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Watermarks
How to Pave the Road to Your Damnation
by John DeLong
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In his song, "Instant Karma!," John Lennon shouts an ominous warning
to his listeners: "Instant karma's gonna get you / gonna knock you right
in the head / better get yourself together, darlin' / pretty soon your
gonna be dead... " The subject of his scorn may have been socially conservative
Americans bent on the abolition of social progressives, but clearly anyone
can gleam a bit of wisdom from such blunt counsel. Even Gustav Flaubert's
eponymous heroine, Emma Bovary, may have been able to escape her grim cycle
of misfortune, disappointment, and utter despair had she understood the
relatively simple Hindu law of karma Lennon alludes to here, which states:
"Any action whatsoever is the effect of a cause and is in its turn the
cause of an effect" (Zaehner 4). For according to this law, every odious
act committed by Emma Bovary had an equally odious impact on her future;
therefore one might suppose that, had she done enough good, or performed
enough tasks for the benefit of someone other than herself, her ultimate
fate would not have been so terrible. As Flaubert has it, however, Emma
Bovary's myriad, abhorrent acts of deceit, adultery, and self-serving manipulation
of even those who care for her eventually lead her onto that dark, cyclical
path that so often ends, as in this case of Madame Bovary's doomed
protagonist, with tragedy.
Traditionally the Hindi faith recognizes karma as a force collected throughout
one's life that serves as catalyst for the events and situations one will
experience in the next life. To understand the impact of karma on Emma
Bovary, one must examine her as having lived three distinct lives: daughter,
wife, and mistress. During her first existence, that of daughter, Emma
performs no valid wrongs; that is to say that such matters as her "innocent"
lies created while in confessionals are (according to the Judeo-Christian
ethic) sins, but harmless and incapable of harnessing any real evil. Her
thoughts may become "corrupted by the nonsense of popular pseudo-Romantic
literature and art" (Tillett 4), but according to the law of karma it is
her actions that ultimately determine her fate. Though Emma "rebelled against
the mysteries of the Christian faith" (Flaubert 34) and "became increasingly
irritated with its discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature" (34),
she performed no real sin. Her less than virtuous thoughts certainly cast
gloomy shadows over her destiny, but have no direct impact on what is to
come.
Emma escaped her first life free of any severe transgression,
but also left it devoid of any notably honorable act on her part. This
lack of any karma whatsoever, neither good nor evil, gives birth to Emma's
second existence. This new life to which she has transcended can only be
defined as utterly dull. She is wife to a mediocre husband whose "conversation
was as flat as a sidewalk" (35) and "traversed by a steady stream of the
most commonplace ideas" (35). Much to Emma's chagrin, there was no lavish
honeymoon to exotic lands filled with adventure after her relatively ordinary,
pastoral wedding. Even her meals become banal gatherings during which she
becomes so bored that she would "lean on her elbow and idly make lines
in the oilcloth with her knife" (56). This lack of anything substantial
in her life is directly related to the lack of karma in her previous life.
She hopes for a "sudden event which would give a new turn to... her life
without elegance, adventure, and love" (Auerbach 133). It would seem that
Emma Bovary is looking for fate to present itself to her without her having
to do anything at all. She begins to seek an end to the "cheerlessness,
unvaryingness, grayness, staleness," and "airlessness" of her life (133),
yet performs no actions that may improve her situation insofar as the law
of karma is concerned.
Emma Bovary's aforementioned, highly depraved nature coupled with
a faulty belief that she deserves more than she has eventually leads her
to perform an act that sets in motion the great pendulum of karma; she
sends it swaying, however, opposite the direction of the worthy. Scholar
of the Hindi faith, R.C. Zaehner notes that, in accordance with the law
of karma, "every sacred act produces its appropriate result or 'fruit'"
(59), and no act is more widely accepted as genuinely sacred than that
of sexual intercourse. Emma, falling prey to her own base sexual desire,
performs this sacred act in the most wretched way imaginable: within the
clutches of a man other than her husband. Unfortunately for Madame Bovary,
Zaehner goes on to explain: "Similarly a rite incorrectly performed will,
by the same ineluctable law, bring about catastrophe" (59).
There were, of course, opportunities at every turn for Emma to redeem
herself, to negate the bad karma with good. She had only to perform enough
good deeds, enough acts of virtue and courage, to cleanse her of the vile,
unclean, "evil-smelling" inequity emanating from her as a result of the
botched rite (59). Alas, Emma does nothing of the sort. She begins a "love"
affair with this other man and performs the unholy act again and again;
with each filthy encounter leading her further down the twisted path of
the damned. She ignores her only daughter, deceives her loving husband,
and blossoms in the throes of what she believes to be a glorious passion.
There is no salvation for Emma Bovary in this life. There is no baptism
in the water of the pure. When finally her degenerate partner in the adulterous
affair ends the relationship, she is overcome with a near deadly brain
fever brought on by shame, disappointment, and sorrow (D'Aurevilly 54),
not to mention by a tremendous collection of bad karma.
Emma is then reborn into what can be called her final existence.
She begins this life stricken with an overwhelming sense of malaise and
an ostensible need for repentance. Alas, her laughable attempt to save
her grimy soul is too little, too late. She "vainly sought a consolation
and a strength in religion... through a ridiculous and stupid village priest"
(55). Rather than performing any act of good, Emma seeks to unburden herself
of her bad karma simply by confessing. Even the priest whom she seeks her
solace in, however, veritably ignores her selfish efforts to alter the
path of her destiny. Emma also mangles an attempt at the ritual of prayer,
addressing her god in "the same sweet words she had formerly murmured to
her lover in the ardor of adultery" (Flaubert 186). She also takes to excessive
acts of charity, but this short-lived streak of supposed goodness is the
result of a selfish pride in her "devotion." Flaubert informs the reader
that during this time "it was no longer possible to distinguish selfishness
from charity in her, or corruption from virtue" (187).
Ironically, it is within the very house of the religion she turned
to for refuge from the buffets of her karma that she begins anew the rituals
of evil. Surrounded by the sanctity of the Parvis Notre-Dame, Emma Bovary
once again gives in to her primal urges. She leaves the cathedral with
the man who will become yet another partner in adultery, but not before
consecrating the unholy acts to come by "dipping her finger in the holy
water" on the way out (210). Within minutes after leaving the church, she
is engaging in what should be performed as the most sacred of acts in the
back of a carriage with a man other than her husband... one can imagine
her fingers still damp with holy water, her hair and clothes still smelling
of incense.
In order to maintain her relationship with this other man Emma abundantly
pours lies upon and painstakingly manipulates her husband. Her previously
mentioned sense of malaise is not so much remedied as embraced, with Emma
Bovary seeming to revel in her bad karma, "her gluttony, her taste for
lies, her walks through the red-light district, (and) the voluptuousness
and sadness of the hotel room with its faded elegance that reeks of decomposition"
(Brombert 74). At this point, Emma has lost any control she may have ever
had over her destiny. The pendulum of karma has swung so far away from
the arch of good that even several selfless acts of virtue would be hard-pressed
to negate the evil oozing from Emma's very essence. The first encounter
with the hideous beggar, who is an embodiment of the bad karma Emma has
collected (he has a ghastly skin disease and pus-ridden, eyeless eye sockets),
is a sign that Emma is inescapably chained in her ride to damnation (74).
In a pathetic show of fearing her fate, Emma is shown "flinging to the
beggar her last five-franc piece, as though money had exorcising virtue"
(75).
It is not long before Emma begins to reap the consequences of the
evil seeds she has sown. Having borrowed money she had no way of repaying
to fund her abominable acts, Emma finds herself in financial ruin when
the lender comes to collect. The man she had been so copiously engaged
in sexual relations with turns his back on her when she goes to him for
assistance. Emma becomes so desperate that she goes to her first partner
in immoral activity for help, but he, too, turns her away. Emma, after
asking for help from other men about town who seem to require sexual reimbursement
that she is ironically unwilling to pay, sees no way of escaping her horrible
fate: her immoral activities will come to light for all to see. Emma Bovary,
pathetically fearful of this, makes a foolish attempt at dodging the effects
of her bad karma by ingesting arsenic, but the shame, emotional destruction,
and grim future she was facing were all results of her previous existence;
therefore every immoral act she had performed since leaving the cathedral
had yet to be accounted for!
Emma Bovary could not evade the karma she had collected. After ingesting
the arsenic, she spends an excruciating length of time in a state of unequaled
physical agony. Emma writhes in the torturous throes of her karma. The
unholy rituals, the lies, the manipulation, the adultery, all of it comes
back to torture Emma in the last bit of her horribly bungled life. After
she dies, black ooze pours forth from her mouth: a representation of the
last bit of awful karma excreting itself from her body. This posthumous
expulsion of palpable evil shows that even in dying she was unable to pay
for all of her wicked actions. Had she not performed so many evil acts
in this last existence perhaps she would have died peaceably. Had she not
performed so many evil acts in the life before she would have never faced
the situation that drove her to suicide. Had she accumulated enough good
karma perhaps her fate would not have been so terribly tragic.
Emma's soul was pitted and etched by the raging flames of an unimaginably
wretched karma. No pity can be afforded to her, however, since this karma
was birthed by her, tended to by her, and eventually even embraced by her.
This Hindu law of action had a direct bearing on every aspect of Emma's
life: from lack of good karma during her young existence that led to her
mediocre existence as dissatisfied wife to the overabundance of negative
karma obtained through deceit, manipulation, and adulterous acts in her
later existences that led to her dreadful end. In the science fiction movie,
The
Empire Strikes Back, a remarkably wise character, Yoda, says, "Once
down the dark path you travel forever will it dominate your destiny." One
is not likely to find a more apparent case of a soul trudging down this
dark path to its horrendous end than that of Emma Bovary.
Bibliography
Auerbach, Eric (1966). "Madame Bovary." In B.F. Bart (ed.), Madame
Bovary and the Critics (pp 132-143). New York: New York University
Press.
Brombert, Victor (1966). The Novels of Gustav Flaubert: A Study
of Themes and Techniques. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
D'Aurevilly, Barbey (1986). M. Gustav Flaubert. In Laurence M. Porter
(ed.), Critical Essays on Gustav Flaubert (pp 50-57). Boston: G.K.
Hall & Co.
Flaubert, Gustav (1857). Madame Bovary (Lowell Bair, trans.).
New York: Bantam Books
Kershner, Irvin (Director), and Lucas, George (Producer). (1980).
The
Empire Strikes Back Hollywood: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
Lennon, John. "Instant Karma!"
Tillett, Margaret (1966). "On Reading Madame Bovary." In B.F. Bart
(ed.), Madame Bovary and the Critics (pp 1-25). New York: New York
University Press.
Zaehner, R.C. (1966). Hinduism. New York: Oxford University
Press.
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