Gemma Bovery: Oversexed or Balanced?

After finishing Gemma Bovery, it’s interesting to flip back through the novel and glance over the pages. There are many things of note, such as the inconsistent layout, fonts and depictions of characters, but what catches my eye the most are things that seem mostly consistent – specifically the way couples appear in bed and the amount of time characters spend imagining, recreating or engaging in sexual encounters. In this manner, Gemma Bovery thrives on the disconnect or connect of lovers, and I can’t help but question if this constant attention to sex (or the lack thereof) is balanced in the text or overstated.

For example, whenever Charles and Gemma are depicted in bed, both parties are shown in different states of mind (5.5, 6.1, 7.7, 19.3, 44.3-4, 68.3, 79.1). There never seems to be a moment where we see a sexual connection between them in their own bed. Eventually this disconnect is shown between Joubert and his wife as well (68.4, 90.1-4) to suggest the parallel of Madame Joubert’s and Charles’ affair that Simmonds points out in the interview with Paul Gravett. Simmonds intended (and succeeded) to depict other characters besides Gemma as unfaithful, lustful and out of line. Joubert goes so far as to imagine himself and Gemma in bed together (84.4), yet sexual desires are implied even farther than this. When Patrick takes Gemma out to dinner after they reacquaint, the eyes of every man in the restaurant, many of whom are with other women, are fixated on Gemma (87.1). A few pages later, Mark Rankin visits Gemma to check on her stability, and ends up caressing her shoulder (91.15) and suggesting that she might “let” him have sex with her as a means to pay off her debts (91.16). In showing us a consistent line of unfaithful men (or men who at least acknowledge their attraction to a beautiful and alluring woman), Simmonds creates an interesting balance of sexual desire in the text – a balance that detracts from or, in many ways, lessens the impact of Gemma’s adultery.

Yet as Simmonds seemingly places everyone in the community in which Gemma lives on the same plane of sexual desire to help justify Gemma’s actions, the text then becomes something of an oversexed depiction of life and an example of how marriage lacks this sexual desire. Perhaps Simmonds doesn’t want to depict Gemma as any more wrong than anyone else, something that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary may or may not do as well (I’d be interested to know if anyone’s read Flaubert’s work and knows whether or not Emma Bovary is singled out as the adulterer). And does Simmonds showing of numerous characters’ sexual desire in Gemma Bovery help to balance or weigh Gemma's actions, or simply fill the world with sex to “sell” this story in our present day culture that is consciously sexually-driven?