Madame Bovary And The Death Of Ivan Ilych Essay

What is the nature of man? Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych portray not only a glimpse of what man’s nature is, but also in so doing provide a criticism of it. Both works look into the life of people who want more out of life, and yet ironically what they desire only adds shallowness and not meaning to their existence. Whereas Flaubert’s Madam Bovary shows the depressing end of a woman consumed by passions, Tolstoy gives hope with a dying man’s last days where he gets an epiphany of what the nature of man should be. Emma is Madame Bovary, a young woman who lived in her world of romantic fantasy. She came from the country and read romantic novels when she was in the convent, and believed in earnest that love and marriage will make her happy. But after marrying a simple-minded and incompetent doctor Charles, she grows disillusioned as she sinks in the routine activities of daily life. She wanted romance, passion, excitement, and although her husband loves her and adores her, she wanted more. She wanted the latest trends in fashion and she felt that she was born unjustly to a lower class than was supposed to be for her, the aristocrat. But Emma does nothing to earn the admiration or the respect of the people she admired: she can copy their outward mannerism and clothes, but she does not have the refinement or the manners to be truly aristocratic. She merely believes in her fantasy world where the aristocrats live in luxury and a life of excitement. She was ambitious, but did not have any means to acquire her material cravings but for using her beauty and body. She gets into extramarital affairs because she finds her married life dull, even when she gives birth to a daughter. She does not take care of her daughter because she wanted a boy, and instead romps off with Rodolphe Boulanger, and does not care what other people say. She is oftentimes indiscreet and cares not of her reputation or her husband’s. Emma is self-centered and she had a sense of entitlement and superiority which had no basis but drove her to act without a thought to the consequences of her actions. She is, in a way, always likening herself to playing a role that sparks her imagination at the moment: a young woman being married to a foreign doctor, a middle class with a noble’s spirit, a bored wife having an affair, a lover, a woman of rich tastes. She could not accept that her reality was the norm and that her fantasies were exaggerated, dramatic ideals. When she was young she wanted the same romance she read in her romantic novels. When she became exposed to the high society at the ball she wanted to become like them. When she saw the melodramatic opera â€Å"Lucia de Lammemoor† she adopts the character and like her commits suicide. She drove herself to debt by buying expensive items which she sometimes gave as gifts to her lovers even when she had no means of paying for these in the first place. She signed promissory notes even when she did not understand them because the merchant Lheureux played with her fantasy that she was meant for the finest things in life. When her first lover leaves her, she is distraught and falls gravely ill. With her second affair she acts as the man, covering the costs for the affair and taking charge of where, when, and how they will meet. Her debts pile up as she purchases more and more to fill the gaping hole in her being. She believed she needed passion and excitement, but it seems that what she really needed was purpose and direction, for her life held no meaning. Her innocent tendency towards romance is transformed into full blown moral corruption as she was unable to hold herself together and keep her urges and desires under control. Emma is not productive, she has no desire to improve herself or her skills, and she does not nurture her relationships with her husband, her daughter, not even with her lovers. She just saw them as means of escape from her dull life, and when they fall short of her expectations she just drops them. When the consequences of her actions finally catch up on her and her world becomes smaller and smaller, she decides to play a role – that of a tragic heroine and kills herself with swallowing arsenic. She could not face up to the trouble that she has caused and decides to escape rather than take responsibility as she could not imagine a life of poverty and shame – although her whole life she was never wealthy and she lived a scandalous life with her known affairs. Up until then she saw her life differently – believed she had wealth, pride and breeding because that was what she wanted, but sadly these did not bring her the happiness she sought. Emma had a good life but was not able to appreciate it with her preoccupation with the things she did not have. By focusing her energies on her fantasies of wealth and romance she failed to live her life to the fullest, and for the most part it could be said that she was living in a dream and when she woke to find herself in the gravity of her real life situation, she killed herself to escape, but there was no going back to her fantasy world, and no redemption as even after her death her husband discovers her infidelity which kills him and her daughter sent off to work on a cotton mill. In her, we see the nature of man as ruled by emotions, desires and appetites, without caution or control, without compassion to others. Emma was not able to see and recognize the humanity in her, all the time she was acting out, even her motherly functions, her martyr facade. She never truly enjoyed life because she never saw anything and anyone beyond their appearances, and never learned to appreciate the little things that make life worthwhile. The theme of life and death is also examined in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, where he uses the characters to critique the artificial life that people live in society characterized by materialism and shallowness. Tolstoy puts forward a picture of society with striking honesty and insight: individuals do not behave as individuals but rather aspire to be like everybody else, trying to live a correct life as appropriated by norms, striving to have a comfortable life accentuated with material wealth even if their spiritual life and human relationships are dry and empty. With his narrative, Tolstoy then poses the question of what is important in life, how life should be led, and ultimately, how important life is and how people take it for granted by deluding themselves into believing they are exempt from death. Most of the characters in the story are portrayed as materialistic social climbers, who equated material wealth and position in society as determinants of success and happiness. Ivan, his wife and daughter, his supposed friends, all troubled themselves with appearances – they were preoccupied with proper decorum and attires, of looking well off, of having power over others. But these are all temporal, for these things do not really matter in the face of death. Ivan finds out that what is important is living one’s life according to one’s own vindication, not blindly following trends in society which results in a shallow, routine, meaningless life. He belatedly understood that empathy and recognizing the individual as an individual with thoughts and emotions rather than as subjects with mere faces is what mattered in life, that to live humanly is what gives life its meaning. Only Gerasim and his son are the ones in the story that have empathy and humanity in them – in Gerasim it is made obvious by his understanding that everybody, regardless of position or appearance, are all equal, with the same fate waiting for them in the end, especially when he said, â€Å"We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble? †. The son, on the other hand, is the only one in Ivan household who showed any feelings for his dying father – he took his father’s hand and kissed it while crying. This can be taken as the boy was young; he was still innocent and not yet tainted with the demands of society. Ivan himself was dissatisfied with the boy because he behaved differently from him, his wife and daughter, but in his last days it was his son who showed him that there is a human soul in the world who regarded his life important. Also, this depiction of the innocence in childhood is mirrored in Ivan’s experiences: the only times he felt truly alive was when he was a boy, before he went to Law School. Being assimilated into society, he found that he trapped himself into a prison of standards, and lived a largely artificial life. Tolstoy showed that an artificial life is characterized by materialism and social climbing. At the beginning of the story, we find Ivan dead but his friends were chiefly concerned with the position that he will be vacating, the promotions and changes in the workplace and what they have to gain from it, all the while denying to themselves that they too will end up like Ivan sooner or later, that they will die eventually. They act as though they could live forever and concern themselves with the trivial everyday things. Even in his wake, his friends put a show of grievance because it was what was required of â€Å"friends†, but were more interested in playing bridge. They did not see the inevitability of death and suffering, of the hollowness of their lives. Peter Ivanovich, Ivan’s perceived closest friend, somehow felt disturbed and concerned, but rushed to quell these feelings because he reasoned he was alive and Ivan dead and there should be no reason to â€Å"hinder their spending the evening agreeably†. When he was still alive, Ivan himself saw how he had lived superficially in the way his doctors treated him, as though he was some subject whose sentence they hold in their hands, his life holding no real importance or meaning to the doctors. What mattered to the doctors was their perception of themselves that they feel important and significant by virtue of their occupation; that is what gave them satisfaction and purpose. Ivan himself acted the same way many times in his life – with the accused brought before him he reduced them to facts on paper and did not see them as individuals, he got married for it was expected of a man of his station and chose a bride not out of love or devotion but out of the social status it will benefit him. In the end, the story teaches that material wealth and position in society are not what matters. In the face of death, one looks back at the quality of life that he has led, and the most precious times would be the ones he felt most alive, when he was free and himself. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Madame Bovary teach us the nature of man as susceptible to fantasies of the happiness that wealth and material possessions can bring, but in reality these are more likely to corrupt us than give us real happiness. The nature of man is that of desire – desire to achieve in all aspects of life, and in this man should always apply himself to make himself a better person. However, desire for achievement is different from greed. Achievement should not only be limited to the professional and material aspects of life, but more importantly to the relationships with others. The meaning and purpose of life is not about the material achievement but how well one lived his life. Man’s nature reflects that of his society, and society that of man, as the individual is part of the whole and the whole consists of its parts. Both protagonists were deeply influenced by their time and what was regarded as important then. They have let others dictate, influence and take advantage of them, and by not taking responsibility d control over their lives they eventually found themselves in situations they did not dream of. This could have only come up to those who did not examine their actions and the kind of life they lead. Emma and Ivan believed that wealth and material things can bring happiness, but they both ended up dead – although here the stories’ protagonists differ. Whereas Emma chooses suicide to escape her suffering, Ivan comes to terms with his death and accepts it. Although Emma’s final act was of her own decision, we cannot say that she was finally taking things in her hands as before that she was always feeling hindered and trapped by her circumstances. She did not have a realization of what brought down her downfall, even in her final days she did not know what held meaning and not. Her suicide, like all her actions before, was an attempt at escaping reality, and this time she succeeded. Emma was not able to redeem herself, nor was she able to see what would make her life happy, but Ivan was changed and in his last days was able to make sense of his suffering. Tolstoy showed that no matter how sullen or materialistic a man behaved and lived, there is still hope for him to change as long as he lives. That man’s innate nature is towards living an authentic life, towards goodness, and that even if society is corrupt and superficial, pure love and humanity also exists, and it is always within us, and also in our capacity, to choose what kind of life to lead.