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Rethinking Madame Bovary's motives for committing suicide.(Critical Essay)

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From: The Modern Language Review
Date: 20050401
Author:Paskow, Jacqueline Merriam

Rethinking Madame Bovary's Motives for Committing Suicide by Jacqueline Merriam Paskow

Unlike most nineteenth-century novels of female adultery in which the heroine's unhappy end is a function of her having broken social taboos, Gustave Flaubert'Madame Bovary presents us with a heroine whose suicide, contrary to the reader's expectation, cannot be explained in terms of any social or personal havoc caused by her adulteries. By contesting the expected motives for her suicide--indeed viewing them as so many red herrings laid by Flaubert--this article re-poses and seeks to ...

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