Best of Miami Portfolios 2001 - Units.muohio.edu

world and Emma “resented his steadfast calm, his serene dullness…” (Flaubert 35). Charles serves
as the microcosm of the reality Emma abhors, and is an integral part of the atmosphere Emma is
forced into. Emma, on the other side of the looking glass, is the ultimate romantic. Having the
background and demeanor of one of higher station, she believes she deserves wealth, passion, and
adventure, and is thus disappointed at every turn. In her delusional preconceptions, Emma believes
“Love…ought to come all at once, with great thunderclaps and flashes of lightning” (Flaubert 87).
Not finding this with Charles, she seeks out lovers to find passion. Beyond this, she borrows her
family into debt to find wealth and thinks up various pastimes and tragedies to occupy her need for
adventure, all the while ignoring the potentially fulfilling circumstances she lives in. She
romantically believes that happiness is something externally attainable, something that is found or
given, and therefore ignores what she already possesses.
It seemed to her that certain parts of the earth must produce happiness like a plant
indigenous to that soil and unable to flourish anywhere else. If only she could lean
over the balcony of a Swiss chalet, or enclose her melancholy in a Scottish cottage,
with a husband wearing a long black velvet cloak, a sugar-loaf hat and fancy cuffs!
(Flaubert 35)
Emma surrounds herself with opulence and lovers at the expense of her family’s credit and honor,
and still dreams of a better life, completely discounting her current one. It is this very refusal to
accept and face reality that leads to her downfall, and Flaubert’s true warning.
As is always the case, one cannot escape reality forever, and because of her refusal to face
reality, Emma ignores her accruing debt and eventually impoverishes her family. She neglects her
only child, and is abandoned by her lovers. Ultimately, Emma is driven to suicide after stooping to
the lowest point possible, virtually to prostitution, to deal with her problems, financial and
otherwise. Yet even in suicide, she cannot obtain the romantic end she desires, but instead weathers
a lengthy, painful, and ugly death.
Through the plight of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, we learn to appreciate reality. Yet from the
downfall of the romantic Madame Bovary—while within the very reality and dimension in which
we live—we can deduce a lesson Flaubert himself learned the hard way. As Flaubert realized in
becoming the realist he was renowned to be in his later years, the ultimate romantic has no place in
a realistic society, and being such a romantic, Bovary is doomed to unhappiness. So, just like the
symbolic blind man who reappears at the moment of her death, Emma progresses through life, and
eventually dies, blind to the real beauty around and within her because of her romantic notions.
Even in the end she searches externally for the source of her unhappiness.
But what was making her so unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe
that had wrecked her life? She raised her head and looked around, as though trying
to find the cause of her suffering. (Flaubert 149)
Thus without ever realizing the actual joys of motherhood, marriage, or life, Madame Bovary,
convulsing, gurgles her last life’s breath; a most ignoble, and unromantic, end.
Work Cited
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans: Lowell Bair. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.
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