Emma

In Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Flaubert explores the life of Emma Bovary, a woman whose desires leads her to her ultimate demise. Setting plays a great role in the novel, drawing parallels between Emma's life living at a convent, Yonville, and in her own home in Yonville and how living in such places will eventually kill her. In desperate search to find a fiery, passionate love, Emma will do the unholiest of things to get what she wants. At the convent is where Emma first develops her destructive behaviors, and feeds on tales of agony and lust. Even when she leaves the convent, Emma continue to hunger for a dark, romantic, fairytale like life. In search for such, she moves to Yonville, a boring village with even more boring of people. She does so with her ever so dull husband, Charles Bovary, who is as completely devoid of ambition as she is full of it. In their own home is where Emma will cheat, lie, and eventually die. All settings play significant roles in the novel for they will eventually push Emma to kill herself.

Living in a convent since the age of thirteen had shaped Emma’s life is ways she could have never imagined. Of course, she was an exceptional student, spending most of her time in the classroom. And she loved reading. To Emma, reading was like a drug, luring her in with tales of sacrifice, agony, and lust. She indulged herself in stories such as Joan of Arc, Heloise, and Clemente Isaure. Emma craved a love as dark and romantic as these. She had become addicted to these fantasies, so much so that it would eventually kill her. Aside from reading, Emma had fallen in love with all the wrong parts of Catholicism. She had become obsessed with the images of a, “sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries”(Flaubert,pg. 84-85). The nuns had taken notice to Emma’s dismissal of the Catholic religion and her obsession of the morbid, and when the time came, the nuns were not sorry to see her leave. Emma had so loved the convent. There, she was given the attention she would crave for the rest of her life. During the beginning of her time there, the nuns adored Emma, amusing her by taking her to the chapel. She had fallen in love with the sweetness of the old nuns, the freshness of the holy water, and the idea of eternal love (Flaubert,pg. 84).  Accustomed to life as it was, Emma would later work tirelessly to to once again find this type of fairytale life the convent had given her. No one or place would ever feed her desires as the convent once did.

             At the age of eighteen, Emma married Charles Bovary. Together, they were happy, but only for a short while. It did not take long for Emma to become dissatisfied with her relationship with such a dull man as Charles. Their lives together began in Tostes, a simple village. Emma soon became sick of such a simple village and longed for a more thrilling place like Paris. Although she’d never been there, Emma dreamed of moving to a place as thrilling, fashion forward, and beautiful as she was. “Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma's eyes in an atmosphere of vermilion” (Flaubert, 140). Driven by desire to move, Emma literally became sick of Tostes. For months she layed in bed until Charles found it fitting to move to a market town called Yoneville. Yonville was a rural area twenty seven miles from Reuon,  and besides Monsieur Homais’ shop, there was not much to see there (Flaubert, 170). With only a few old shoppes, an old church, and an old cemetery, Yonville was just as boring as Tostes. Yonville was exactly the opposite of what Emma dreamed of Paris being. While Emma, “longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know,” (Flaubert, 162), Yonville offered nosey neighbors and an annual agricultural show. Yonvilles realist setting directly conflicted with the fantasies that controlled Emma.

Frustrated with her living situation, Emma resides to suffer in misery within the confines of her own home. While one's home is a safe haven for most, to Emma, her home is constant reminder of her misfortune. Surrounded by a husband she finds grotesque and a child whom she does not love, Emma once again feels she belongs in Paris, a city as beautiful as her. Driven by her desire to live a more fantastical life, Emma commits many sins in her home in hopes of living a more romantic and exciting life. When beginning her affair with Leone, Emma would routinely have him in her house, blatantly disgracing her and her  husband's relationship in their own home. In one scene of the novel, Emma begins to regret her affair with Leone, even ignoring him. When he comes over once again to her house to confront her, Emma simply tells him, “Have I not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many duties that must be considered first?”(Flaubert, pg. 132). In a later part of the novel, Emma begins another affair with Rodolphe, a rich and arrogant man. Long after their affair is over and Emma ends her life does Charles find saved letters between the two lovers. One letter from Rodolphe states, “Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your life.” Emma was the only carrier who brought misery into her life. Due to her desires, she could have never been satisfied. Perhaps she realized this, for in her own home is where she finally rested.

          The life of Emma bovary is as tragic as they get. First beginning at the convent, Emma’s innocent dreams of living a romantic life she conjures up as a young girl soon become more sinful as her desires are intensified. On the outside, Emma Bovary appears as a beautiful and sophisticated woman. Though as she moves from setting to setting, her inner dark being is drawn forth. Her unfortunate living situations cause her to commit lustful crimes against her husband and she eventually goes mad, even to the point of killing g herself with arsenic poisoning. Although her settings drive her to commit these crimes, Emma Bovary would have never been truly happy wherever or with whomever. She craved eternal pain, finding sweetness in the pain of Jesus Christ, her mother’s death, and in books that told similar stories. In the end, Emma longed for a death as beautiful as she was. Instead, she received one as long and tortuous as her life.