Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert (1857)
“A bored doctor's wife reads too many romance novels and destroys herself, her husband, and everyone who loved her — and Flaubert makes you understand exactly how.”
Character Analysis
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.
Aspires to aristocratic register; her vocabulary is borrowed from romantic novels and has no organic relationship to her actual experience. She describes her feelings in literary abstractions that fit no specific situation.