I found it remarkable how much society has to do with the
decisions Emma and Charles make. In chapter 10, Emma comes across the duck
hunter and needing to leave abruptly, said she was going to the wet nurse to
pick up her daughter but since the whole community knows what goes on with
everyone else’s children’s whereabouts, the lie is obvious because Emma’s child
has been living at home for several weeks. When Emma goes to ask for an
extension on her loan, other townswomen are spying through the window trying to
figure out the reason for her visit. When Emma is dying, Charles runs around
screaming for help until the whole town knows that Emma is on her death bed and
her husband is rendered useless even though he’s a well-known doctor. In the
very last chapter of the book, the reader can see just how cruel society can be
toward Charles, after Emma’s death. It starts with the debt she has left behind
when people who she never owed money to start demanding payment such as the
piano teacher she never met. While the apothecary’s daughters used to visit
Emma and Charles’ daughter, they stopped coming because his wife decided they
needed to separate themselves from the family because of social status despite
human nature to help friends in need.
Emma and Charles’
Relationship:
There are a number of places where you can clearly see Emma’s
affections for Charles waning. It comes and goes which is difficult to predict,
especially concerning the reasons behind it. Early on, Emma grows more and more
impatient with Charles’ little habits like talking by the fireside while she
eagerly anticipates meeting with Rodolphe. It even embarrasses Emma when
Rodolphe makes jokes about her husband. She shows almost a fear of him when she
asks Rodolphe if he has pistols as she hears her husband arriving home. It
seems a little harsh to consider using a firearm on your own spouse, especially
when you’re the one with the lover, not him. Over this, Rodolphe develops a
superiority complex over Charles, which is especially obnoxious. After the
surgery fiasco, she’s even more dismayed with him because of the fact, “that
she had imagined such a man could be worth something, as though twenty times
over she had not already been sufficiently convinced of his mediocrity.” And it
continued on that, “everything about him irritated her now – his face, his
clothes, what he was not saying, his entire person, his very existence.” As she
reacts harshly to what she perceives as change, even though he hasn’t, he
assumes that biology is the source of her sourness, not the fact that she is
repulsed by him. This assumption causes her to pull even farther away.
Emma and Rodolphe:
It is at this point that she starts trying to make plans to
run away with Rodolphe, completely neglecting the fact that she has a young
daughter to either take with her or risk never seeing again. In fact, Emma
wasn’t planning to bring her daughter with her until Rodolphe brings it up.
Rodolphe seems to be the type of guy who likes to date married women. He
doesn’t want to be married to them or live happily ever after. I think he likes
the thrill of doing something wrong and keeping a secret. He strays from the
normal relationships by grudgingly accepting gifts from her that he doesn’t
want and seems unsure of how to react when Emma professes her deep love to him
constantly. To him, Emma is just another housewife and he’s seen all of this
before. After putting off the departure date, Rodolphe reneges on their plans
to run away together, blaming it on believing it’s not really what Emma wants
and because he isn’t prepared to take care of her child, which devastates Emma
because the idea of leaving has become her new object of desire.
Affection Toward
Daughter:
At strange intervals, Emma shows her daughter a great deal
of affection but between those intervals, she had almost no contact with her
child. The first time we see it is still in chapter 10. What is so troubling is
the fact that before asking to see her daughter, she was thinking about what in
her life made her so unhappy and why it was that she was continuously searching
for happiness. Does she associate her daughter with a grounded happiness, or a
cause of her unhappiness? As an attempt at something close to happiness, Emma
realizes that she must define happiness as something not based on love when it
is said, “all she wanted, now, was to be able to lean on something more solid
than love.”
The Garden:
Emma and Leon used to meet on a particular bench, now Emma
and Rodolphe meet in the same garden. After Rodolphe leaves and she finally
gets over her ailment, or love sickness rather, Charles takes her for short
walks through the garden. The first time they go out, he tries to get her to
sit on the bench and she promptly faints at the memories associated with
Rodolphe and the bench, followed by vomiting, which is a rather strong
reaction. Later, in chapter 14, “she now had an aversion to the garden, and the
shutters on that side always remained closed. She wanted the horse to be sold;
what she had once loved, she no longer liked.” Then, “in early spring, she had
the garden completely redone, from one end to the other,” to symbolize moving
past Rodolphe and, in a sense, taking back her garden, or her love.
Feet:
Feet symbolize strength and stability which paralleled
Charles’ relationship with Emma. When he begins treating a man with a club
foot, it appears as though it is getting better, as his relationship with Emma
did for a short amount of time because they both think he will become famous
for this revolutionary surgery and therefore, wealthier, which is Emma’s main
concern. Instead of receiving compliments from his fellow doctors, Charles is
criticized for operating on a clubfoot, something that didn’t need to be
operated on. The surgery becomes somewhat of a mechanism to achieve fame and
wealth so of course it must fail. After a while, the patient’s foot developed a
case of gangrene and began to spread up the leg. This is symbolic of a virus
slowly spreading through his marriage and an ugliness taking over in their
lives. As he struggles to cure the man, he is also struggling to keep his wife
happy, and therefore keep his marriage from falling apart. He fails at both
tasks. While trying to cure the gangrene, he is more worried about how he looks
in society’s eyes instead of the health and wellbeing of his patient. Also, the
community goes to watch the surgery which seems out of the ordinary because it’s
not like they had observation decks for operating rooms back then. So they must
have all been packed into a little room, which couldn’t be sanitary.
Religion:
The first time Emma thinks she’s going to die, she asks to
be given communion. While taking communion, she has this vision thing.
Described as, “there existed greater delights in place of mere happiness, a
love above all other loves, without end, one that would continue to increase
through all eternity!” I assumed the love described here was a love of God, not
of another person. When Emma truly is on her death bed from ingesting arsenic,
she again turns back to religion and in return, receives an “extraordinary
feeling of peace, the lost ecstasy of her first mystical yearnings, alongside
the first visions of eternal beatitude.” Ironically, when Emma finally dies,
Charles exclaims that “I loathe him – your God!”
The Theater:
Charles takes Emma to the theatre because cultural exposure
is supposed to be good for her, especially because they believe literature is
so harmful because she is impressionable. The theatre is okay, according to the
priest, because music is less harmful than books. At the play, Emma becomes
wrapped up in the story line because it vaguely resembles her adulterous life.
She basically falls in love with the lead actor and imagines them meeting,
falling in love and traveling together. All the while, she’s sitting in the
balcony boxes with Charles, representing her confinement in her marriage while
she desires things outside of their box. Leon is also at the theatre and when
given the opportunity to speak with him privately, Leon confesses that “he had
loved her the moment he first saw her; and he was filled with despair when he
thought what happiness might have been theirs if, by good fortune, meeting
earlier, they had been joined together by an indissoluble bond.” She then
rejects him, just as Rodolphe had done to her and tells him they must never
meet again. Not long after making this resolution, Emma makes plans to see Leon
and begins lying to meet with him once a week while Charles thinks she’s at
piano lessons.
Money Issues:
Trouble starts when Emma orders a bunch of luggage as she
plans her departure with Rodolphe. While meeting Leon once a week, Emma tells
Charles she’s at piano lessons which provides her not only with hours away from
home once a week, but also the money that she would have spent if she was
actually going which instead pays for a hotel room. As issues arise, she masks
them with more lies until “her life was no more than a confection of lies in
which she wrapped her love, as though in veils, to hide it.” While trying to
pay off the debts she accumulated without her husband’s knowledge, she buys on
credit, never pays, borrows more money by signing notes and renews them to
avoid paying so she’s putting off repayment and accumulating interest so the
total amount is increasing dramatically. Monsieur Guillaumin, a notary she has
borrowed money from, tries to seduce her and basically use sex as repayment on
her debts. This doesn’t sit well with Emma as she exclaims, “it’s shameless of
you to take advantage of my distress, monsieur! I’m to be pitied, but I’m not
for sale!” Finally, out of sheer desperation, she asks Rodolphe for three
thousand francs, which of course doesn’t work out.
Emma’s Death:
Finally, because of the debt problem and her many lost
loves, Emma finally decides to commit suicide using arsenic. Her prolonged,
agonizing death parallels the pains of her loves that came in waves, as her
symptoms of arsenic poisoning come in waves of screaming and vomiting. For Emma’s
grave, Charles has a number of ideas ranging from “a broken column with
drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta” and Homais insists upon a
weeping willow as a symbol of melancholy. Charles eventually decides on a
mausoleum, another box to confine her in.
Other miscellaneous
things:
I thought it was interesting that Emma calls Leon “child.”
On Page 269 “pretty things never do any harm.” This is ironic considering Emma
is a pretty thing that does very much harm.
Why was the last song Emma heard
before she died sung by the blind man?
What is the chocolate movement?!
When
Charles finally sees the letters Emma has been keeping in a desk drawer in the
attic, he refuses to believe she was having an affair and instead says “perhaps
they loved each other platonically.” He begins taking on things he knew his
wife enjoyed as if to please her such as patent-leather boots. It was like “she
was corrupting him from beyond the grave.”
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