Seeing Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary through their hamartia: ambition
-Our true passions are selfish.
Stendhal.
You know it, I know it, even the 19th-century characters with little self-awareness know it; there is one and only thing that ravages the souls of Julien Sorel and Madame Bovary: deep, black, fiery ambition. The mediocrity of life, the commonness of people, the coarse, the ugly, the predictable happenings, all merges into one existence and fuels the passions of our tragic hero and heroine. Nonetheless, the nature and the outcome of the ambitions of the two characters differ fundamentally.
In both of the novels, i.e The Red and the Black, and Madame Bovary, the periods in which the stories take place plays an important role in the characterization of the protagonists and the shaping of their lives. The Napoleonic values, class inequalities, and the political ambition that all these give rise to are integral qualities of Stendhal’s hero. In line with this, Julien’s ambitions are born primarily from his strong belief in these promising ideals and his exclusion in society. In Flaubert’s novel, on the other hand, the mediocrity and the mundaneness of the story is a reflection of the disillusionment of the French society at the time in these revolutionary ideas. Therefore, what he sets out to examine is most importantly the boredom born of this disillusionment, and accordingly, his heroine is stuck between the claws of it- even the ambitions of Emma exist within this boredom and are, essentially, attempts to escape it. As a result, Emma, the imaginative protagonist of the novel is depicted by Flaubert completely immersed in an illusion about her own life as a mock-romantic, quixotic character.
No doubt ambition and determination are the characteristics that mark Julien’s personality; on the one hand, he is a self-centered, sly scoundrel while his success-at least until his execution- seems like the quintessential story of the triumph of individualism mirroring that of Napoleon. It is easy to view Julien as an ambitious Machiavelist opportunist, and to some extent he is indeed so, however, his character proves to be more complex; and his character, so interwoven with his passions, is important to understand in understanding his ambitions. Julien is both a man of imagination and a man of action, who on the one side intoxicated with the passions of success “For many years, scarcely an hour of Julien’s life passed without his telling himself that Bonaparte, an obscure tenant, had made himself master of the world with his sword” (Stendhal, 54) and on the other filled with timidity and tenderness “I have a heart which it is easy to touch. The most commonplace words, if said in a genuine tone, can make my voice broken and even cause me to shed tears” (830); and since this is so “one of the most essential features of the book, is the swing of the pendulum between Julien’s ambition and Julien’s tenderness”(Samuel, 14).
In pursuit of his ambitions, most often Julien represses this sensitive part of his personality as he considers it to be a flaw, a weakness, and a hindrance before his career. Blinded by the vision of life and person that he sets before himself, in his utter ignorance, he does not realize that the oppression he imposes on himself to not to give in to any feelings and not to forget his “duties”, together with his ambitions are what, on the long run, prevents him from making just and rational choices. Pursuing his ambition of realizing the Napoleonic promise, he sacrifices everything in his “inextinguishable will to die a thousand deaths rather than fail to make his fortune” (32), including the authenticity of self, as he chooses willingly a life of inauthenticity that blatantly contradicts the values he believes in.
Julien acts as though he is the “clever calculator” and the “cold exploiter” due to his prideful ambitions but so often he is nothing more than a naive romantic boy who learned about life from books instead of experience, and who takes refuge behind big names such as Rousseau, Napoleon, etc as a means of defense (Gard, 24). Therefore his efforts to realize his ambitions are often comical, tragic, and respectable all at the same time; his whole being is so absorbed with one idea- that is, making of his “colossal fortune”(861)- that it ultimately makes him unable to perceive anything as not related to his social inferiority and his ambition of changing it, which causes him to “banish all pleasures” (102) from his heart. For Julien, everyone is a potential enemy out there to humiliate him and the beauty of a woman is a thing that needs to be hated as it creates a threat to his militaristic determination; flirtation is a “duty” in which he must prove himself his courage, consequently, he does not see people in their true individuality but as mere symbols of their classes, and thus hates them with a prejudice that is the result of his resentment in being excluded. Therefore, Stendhal skillfully manages to create a character whose political ambitions dominates all his existence, to the point of resulting in a double-life in which a deep chasm separates the public and the private existence “What immense difficulties,” he added, “are involved in keeping up this hypocrisy every single minute” (317). The duality, given also in the title of the book is one that marks the difference between the thoughts and the acts of Julien, the hypocrisy in wearing the black robe of the church only with worldly concerns, talking of Napoleon with abhorrence publicly, but carrying the red passion of the Revolution privately.
It is quite ironic that throughout the novel Julien constantly and even obsessively thinks about his acts and carefully plans out what to say, how to look, and when to act but never really evaluates them, his introspections are not for questioning his ambition but for finding efficient ways of actualizing it “As the result of thinking of the victories of Napoleon, he had seen a new element in his own victory. “Yes,” he said to himself, “I have won a battle. I must exploit it” (127). Tragically enough, by working on the actualization of his ambition, he hampers his self-actualization. This idea marks the lack of faith in the Bildung ideal in the novel; Julien, whose interior is invaded by the political ambitions, who seems to make rational choices as an autonomous individual, is guided by psychology that is filled with hatred, resentment, and social insecurity that ultimately causes him to follow blindly his ambitions without realizing in the meantime that he looses what matters “In former days,” Julien said to her, “when I might have been so happy, during our walks in the wood of Vergy, a frenzied ambition swept my soul into the realms of imagination” (861). Consequently, he realizes that what he thought to be fooling others is in fact was fooling of oneself, sacrificing happiness for an ambition to be a part of a society that he abhorred, and blamed of hypocrisy by being a hypocrite himself.
Therefore, in an inverted way, his ambition, which he valued above all else, is his tragedy, and, his tragedy is his redemption. What seems as the dazzling success of Julien, or one should say the lieutenant of Hussars, M. le Chevalier Julien Sorel de Vernaye, is only an illusion. He is only liberated from his double life, from the Machiavellian hypocrisy, and from the constant inner battle when he has nothing more to lose or to gain, namely, nothing more to be ambitious about. It is at this moment that he experiences epiphany “life was no longer boring, he was envisaging everything from a new point of view, he had no longer any ambition” and as he makes his “defense” speech, he remarks “I am under no illusions” (823); this realization has to do with the certainty of the death that awaits him, sure, but more remarkably, Julien is no longer under any illusion concerning the society he lives in and his own life. Hence, he is finally able to experience a passion other than the one for success, that is, of genuine love and happiness. As his death awaits for him, the narrator tells us that with his arms surrounding Mme de Renal “Julien had never experienced moments like this at any period of his whole life” and that “he had never been so mad with love” (838). Thus, Julien is saved, but at a cost of his life.
Madame Bovary, on the other hand, creates a blatant contrast to the grand ambitions of Julien Sorel’s, to his heroic acts, to the dazzling “success” and his epiphanic transformation from that of an idealist to a realist. Flaubert’s aim in writing the novel, i.e examining boredom, inevitably sets the tone of Emma’s passions: they are not only attempts of escaping that boredom, but ironically, are the attempts that doubles and deepens her boredom after each time, until she is completely consumed by them, or more precisely by their unattainability. Indeed, this is the main problem of her ambitions and the unsatisfactory life she has. In Madame Bovary, the banality of the subject matter and prevailing, suffocating presence of mediocrity is stained on all details of life, even to passions “Emma and her provincial neighbors are little in moral stature, limited in intelligence, stunted in their ambitions, sordid in their private thoughts, and ridiculous in their public prating and posturing” (Malcolm, 8).
Emma’s worst nightmare is commonness and as a quixotic character, the heroine is infatuated with the ideas of romantic, over-idealized passions that she borrows from second rate books that are always and only about “love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sobs, tears, and kisses, skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever is, always well dressed, and weeping like tombstone urns” (Flaubert, 85). Indeed, these are the type of events and feelings that Emma tries to mold her life after. From childhood her imagination is caught by the excitements unknown to her “accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins” (84). The absurdity of her search for pleasures is especially highlighted in the sensual stimuli that she gets from the elements of religion through which a spiritual experience is supposed to be offered; she loves “the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the fonts, and the glow of the candles” (83) and religious texts for “the metaphors of betrothed, spouse, heavenly lover, and marriage everlasting” (84).
Intoxicated with extravagant romantic ideals “Yet if somewhere there existed a strong, handsome being, with a valorous nature, at once exalted and refined, with the heart of a poet in the shape of an angel, a lyre with strings of brass, sounding elegiac epithalamiums to the heavens, then why mightn’t she, by chance, find him?” (404), Emma lacks the analytic power that enables awareness concerning both oneself and the outer reality, lacks the discipline that provides self-control and coherence in her actions. But the romantic and easily changeable mind of hers constantly craves for idealistic dreams, irresolute enough to never consummate them fully, discovers the painful chasm between her reality and her passions, often manifested in the contrast drawn between her surroundings and her inner being “The wan light from the windows was fading in gentle undulations. The pieces of furniture, each in its place, seemed to have grown stiller and to be sinking into an ocean of shadow. The fire was out, the clock ticked on, and Emma vaguely marveled that these things should be so calm while within herself she felt such turmoil” (186).
But all the same, the disappointing reality fuels her ambitions: “Her own gentleness goaded her to rebel. The mediocrity of her domestic life provoked her to sensual fantasies, matrimonial affection to adulterous desires” (178) causing a vicious cycle of unsatisfaction that is renewed in each illusionary attempt of achieving happiness. Unsatisfied with everything and filled with failed ambitions, she plunges “deeper and deeper, with her whole being, into the pursuit of pleasure”, and becomes “irritable, greedy, and voluptuous” (393). Indeed, as the story proceeds, her acts become more daring and her frustration bigger, tragically, in a causative relationship. This is how the story is taken further, by the gradual downfall of Emma; and in the swamp of her ambitions she sinks all the more in each of her attempts of fulfilling them: she marries Charles thinking that she at last “possessed the marvelous passion” only to realize herself to be “thoroughly disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, nothing more to feel” (88), after the ball she tries to fake a Parisian life but soon finds no meaning in it, she embarks on affairs, which at first give her so much excitement in which “all was passion, ecstasy, delirium; a blue-tinged immensity surrounded her, heights of feeling sparkled under her thoughts, and ordinary life appeared only in the distance” (248), later ends with the same ennui as she discovers “all the platitudes of marriage” (412) in those adulterous affairs. Her unsatiated ambitions of experiencing “bliss,” “passion,” and “intoxication,” (82) turn into a disillusionment taking the form of physical sickness, contempt towards her domestic life, and a never-ending yearning; she becomes filled “with desires, with rage, with hatred” (176).
In Madame Bovary, the nature of ambition changes, it becomes something different than the ambition of Julien which appears as a force causing action, movement, and change. Because fundamentally, Emma’s ambitions are related to dreams and boredom more than they are to actions. When looked closely, nothing happens in Madam Bovary, not in the true sense of the word, we find Emma almost just as the same at the beginning. And this is too, to some extent, a part of her tragedy: even though she passionately dreams, and takes decisions to fulfill them- by marrying, by taking lovers, by going into debt, etc- she ultimately remains inert without making a “real” change in her life, nor does she experience any inner development. One does not see the redemption that comes with tragedy as with Julien; she does not attain self-knowledge, does not realize her errors, her self-deception, and the unattainability of her idealized dreams. Indeed, even her suicide is one of her over-sentimental acts, “in an ecstasy of heroism” she resolves to end her life but even that remains unconsummated. Ultimately “her physical desires, her cravings for money, and the fits of melancholy born of her passion” (177) proves to be nothing more than the things that bring her tragic downfall. Her portrait freezes in this quote “despite her flightiness, Emma did not look happy, and the corners of her mouth were usually marked by those stiff creases that line the faces of old maids and people of failed ambitions.” (200).
References
Bowie, Malcom. Introduction to Madame Bovary. Oxford University Press. New York, 2004.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways. Penguin Classics. New York, 2010.
Gard, Roger. Introduction to The Red and The Black. Penguin Classics. New York, 2002.
Stendhal. The Red and The Black: A Chronicle of 1830. E.P. Dutton and Co. New York, 1916.
Samuel, Horace B. Introduction to The Red and The Black. E.P. Dutton and Co. New York, 1916.
