Madam Bovary Analysis

meals. This is why the readers feel the violence of history, but not the protagonists. Anything goes seems to be a valid principle to cross the existence, they have some sense of malaise and curiosity but they are too scared to pursuit, they love but in a very pale manner, they don’t burn of earnest emotion, are not intimate with each other, with any excess of life. They rather assume a numb approach towards the surrounding and by so doing they dry inside. As if moved by a Daoist refusal of social and political engagement, they finally get used to the tragedy, sitting in a courtyard or hiding within the crowd they see it happening, it is not that they are politically unaware but emotionally uninvolved. It is only when China realizes that the

It is a fact that in postmodern China the journey of self-exploration, self-scrutiny, the psychological and contemplative reflections over the existence at the moment is essentially a female phenomenon with female protagonists. The response to Flaubert’s adulterous Madam Bovary, Dostoyevsky’s rebellious Ana Karenina, Murakami’s troubled Naoko is to be found in Wang Anyi, Chen Ran, Lin Bai, Chi Li, Mian Mian, Wei Hui. However my attention is not placed on who wrote what, I am not interested in gender analysis or feminist concern, but I will focus on the content of the narration which is an alternative writing no so much to the male narrative as to the mainstream narrative based on longstanding emotional anesthesia. Narrative enters now a different dimension, more than ever the line between literature and fiction comes loose, directly cutting into the state of the subject. Fiction here contain more truth than fact, the journey into the inner-self is dramatic because it’s not bound to the past but it’s happening all along, scattered between disjointed space, one own room of solitude and a desperate longing for the other. To some extent female writers have succeed where until now male writers have failed. Unveil the self. Different from the visionary

The CR doesn’t appear in its historical expressions but as personal dimension, the Four Clean-ups Movement set the stage for her loneliness, the fear of darkness, that awkward feeling of being always superfluous. Growing up was sad and a shameful experience, every touch felt vulgarly brutal, yet the remembrance of those years helps the writer to become aware of the significance of her inadequacy, estranged and disconnected to both the repressive collectivism and the shallow capitalism. The protagonists by and large are urban educated female venturing far beyond themselves; Duomi, Niuniu, Wang Qiyao, Coco, Hong using their bodies as the tool of their experience perceive a world denied to their narrative brothers but in the end this world closes on them too, revealing the same desperate loneliness. The background stage is very desolating though this time to fail are not the primary organs of socialization, family and school, but the male world. Men are broken. In Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby, Coco shares her life with Tian Tian who is a frustrated artist and an impotent man, in Mian Mian’s Candy, Hong linked herself with Saining who is an heroin addicted and an idler. Fathers are absent (Lin Bai’s One Person War) or violent (Chen Ran’s A Private Life) sided by loving mothers who disappeared to soon or emotionally frigid. Teased from their classmates, neglected by distant