Barbarians In Madame Bovary

Nietzsche understands power as an intrinsic quality of the individual. He distinguished between ascending life and a life in decline, which defines decadence and weakness. However Nietzsche states that the mediocre majority, even if it is powerful, does not stand for ascending life. But the mediocre are necessary because a high culture can be built only on a strong, consolidated Mediocrity. The spread of democracy and socialism helps the spread of mediocrity and the national state sets itself as an object of worship and reduces everything else to a state of mediocrity. But it is a necessary means to an end inasmuch that it helps in emergence of a higher type of man. Before this can happen there will be the barbarians who break the common masses

While Nietzsche does not refute the empowering value of virtues, he pronounces that these are values of the ‘lowest common denominator’ and imposed on all people while preventing creation of new values. Emma’s adultery can be viewed in the same way in her attempts to experience ‘bliss, passion and ecstasy’. But Nietzsche warns that not every person can create new values and transcend the old ones, and this is true of Emma where her acts of adultery are mediated by notions of romantic love. But by viewing the novel through the parents in the novel, and the parents as the original begetters of the Mediocrity I try to undercut the notions derived from romantic and sentimental literature which prevail so obviously in the novel, to understand the macrocosmic shifting worlds in Madame

To do that, a premise of Emma’s individuality is essential where she tries to break away from the mediocre majority. For this, a slightly subversive not necessarily anti-feminist reading, of Peter Brooks’s work on the body with respect to Madame Bovary can be briefly discussed. Metonymization of the body, its division into parts can be seen as defining characteristics or special features that mark a person. Not psychoanalytically, thus metonymization is simply an exposition of chief characters of a person which distinguish one from the other. Further, the metonymization can also be a signifier for various emotions such as love or economic status. Therefore, Charles’ love is reflected through Emma’s eyes and hair and her clothes and her other ‘refinements’. So if individuality deviates away from Mediocrity, I would like to examine how the parents in the novel disseminate the Mediocrity that circulates in the novel among the characters and therefore contend that Flaubert, in painting portraits masterfully, is not only an endeavor in ‘serious imitation of everyday’ but also an imitation of