Rethinking Madame Bovary's Motives for Committing Suicide

Abstract

Unlike most nineteenth-century novels of female adultery in which the heroine's unhappy end is a function of her having broken social taboos, Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" presents us with a heroine whose suicide, contrary to the reader's expectation, cannot be explained in terms of any social or personal havoc caused by her adulteries. By contesting the expected motives for her suicide-indeed viewing them as so many red herrings laid by Flaubert-this article re-poses and seeks to re-answer the question of what "Madame Bovary" is ultimately about.