Emma is the most analyzed female protagonist in Western literature, and the debate hasn't resolved: is she a victim of her education and her era, or is she culpable for her destruction of everyone around her? Flaubert refuses to decide. What is clear is that Emma's problem is a language problem — she thinks in borrowed romantic vocabulary and applies it to a life that cannot bear the weight. Her desires are not wrong; the world's failure to provide what she desires is not her fault; but her method of pursuing desire destroys everything it touches. She is simultaneously completely understandable and completely catastrophic.