues that “women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality” (91). This is a miserable convergence that leads Emma to her ruin. And yet, though this context renders Emma sympathetic, it cannot close us off to further criticism of the character. Leonard explains that recent feminist discourses surrounding Madame Bovary have established “Emma’s ennui 30

as a cultural symptom rather than a personal failing further allowed for a recasting of her dilemmas, so that, for example, her marriage’s failure to live up to her romantic expectations, her disdain for (and simultaneous inability to leave) her provincial country town, her humiliation at the hands of thoughtless lovers, and her lack of access to financial resources all cohered into a portrait of the effects of gendered power” (652). This portrait does a disservice to a character who makes legitimately poor choices for entirely comprehensible reasons. We must give credence to the act of choice—amplify the agency that Emma does have—in order to seriously reckon with her circumstances. Tolentino points to penchant for feminist rescue among contemporary pop-discourse: “Any woman whose story has been altered and twisted by the force of male power—so any woman—can be framed as a complicated hero, entombed by patriarchy and then raised by feminists from the dead” (237). She cites figures from Hillary Clinton to Britney Spears as beneficiaries of this itch to resurrect, and Emma emerges as a natural addition to the list. This sort of feminist rescue assumes an autotelic nature: it implies that so long as we rehabilitate ambivalent women, we no longer need to contemplate the how of feminist liberty. But if feminist analysis recognizes the contexts that lead to Emmas tragedy, then it must also coalesce around a meaningful theory of change. To do the first part without the second leaves us in an infuriating snake-eats-tail continuum in which we sanitize stories of female failures to the point where we can no longer learn from our own history. It’s a shame, for when we strike the balance between feminist resurrection (a la Leonard’s analysands) and unsympathetic criticism (a la Christopher Lasch), Flaubert’s novel emerges as an invaluable feminist heuristic.

Works Cited

Bauer, Nancy. “Recounting Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and Feminist Philosophy.” Diss. Harvard University, 1997. Beauvoir, Simone de, and H. M. 1884-1953 Parshley. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, 1952. Print. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Books, 2010. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Leonard, Suzanne. “The Americanization of Emma Bovary: From Feminist Icon to Desperate Housewife.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 647–669., doi:10.1086/668551. Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. Random House, 2019.