Emma's Romantic World example essay topic

Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is often considered as the first realistic novel. As the reader follows the catastrophic search of a woman for love out of dissatisfaction in her marriage, it becomes apparent why. Flaubert's work of realistic contains many characters. The main one is Emma Bovary, better known as Madame Bovary from the title. Emma is a country girl educated in a covenant who marries Charles Bovary at a young age. She harbors idealistic romantic illusions, covets sophistication, sensuality, and passion.

She appears to immerse into fits of boredom and depression when her life falls to match that of the ones she idolizes through novels. Emma's desire for passion and her reflection of marriage lead her into one affair after another. Her husband, Charles Bovary, is a simple, kind, yet a dull country doctor. His lack of skill at his profession leads him to amount into nothing more than a mediocre doctor who can only manage simple cases. Charles holds nothing but love in his heart for Emma. She seems to hold as much, perhaps more, control as his mother.

Despite his love for her, he doesn't seem to understand Emma. His adoration for her causes him to act with innocence. Charles even fails to detect her extramarital affairs, which are so poorly concealed. Both Charles's naivet'e and Emma's quest for pleasure. Madame Bovary revolves around Emma's wishes for romantic love, wealth, and social status that she cannot attain because of her marriage to a middle-class doctor. Fresh out of a covenant at a young age, she accepts Charles Bovary's hand in marriage.

However, marriage doesn't live up to Emma's romantic expectations. She had dreamed of love and marriage as a solution to all her problems. After she attends an extravagant ball, she begins to dream constantly of a more sophisticated life. Emma is unable to accept the world as it is, but she cannot make the world as she wants it to be. Flaubert's portrayal of the ball and the events that follow displays the ironic contrast between Emma's experience and reality. He conveys both the external reality of how Emma looks as the ball as well the psychological reality of how the ball looks to Emma.

She is so happy at the ball that she fails to realize that no on e at the ball is even paying any attention to her. In fact, she continues to overlook the well-meaning love of her good-natured but vapid husband in favor of her memories of the ball. Not only does she not return her husband's love, Emma grows more and more irritated with his poor manners and dullness. As her restlessness, boredom, and depression intensify, she becomes physically ill.

In an effort to cure her, Charles decide they should move. While packing, Emma throws her dried bridal bouquet into the fire and watches it burn. This symbolizes her rejection of her marriage and the complacent middle-class world in which it has, to her mind, imprisoned her. Emma's prejudiced eyes intensify Flaubert's realist attention to the detail.

The details of Charles's oafishness and Emma's dull daily routine emphasize the realistic mode the novel has switched onto. In her new home, Yonville, new characters are introduced. A pompous, obnoxious apothecary, Homais, greets the newly arrived Bovarys. Though Homais in not central to the plot, he is an essential part of its atmosphere. His presence serves to heighten our sense of Emma's frustration with her life. Another character, Leon, is a law clerk.

Emma and Leon immediately become close friends due to their shared interest in romantic preconceptions and sentimental novels. The superficiality of Emma's romanticism becomes clear in her interactions with Leon. Emma's conversation with Leon at dinner is trite and sentimental but to them, it seems rapturous and meaningful. She is able to challenge her stable yet unsatisfying marriage with a relationship based on falsely profound declarations rather than true sentiment.

Soon after the move to Yonville, Emma bears a daughter, Berthe. The birth of her daughter underlines the materialism of her sentiments, but it also introduces some of the novels' feminist arguments. Emma desires to be a maternal figure only when the role might be glamorous. However, when she realizes that she can't buy expensive items for the baby, her interest fades.

Furthermore, Emma's hopes were of a son. She believed that a male child could have had the power she lacks. She regrets that her lovers always enjoy freedom that she cannot. Thus, the reader is enlightened with the fact that Flaubert was aware and perhaps disapproved of the limited liberties given to women in the late 19th century.

His description of the mundane world around Emma is realistic, but somewhat exaggerated. Though he uses florid, poetic language to describe Yonville, Flaubert also recognizes the banality of the setting as without character. He thereby establishes that while Emma maybe right about the boredom of village life, she is also missing a layer of beauty that her perspective is too narrow to contain. Though she wants to remain a dutiful wife, Leon's love for her beckons a way to escape her boring life. However, ashamed at his cowardice for not declaring his love, Leon leaves to Paris. Emma never did ask herself about her love for Leon.

She believed that "love must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightening, - a hurricane of the skies, which sweeps down on life, upsets everything, uproots the will like a leaf and carries away the heart in an abyss". Emma is ignorant that a flooded roof causes a rent in the wall. Flaubert satirizes the romantic idea of love as an overwhelming transformative force of nature by juxtaposing images of hurricanes and tempests with one of the more mundane effects of weather, water damage. By presenting Emma's discovery of the rent in the wall in an ironic tone of regret, he mocks Emma's lack of practical knowledge, as well as her inability and unwillingness to conceive of the actual. She yearns for unreal romantic ideals and is at first ignorant of and then disappointed by the imperfect realities of life, such as decay. After Leon's' departure to Paris, Emma lapses into her old depression 0 moody, irritable, nervous, and miserable.

She constantly dreams of Leon, and wishes that she would have given in to her love for him. However, she soon meets a rich and handsome landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger. He takes her to an agricultural fair where he confesses his love for her. She is reminded of her role as a dutiful wife. Rodolphe avoids Emma for six weeks in hopes that his absence will make her long for him. When he returns, Emma greets him coldly.

However, his romantic language quickly woos her. They go on a horse ride together where he declares his love for her yet again. This time, she gives in. She returns home, joyful that life has finally become romantic.

She then begins a full-fledged affair with Rodolphe, often action incautiously. It is apparent that Rodolphe regards Emma as sexual prey and her marriage status as a convenient excuse to stray from commitment while Emma feels the need to escape form her ho-hum life. Emma borrows huge amounts of money to buy gifts for Rodolphe. She is never able to remain happy in one situation for long, her guilty attempt to reclaim her moral bearing by sacrificing herself for Charles's career is simply the particular form her inevitable depression takes at this point in the story. Throughout the novel, Emma undergoes ethical development cyclically. She tends to switch form romantic indulgence to dissatisfaction's, misery, and illness to moral resolve, and then begins the cycle again with a new romantic indulgence.

This cycle is evident in her relationship with Rodolphe. When Rodolphe cuts off their affair when it becomes too serious, she almost commits suicide, a foreshadowing hint. Instead, she falls ill again. In hopes of recovering her health, Charles takes her to the opera. There, she discovers Leon, her old spark that never ignited. She realizes that she is ready for yet another romantic affair.

She says back in Rouen with the excuse of seeing the second part of the play. Afterwards, however, Leon and Emma take a carriage ride, with the curtains closed, for so long that she misses her train and has to catch a cab back to Yonville. Not long after, she make another excuse of having some papers drawn up by Leon to visit Rouen. The three days end up being a "honeymoon" for the two.

All the while, Emma falls deeper and deeper into debt that first began when she borrowed money to buy gifts for her first lover, Rodolphe. She signs up for alleged piano lessons every Thursday in Rouen, yet another excuse to meet with Leon. However, everything just goes downhill for her. A debt collector serves a legal notice against her. She borrows more money to fulfill the money she owes. When she is unable to pay that sum back, her property is foreclosed.

The essential superficiality of Emma's connection with Leon compounds the disaster of her financial indiscretions. Once her affair loses its early glow, Emma loses all sense of proportion and propriety, oscillating between extremes of self-indulgence, self-pity, depression, and guilt. Emma's financial ruin parallels her moral ruin. Once she obtains power of attorney over Charles's finances, her destructive qualities spiral further out of control. Emma's attempt to transcend the values of her middle-class existence fails as much out of her own free will as the circumstances in which she lives. Her moral corruption, however, remains dependent on the will of the men around her.

Soon, officers come to the Bovary's house to seize the property unless the borrowed 8,000 francs are repaid. Emma frantically tries to raise the money before her husband returns. She goes to every man and even sinks as low enough to sell herself as a prostitute for money. However, her hopeless search yields nothing. Although Emma has carefully constructed a romantic fantasy world for herself throughout the novel, financial reality wrenches her out of her dreams.

She can no more seek refuge in fantasy. When forced to face the actual consequence of her actions, she decides that she would rater die. Emma eats arsenic poison in hopes of a quick death. However, even that proves to be a disappointment.

She suffered much pain while begging for the poison to work faster. Emma's lifelong desire to escape the confines of the material world is thus completely destroyed by her death. Flaubert's realistic description of the material world persists though Emma's death scene, relentlessly suffering that Emma's romantic world bears no resemblance to reality. Even after Emma's death, Charles remains faithful to her memory even when he is consigned to a life of comparative poverty. When he discovers a drawer full of letters form Emma's lovers, his innocence is penetrated. Charles dies shortly after this revelation and the devastation of the Bovarys is finally complete.

Their daughter, Berthe, is forced to live with their impoverished aunt. Emma's aristocratic pretensions have imprisoned her child in a life of poverty and dependence. The ending ceases to remind us yet again that Madame Bovary is a tragedy of class. I think Flaubert's intended audience was aimed more towards the older generation, around the ages of twenty to thirty.

However, I think some high school and college students would appreciate Flaubert's work as well. His intended purpose, to create a work full of realism, was carried out well. After reading his book, I began to appreciate my life and how positive it was. It also enabled me to not take simple things in life not granted and be happy with what I have.

Though many themes, such as powerlessness of women, can be found in the novel, it can also be observed that Flaubert uses realism in all of them. His plot is based on realistic ideal that focused on the details of everyday life without turning a blind eye to their dreary aspects. He describes his character, their emotions, actions and setting vividly and without romantic or fantastic embellishment. Realism is an obvious fact of Madame Bovary. Flaubert is also able to carry out his realistic ideals by enlightening the reader of every detail so the reader can gain a perspective of the age of realism. He carried out his goal well thought, organized, and perceptively.

I agree with Flaubert's point of view. Being a realist, Flaubert states the truth the way it is. I believe that this is a good thing. A person should tell it like it is. His novel is very realistic and pessimistic.

The reader can believe in a plot more if the ending is an unhappy one and the plot is not far-fetched. The author did a good job of achieving this. I think Flaubert has an honest opinion and sees life for what it is rather than sugarcoating it. Madame Bovary was a genuine realistic novel. It was a break from the happy cheery books whose goal is to make you smile. This novel shone a light into the harshness of reality.

Madame Bovary was entirely thrilling and opened the horizon to many interesting characters and remarkable events and left something to ponder about. Flaubert's book reminds the reader that life is not something to be taken granted for. 3/27/03.