Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Arsenic yum
This type of death tries to give meaning to the character's life. Suicides make people think that the person's life was awful and ultimately try to make people empathisize with her situation. Engulfing arsenic is a slow painful death. Emma thinks that it is going to be a quick easy death. When we think about this type of death that romantic belief is brought in. For example, in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Juliet supposedly "dies" so out of heartache Romeo drinks poison to kill himself. Love really determines death in both of these stories. With love comes life, and without it comes death. The death scene is supposed to be tragic because suicides are never funny. But in this case the suicide is funny because of how idiotic Emma is. Killing herself by eating arsenic. The tragedy of of Emma dying is not quite as sad as Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet overcome the obstacles making them unable to be together, whereas Emma can't deal with her emotions and caves in. The fact that she can't handle her surroundings and emotions makes it kind of funny and pathetic. I believe Flaubert was going for an empathetical approach in this scene, but kind of failed. Maybe in this time period people would have thought that her ending was sad. In the book no one really seems to care. Her father comes down to the funeral, and all towns people don't really say much about it. The only people that care are Charles and the debt collectors. Flaubert wrote her death as "fundamentally romantic" to add spice to the story. Her death symbolized her freedom from marriage she wanted. The fact that the she committed adultery on so many counts shows her individualism. This individualism could be connected to Jane Eyre in that both of them cannot find love with one person. Jane Eyre goes back to Rochester in the end, but Emma has to force herself to love Charles and fails. Because of this pressure she ends up killing herself. When you compare all stories like Romeo and Juliet, and Jane Eyre it really shows her death as being comedic instead of tragic.
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3 comments:
I feel as though Flaubert wanted to make Emma's death comical. In fact, I think he's making fun of all the hopeless romantics in the world including Shakespeare! And you're right, the allusion to Romeo and Juliet should be one that demonstrates the romanticism of Madam Bovary but, once again, Flaubert turns it into a hilarious moment. I mean, the blind man is singing down the street while she dies!
I agree with Alexis. I think he was kind of mocking the romantic suicide more than anything. This is a good relation to Romeo and Juliet - it really shows how Flaubert really feels about romanticism.
I agree with both Alexis AND Sarah (and, as it turns out, you). You begin this post with a comment about suicide giving "meaning" to a life (a la Romeo & Juliet)--even if that meaning is ultimately tragic--but in the balance of your post you go on to note that there is no real tragedy here (no "meaning" either). The last line of the death scene is probably the most telling: "She ceased to exist." How flat and unemotional can one get. Do we laugh because it's funny? Or because we're made uncomfortable that the author has given no signal as to what the "meaning" of this life might be?
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