"Women-fowls and tree-women metaphors: an ecofeminist perspective on Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary"

Résumé du document

This paper is an ecocritical reading of an extract from Madame Bovary, and assesses the extent to which such a reading is a fruitful demonstration of the relevance of ecocriticism to literary analysis.

Extraits

[...] http://dictionnaires.atilf.fr/dictionnaires/ACADEMIE/ [accessed 7 May 2017] THE KING JAMES BIBLE. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611-Bible/ [accessed 7 May 2017] OUTLINE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS [full text by Sigmund Freud revised edition]. https://archive.org/stream/outlineofpsychoa027934mbp/outlineofpsychoa027934m bp_djvu.txt [accessed 7 May 2017] See Greg Garrard p See Garrrard 2014, p for his definition of ecofeminism. Clark 2011, chapter 11. [...]

[...] Through this remark, I wish to show that with the same ecofeminist methodology, one might come to two fundamentally opposite conclusions: one associating the tree metaphor with a dehumanizing, alienating device, i.e. a reification of women; and another one in which the tree is a medium for some deification of womankind. My stance, as previously mentioned, is that women are described as objects of men's pleasure throughout the passage. Let us study that more in detail in the next and last part of this essay, dealing with the symbolism of (the flux of) seasons. [...]

[...] Another example of this reifying process can be found towards the end of the passage: A clear link is here established between “l'arbre du pressoir” (the allusion is lost in English, where the expression is translated by the shaft of a cider press, not the tree) and the young woman. It sounds as if the last argument of “l'arbre du pressoir” was the key element that convinced the old man to give his daughter away. The girl is then substituted for (and by) a shaft, or literally a tree in French. She is worth a tree; she is a tree. [...]

[...] However, another branch of ecofeminism would be prone to say the very contrary. Indeed, many theoreticians of this new theory emphasize the need to return to the material, to the physical body, as a liberating (rather than alienating) force for women. Or to quote the words of Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2009, p. 143), they insist on “bring[ing] the material, specifically the materiality of the human body and the natural world, into the forefront of feminist theory and practice”. [...]

[...] In the beginning of chapter III, while talking about his dead wife, old Rouault speaks the following words to Charles Bovary: We may remark, first of all, that the conception of Time is mediated through the change of seasons as was the custom of French country people in those days. In the sentence above, the widow's “grief” literally flows away with the seasons: it freezes in winter, melts away in spring, and evaporates in summer. This is significant, I think, to understand the psychology of Flaubert's characters in Madame Bovary. Men and women alike seem to be subjected to the seasons, as if human beings were dominated by their natural instincts, as any other animal living on this Earth. [...]