Madame Bovary as Tragic Anti-Hero

In the literary world, tragic heroes are known to be ambitious individuals who, by some tragic flaw, find themselves meeting a tragic end. Tragic heroes have been around since the ancient Greeks, and have been developed throughout Shakespeare and writers today. The tragic hero is a popular archetype for the ambitious writer to choose, and often gets good reviews by an audience if the character is written well.

I want to propose a new archetype in order to better understand the nature of Madame Bovary's character. Upon my first sketches of this journal, I wanted to write on Bovary as a tragic hero, but I quickly realized that she has no heroic qualities whatsoever! I found myself at a loss in finding an appropriate title for this character.

In my Critical Reading class with Donovan, we defined anti-hero as being a person with heroic ambition, but unlike the hero, directs that ambition toward their own benefit, rather than the benefit of others. I think this definition fits snugly on the character Bovary, who has almost no desire to appease the people around her. Even her daughter, she writes off and treats with complete disregard.

In fact, I find it necessary to take a whole paragraph to discuss Bovary's blatant self interest. From the beginning, she wants only to leave the city in which she lives, burdening Charles and placing guilt on him until she gets what she wants. Arriving in the new city, she is then confronted with Leon, a strapping young bachelor in his late twenties, early thirties. After Charles has so graciously treated his wife to a new home, almost without a second thought, cheats on him with Leon, if not for anything but the sexual benefits. Charles is far from poverty, and in fact has more financial benefits and esteem than Leon, but the taste of new fruit is too tempting for Bovary, and she ends up riding the beast with two backs anyway.

There is no end to the evidence of Bovary as an anti hero. The argument that she is a tragic anti hero comes from her flaw of insatiability. It is because her lack of satisfaction that Bovary is driven to total madness in the face of the ennui in her life. Never being satisfied, she swallows the arsenic, putting herself to a quick end. For this reason, I think she's a tragic anti hero, if that's even a thing.

It is now.