Madame Bovary

In Part 3 of Madame Bovary, Flaubert escalates Emma’s inability to reconcile her fantasies with her reality until she is ultimately destroyed by this fatal flaw.

Emma is frivolous with money, with people’s feelings, and with her own security. She allows fantasy to overwhelm her reality because enacting the dramas of an affair and the fantasies of her romantic ideals gives her misdirected confidence. This emphasizes the themes of The Gap Between Fantasy and Reality and Personal Pleasure Over Responsibility. Still embittered by her failed affair with Rodolphe, Emma begins another affair with Léon, who has lost his sense of social moral codes that kept him away from Emma when he first fell in love with her. Ironically, Léon and Emma’s affair begins in a cathedral. Adultery goes directly against Catholic doctrine, so this setting to begin the affair highlights the sacrilegious nature of the affair, especially within the novel’s historical context. This setting also highlights Flaubert’s progressive message about the individual pursuit of happiness and pleasure over the pressures of moral pontificating from religious institutions. However, it also foreshadows that breaking off from certain social guidelines of moral behavior can have a long-lasting, damaging impact. Léon and Emma’s affair is passionate and, in some ways, different than her affair with Rodolphe because Léon is authentically in love with her. Léon is devoted to Emma and, because he is friendly with Charles and Charles is oblivious to Emma’s flaws, Emma has free rein to escape to the city with Léon. Similar to her affair with Rodolphe is Emma’s projection of her fantasies of what love can be onto Léon, which allows her to escape from reality. Emma’s affair with Léon combined with the ease with which she can lie to Charles buoys her ego, and Emma starts acting irrationally in other ways. For the first time, Emma feels unstoppable, as her affair affords her some sense of agency and control in a society that is otherwise rigid, particularly with regard to domesticity and the roles of women. Emma is consumed by escapist fantasies that offer a reprieve from the humdrum of marriage and motherhood, though reality always catches up with her, and she ultimately finds that anything can become routinized and unfulfilling. Still, her focus is so often on her own pleasure as it is the only thing that makes her feel like an agent in her own life.

Emma’s affair with Léon ultimately runs its course. She learns that being in a long-term relationship, even with the seductive excitement of an affair, becomes as routine as a marriage. Emma and Léon find it difficult to break up with one another because they are both in a toxic cycle in which the affair is both a burden and a blessing. Emma’s misdirected confidence helps propel the end of this affair because she starts treating Léon the way Rodolphe treated her. From Rodolphe, Emma learned how to manipulate feelings and use seductive techniques to fulfill desires. Knowingly or not, Emma has absorbed this treatment and mimics it toward Léon, which again speaks to The Gap Between Fantasy and Reality, as it could be argued that Emma also mimicked the characters in romance novels, thus shapeshifting to achieve her fantasies. Moreover, Emma believes that she is in love with Léon, but she still doesn’t understand what true love is, further blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Charles, on the other hand, demonstrates true love through his unconditional affection and concern for Emma’s feelings and well-being. Emma doesn’t care about Léon the way a partner technically should because their affair is based on a physical connection that is heightened by the excitement of sneaking around and breaking the strict rules of their society. Léon ultimately feels frightened of and abused by Emma, who takes advantage of his feelings for her. Emma becomes too comfortable in her affair, and this has repercussions on the affair itself because Emma cares more about escalating the layers of romantic gestures than about nurturing the relationship itself. This escalation speaks to Emma being consumed by fantasy and a longing for escape: It is not so much who she has an affair with that matters at this point, but rather the need for an affair to provide a thrill and risk in a rigid society.

In satisfying her own self-centered desires, Emma brings about the ruin of her family. She is easily tricked by Monsieur Lheureux into buying extravagant material goods by signing on for loans, putting her in a cycle of debt that she can’t get out of. Emma is irresponsible with money because, as a woman whose financial life has been managed by men, she doesn’t understand how to handle finances without being taken advantage of or misled. She is also irresponsible with money because she has an insatiable desire to have more things that she doesn’t need but hopes will satiate her desires for escape and newness. Monsieur Lheureux becomes a constant threat to Emma because he takes advantage of the secret of her affair and of her financial irresponsibility to enrich himself, which is undeniably predatory behavior. He knows that Emma is dishonest with her husband, which makes Emma an easy target for his own financial gain. Monsieur Lheureux is an antagonist because he feeds off of Emma’s naivete and self-indulgence. This emphasizes the theme of Personal Pleasure Over Responsibility, which places Emma in a position to be taken advantage of by anyone who knows her secrets. As such, actions that once provided a sense of agency result in her being further reduced, thus highlighting The Subjugation of Women.

Emma would have been able to get away with her affairs had she not spent beyond her means. This conflict provides a substructural plot in which Flaubert exposes Emma’s flaws in parallelism to 19th-century French society’s perceptions of wealth. She’s not ruined by her affairs, but rather by her flippant attitude about wealth. The central issue in Emma’s life becomes not her romantic fantasy life but her inability to deal with the reality of how money and debt work. Debt in the 19th century was quite serious. Because 19th-century French society was a hierarchy based on economy, with peasants at the bottom and royals at the top, loans from banks or private lenders were not necessarily easy to obtain. Emma is able to sign on for loans because she happens to deal with a man as insidious as Monsieur Lheureux. Because banking institutions at this time were not necessarily in the money-lending business, taking on debt was a serious affair. If people reneged on their debt and were unable to pay, their assets would be seized, and they could even be imprisoned for defaulting on their loans. Emma’s privilege is that, as a woman of some means who is also shielded by a devoted husband, she’s never had to concern herself with the serious business of managing money. In Emma’s world of privilege, nothing bad can happen to her because there are always men willing to take the fall for her, namely Charles. Thus, when the bill collections come, everything else in her life crumbles. Part of this conflict is the fact that Emma has always kept the truth of her life hidden from Charles. Rather than turn to her husband with the difficult truth of her debt, she hides the debt from him, which places both Emma and Charles in a vulnerable and dangerous situation, not to mention impoverishing their daughter. Emma doesn’t think of the future; she lives in the present because the present is all about her exciting affair and her luxurious goods. In not thinking of the consequences of her actions, Emma spirals into a financial conflict that is ultimately more ruinous than her affairs.

The novel comes to its climax when Emma consumes arsenic and dies. Her death is long and painful, and it doesn’t save her from the responsibilities of what she’s done. In dying slowly, Emma is confronted by her past mistakes. Emma’s death is an act of desperation, but it also contains an element of the fantastical or dramatic. Indeed, it is yet another example of her inability to reconcile fantasy with reality; in this situation, her fantasy-driven mind can’t see a way out of her situation, but in reality, Emma could have pursued other options, including being honest with her husband. Emma’s hamartia (or, her fatal flaw) is her overactive imagination. While this has served her by giving her happiness in an otherwise boring life, it brings about her downfall. Living too deeply in her fantasy life makes her unable to understand how the real world works. Flaubert’s novel criticizes his society’s relationship with money, bourgeoise aspirations, subjugation of women, and conceptions of sin through Emma’s ultimate fate: She opts out of reality one final time, as she has consistently done throughout the novel. Emma’s inability to confront reality, combined with her completely unremarkable everywoman nature, suggests that the fatal flaws of Emma are inherent to the society that produced her.

Charles then dies of heartbreak, a representation of his love for Emma and his devastation at uncovering her secrets. Until the end, even when Charles learns of her past affairs, he has a hard time finding fault with Emma. In death, Emma becomes even more angelic in Charles’s mind. Her death means that she doesn’t have to be confronted by Charles about her affairs. Thus, even though he learns of her deception, he never gains closure. Charles was so in love with Emma that even after dragging him into financial ruin, cheating on him, and lying to him, Charles keeps Emma on a pedestal. Charles is the kind of character who internalizes other people’s mistreatment of him as a problem with himself. He takes responsibility on Emma’s behalf, standing by her even in death. Charles’s death is tragic because it makes an orphan out of Berthe, an innocent child whose life is ruined by her mother’s pride and her father’s obliviousness. Berthe ends up poor; rather than maintain class hierarchies, Berthe falls behind and drops out of the middle class into the lower class. Berthe’s fate recalls the theme of The Gap Between Fantasy and Reality, as both Emma and Charles were beholden to opposite fantasies. Charles’s fantasy was domesticity with Emma, while Emma’s fantasy was her passionate affairs. This preoccupation with fantasy led both parents from reality and left their child abandoned to suffer.

The novel ends with these tragic deaths and one victory—that of Monsieur Homais. Since the Bovarys moved to town, Monsieur Homais has been finagling influence and power. He uses the stories of his town, including that of Charles and Emma, to publish himself as a public intellectual. He takes over the medical business in the town, meaning that Charles’s downfall is Homais’s gain. Homais is even awarded the Legion of Honour, an esteemed award in France that is given to citizens for their contributions to society. This is a case of dramatic irony in which the reader knows that Homais has been dishonest in his dealings with his business. The reader knows that Homais pontificates on topics he doesn’t actually know that much about, while society celebrates him as a remarkably intelligent individual. Thus, Flaubert criticizes his society for rewarding people like Homais over helping people like Charles Bovary.