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World Literature Essay Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published to critical acclaim and public scandal during Second Empire France (1852–1870). Government censors cited the novel for offending public morality and religion, though prosecution and defense both acknowledged the artist’s achievement. Flaubert was tried and acquitted for a compelling portrait of his heroine’s unhappy marriage, adulterous love affairs, financial ruin, and suicide. The creation of a powerful and profoundly conflicted male imagination, Emma Rouault Bovary is a polarizing figure. She embodies yet challenges archetypal images of women (virgin/mother, madonna/whore, angel/siren) arising from male experience. She calls into question education, marriage, and motherhood, institutions that inculcate these dichotomous views of women. Thomas Manns Death in Venice opens, like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, on the scene of Aschenbachs creative composure shattered by an unfamiliar nervous excitement. As Aschenbachs mind spins unproductively, we sense immediately that Venice itself will be ultimately just a picturesque exterior, the backdrop to a story whose cardinal events belong to a mental world– to what Mann called â€Å"reality as an operation of the psyche† (Mann 29). Thomas Mann has spared no allusion to suggest that the hero of the story resembles its author at least with regard to his literary production. Yet Aschenbach is said to have achieved in earnest the classical style befitting a conqueror of the abyss the very style which Flaubert parodies in telling the tragic story of Madame Bovarys disillusion and downfall. The societal scandal of Madame Bovary is as remote now as the asceticism of the spirit practiced by Flaubert and Mann, who seem almost self indulgent. Emma seems as boisterous as Aschenbach. With these heroes the novel enters the realm of inactivity, where the protagonists are bored, but the reader is not. Poor Emma, destroyed by usury rather than love, is so vital that her stupidities do not matter. A much more than average sensual woman, her capacity for life and love is what moves us to admire her, and even to love her, since like Flaubert himself we find ourselves in her. Why is Emma so unlucky? If it can go wrong, it will go wrong for her. Flaubert, like some of the ancients, believed there were no accidents. Ethos is the daimon, your character is your fate, and everything that happens to you starts by being you. Rereading, we suffer the anguish of beholding the phases that lead to Emmas self-destruction. That anguish multiplies despite Flauberts celebrated detachment, partly because of his uncanny skill at suggesting how many different consciousnesses invade and impinge upon any single consciousness, even one as commonplace as Emmas. Emmas I is an other, and so much the worse for the sensual apprehensiveness that finds it has become Emma. Whenever Emma is seen in purely sensuous terms, Flaubert speaks of her with a delicate, almost religious feeling, the way Mann speaks of Aschenbach. Flaubert punished himself harshly, in and through Emma, by grimly mixing in a poisonous order of provincial social reality, and an equally poisonous order of hallucinated play, Emmas fantasies of an ideal passion. The mixing in is cruel, formidable, and of unmatched aesthetic dignity. Emma has no Sublime, but the inverted Romantic vision of Flaubert persuades us that the strongest writing can represent ennui with a life-enhancing power. Flaubert despised realism and said so over and over throughout his life; he loved only the absolute purity of art. Madame Bovary has little to do with realism, and something to do with a prophecy of impressionism, but in a most refracted fashion. All of poor Emmas moments are at once drab and privileged. At moments of more overpowering sensuality there even emerges a â€Å"formula† for Emmas sensual intensities, a characteristic style of sensation which, as we know from Flauberts other works, wasnt invented for Emma alone but rather seems to be a basic formula for Flaubertian sensation in general. Sexuality in Flaubert is frequently expressed in terms of a rippling luminosity. â€Å"Here and there,† Flaubert writes as part of his description of Emmas first happy sexual experience (with Rodolphe in the forest near Yonville), â€Å"all around her, in the leaves and on the ground, patches of light were trembling, as if humming-birds, while in flight, had scattered their feathers† (Flaubert 56). Much later, as she lies alone in bed at night enjoying fantasies of running away with Rodolphe, Emma imagines a future in which â€Å"nothing specific stood out: the days, all of them magnificent, resembled one another like waves; and the vision [cela] swayed on the limitless horizon, harmonious, bluish, and bathed in sun† (Flaubert 94). A world heavy with sensual promise (and no longer blindingly illuminated by sexual intensities) is, in Flaubert, frequently a world of many reflected lights blurred by a mist tinged with color.