Death and the post mortem in Flaubert’s works

Abstract

If Madame Bovary was brought to trial on account of its perceived indecencies to public and religious morality, particularly on account of the famous, frenetic cab ride around Rouen and the 'sacrilegious' wake at her bedside, the novel's nineteenth-century censors did not detail Emma Bovary's death pangs among their principal objections. Whether considered a 'fitting' punishment for her adulteries or a sacrifice on the altar of Romantic excess or the orders of Patriarchy, her death remains the unquestioned crux of the novel. As the site of its moral, it also highlights Flaubert's implied ethics of art, to show rather than tell. Indeed, Emma's cruelly detailed agony and almost sadistically protracted death have continued to provide grist to Flaubert criticism. Her final death throes have thus stimulated approaches as diverse as sociocritical, psychoanalytic and feminist, and it is this scene too that has fascinated critics who uphold Flaubert the Realist. Frequently cited are the medical accuracy and meticulous ordering of the various stages of death by arsenic poisoning that Emma endures, an attention to medical detail as precise as that of the almost equally famous club-foot operation at the pivotal point in the novel. Conversely, and with equal conviction, critics arguing for the symbolic or mythic import of Flaubert's Madame Bovary will cite the appearance of the blind beggar in her final moments, the significance of Emma's triple coffin, or the decidedly ironic or gnomic ending of this Flaubert novel as indicative of his later novels and short stories. Little critical attention has been paid, however, to the no less problematic and seemingly non-violent deaths that accompany the more visible, violent and hideously graphic ones in Flaubert's works, not least in Madame Bovary .