55 pages • 1 hour read
Madame Bovary
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Themes
The Gap Between Fantasy and Reality
Content Warning: This section discusses suicide, racism, and domestic violence.
In Madame Bovary, Flaubert explores the gap between fantasy and reality. Ultimately, characters in this novel are ruined by their inability to reconcile reality with fantasy and desire.
Emma Bovary projects all her fantasies onto reality. As a girl and a woman, Emma is not permitted to be a part of the world around her. She is sequestered away from reality, first in her schooling in the convent, then by her father. This was common for young women of a certain class in the 19th century. Emma is expected to become a wife and a mother, so real-world experiences are seen as superfluous in the development of a woman. Therefore, Emma has no other option but to experience the world through her novels. These novels give her an unrealistic understanding of human behavior, love, and life. Emma develops a rich interior fantasy world without realizing that these fantasies can’t and don’t exist in the real world. She gets married to Charles without knowing him well because she is so committed to finding the love of romantic literature, but she is quickly disillusioned by marriage. Emma is chronically unhappy because no real experience is good enough for her because real-world experiences are not at the same level of drama and extreme emotion that novels express. Because Emma can’t reconcile her reality with her fantasies, her fantasy life becomes her defining hamartia, the fatal flaw in her that brings about her own downfall. Emma engages in affairs, hoping that they will make her feel alive and excited by life. Ultimately, all of her affairs and her projection of her fantasies onto men fail to make her happy. She digs her heels into these affairs because, as a woman, there is little other recourse for her to feel daring and excited. These affairs play with her emotions and sense of self. Emma also turns to shopping with credit on loans, which puts her family in a dire financial situation. Because Emma has a disconnection between reality and fantasy, she doesn’t think through the consequences of her actions. Fantasy makes Emma live in the moment, which ruins her family’s financial stability. Emma dies by suicide because she can’t bear to confront the reality of the trouble that she finds herself in. Thus, the gap between reality and fantasy literally kills her.
Charles Bovary also falls prey to the gap between fantasy and reality. He is oblivious to everything Emma does. He doesn’t recognize that her sadness, boredom, and illness are caused by their marriage. He doesn’t figure out that she’s sneaking off to sleep with other men. He doesn’t know that she’s buying all of their goods on credit. He refuses to acknowledge her apathy toward their daughter. Charles is oblivious because he is unconditionally in love with Emma and the ideals of domestic bliss. However, this obliviousness prevents Charles from stepping in before it’s too late. Even when the bailiff starts selling off his assets, Charles still doesn’t find fault with Emma. After her death, he learns of her affairs but still places her on a pedestal. Charles leans into his obliviousness so that he doesn’t have to confront the uncomfortable truth that Emma never loved him and took advantage of his generosity. Charles also can’t reconcile the reality of Emma with his idealized version of her. This destroys Charles, who dies heartbroken and ruined. Though this theme works in different ways with Emma and Charles, who act as foils to one another, both characters choose some level of fantasy over reality. The inability to confront the unpleasant nature of reality leads directly to both of their deaths.
The Subjugation of Women
Madame Bovary is a critique of society’s subjugation of women.
Emma Bovary is irresponsible: She engages in extramarital affairs, doesn’t appear to care about her husband’s sacrifices and generosity, doesn’t engage with her daughter, and spends money that she doesn’t have. Emma is also a woman trapped and bound by society. Because she was not educated to understand finances, she doesn’t realize what she’s doing when she signs up for loans and credit, and, because she was raised to be nothing but a mother and a wife, she doesn’t have the opportunity to develop her own identity. She is not given the opportunity to have any autonomy, so she rebels against her imprisonment in marriage through the flights of fancy offered by literature.
Emma is not taught about the real world, because in 19th-century France, women of upper socioeconomic classes were not encouraged to be a part of the world. Instead, Emma is kept in sequestered settings, such as the convent or her father’s house. Because she doesn’t have exposure to the real world, she doesn’t develop the tools to deal with the real world. She has no other choice than to turn to literature, and novels of the 19th century were hyper-romantic narratives that made icons out of mere humans. Emma sees people as characters rather than who and what they really are because of her need for escapism through literature, which is all she has to base her own life off of. Thus, she casts the men in her life as heroes or villains, romantic conquests, or oppressors. Emma simply isn’t given the opportunity to learn and use her intelligence, so she projects that intelligence and desire for intellectual and emotional stimulation into unhealthy channels.
A telling demonstration of this theme is when Emma is pregnant and desires a son. She acknowledges that boys are given more freedoms in her society. Boys become men who receive an education, start a career, and are encouraged to be part of the world and show ambition. Part of her apathy toward Berthe is that Berthe is a girl and therefore subject to the same oppression. Emma sees no point in raising Berthe because Berthe will grow up to become a wife and mother, herself bored and disillusioned. Emma can’t bond with Berthe because she subconsciously loathes that Berthe will face the same lack of freedom as Emma.
Emma is taken advantage of by men who understand the dynamics of their power over women. Rodolphe seduces her with false promises of love because he enjoys playing with women’s emotions and bodies, thus launching Emma into a higher level of escapism through her affairs. Monsieur Lheureux takes advantage of Emma’s naivete to financially profit off of her financial downfall. Thus, Flaubert criticizes his society for suppressing women’s ability to be fully integrated in the world.
Personal Pleasure Over Responsibility
In Madame Bovary, Flaubert exposes the dangers of personal pleasure over responsibility. Flaubert advocates for the pursuit of happiness. He does this through the use of Hamois’s perspectives on how the Catholic church uses hypocritical moral codes to convince individuals away from their own autonomy. He also does this through championing Emma Bovary as a tragic figure whose personal pleasure becomes too unhealthy because she is not allowed to pursue her own intelligence and ambitions.
An important layer to this theme is privilege. Emma ends up financially ruining her family and pushing her daughter out of the middle class and into poverty. However, before this happens, Emma is a young woman who enjoys the financial stability of the men in her life. Although both her father and her husband are precariously close to losing assets and money because they’re good enough but not amazing at their jobs, they both provide her with a secure lifestyle. Emma is trapped by her homes and the convent, but in a way, this is also a privilege afforded to few. Unlike many of the peasant and lower classes in France in the 19th century, Emma doesn’t have to engage in manual labor just to keep up with poverty. There are glimpses of this poverty throughout the novel, and Emma has little compassion for the real conflicts these people face. The priest reminds her of her privilege because he sees how painful hunger and poverty can be. In comparison, Emma’s conflicts of unhappiness pale in importance. Yet, Flaubert maintains that Emma doesn’t appreciate her privilege because she is oppressed in a different way by society and by that very privilege. As such, her story is worthy of analysis and exploration and likely captured the fantasies of many women of the time, regardless of whether or not they acted on those fantasies.
Emma doesn’t think ahead to the future. She spends her husband’s money, even spending beyond their means, because she doesn’t think about the consequences of spending too much money or signing on for debt. Emma chooses personal pleasure over the financial responsibility of her family. Rather than worry about how hard her husband has to work to keep up with her spending habits, and rather than worry about the financial future of her daughter, which will require boarding school and a dowry, she thinks only of the pleasure she projects onto superfluous material goods. Seeking personal pleasure seems to afford her some small sense of control as a woman, however destructive those actions are.
Emma also engages in affairs because she seeks emotional and physical pleasure. She lies to her husband and acts against the moral codes of her society. Emma prefers to feed her desires rather than abide by the social codes of her society. She does not recognize how deeply her husband loves her; she can only see him as average and therefore pathetic. Because Emma projects her own fantasies and desires onto other people and things, she is unable to appreciate what she has. This only escalates her constant unhappiness. She learns too late that intermittent and fleeting happiness built from nurturing her own pleasure does not give her life-long happiness or an intense sense of self. Though Emma is irresponsible with others, she is also irresponsible with herself. She leans so much into her own pleasures that she ends up destroying her own self. In this sense, Flaubert offers a cautionary tale on seeking the balance between pleasure and responsibility rather than being consumed by one over the other.
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By Gustave Flaubert
