Madame Bovary

7 Pages 1712 Words

Madame Bovary

“The tragic flaws of Madame Bovary”

Bovarysme is a psychological condition in which one deludes themselves into what they are, and to what is life’s potential for them. And bovaryistic is an appropriate adjective to use when discussing Emma Bovary, the main character in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Emma’s story is one of a woman, dissatisfied with her marriage that turns to other men for affairs, goes into debt, and eventually commits suicide. On the surface, this novel appears very simple yet ceases to be when one considers exactly why Emma behaved the way she did in Madame Bovary. Her tragic flaw was bovarysme but Emma behaved the way she did for several separate but connecting issues: she was a victim of her own romantic ideals, she lived during the ‘bourgeois century’, and her simply being a women.
Emma fell victim to her own romanticism at a very young age. She was raised in a convent and her only ideas of love and marriage were from what she learned while reading her romantic novels. The problem with her reading these romantic novels is that because she had led a very sheltered existence up to this point, she had no idea how false those ideals where. Those novels, to Emma, brought about a basic false understanding of the world. Her expectations for life were too high and she did not know her own feelings, but merely those that she had read about in her stories. The first example of this is Emma’s marriage to Charles Bovary. Emma goes into the marriage with very high expectations, but is soon disappointed in her marriage from the very beginning. Emma shows her dramatic and romantic flair when deciding on how the marriage ceremony should go. “Emma would, on the contrary, have preferred to have a midnight wedding with torches, but old Rouault could not understand such an idea” (17). This begins the pattern of what would continue for the rest of the novel. Emma dre...