Madame Bovary The Tragedy of Emma Bovary's Relationships with Herself and Others

A detailed Summary of Madame Bovary The Tragedy of Emma Bovary's Relationships with Herself and Others

Madame Bovary: The Tragedy of Emma Bovary's Relationships with Herself and Others

Madame Bovary is a narrative which compels the reader to keep turning the pages once he has begun reading. There are no screaming car chases, no resourceful detectives, no horrifying surprises, and no terrifying secrets to capture the reader's attention and rivet him to the page: There is only a tragic, well-written, delightfully descriptive narrative about a woman who was raised in the convent, her life, her scandalous conduct, and her untimely death. The narrative is compelling in its concentration on the relationships between the characters in the novel. The tragedies of the novel are based on these relationships, especially the relationship of Emma to herself, to the men in her life, and to the peripheral characters in her life such as her daughter, Berthe, Monsieur Lheureux, the proprietor of the local dry-goods store, and Justin, the pharmacist's assistant.

One of the tragedies of Emma Bovary's relationship with herself was that she never really understood herself. Emma did not realize that the yearning she had for an exciting lover who would romance her amidst the trappings of luxury was engendered by her reading of silly, sentimental st

No matter: she wasn't happy, and never had been. Why was life so unsatisfactory? Why did everything she leaned on crumble instantly to dust? But why, if somewhere there existed a strong and handsome being-a man of valor, sublime in passion and refinement, with a poet's heart and an angel's shape, a man like a lyre with strings of bronze, intoning elegiac epithalamiums to the heavens-why mightn't she have the luck to meet him? Ah, fine chance! Besides, nothing was worth looking for: everything was a lie! Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse; every pleasure, its own surfeit; and the sweetest kisses left on one's lips but a vain longing for fuller delight. (1075-1076)

Emma realized that Leon was not the man to satisfy her, but she was unable to bring the relationship to a close, because she needed something to distract her from the unhappiness of her boring life.

Another tragedy in Emma's relationship with herself was her lack of imagination or empathy. Emma could not imagine how other people felt about life and could not conceive of the notion of "walking a mile in someone's mocassins." Emma could not perceive how she appeared to her lovers (jealous and obsessive), she could not empathize with her lonely, neglected daughter, she could not imagine what Monsieur Lheureux might do if she could not pay him back, she could not understand Justin's simple-minded admiration for her, and most of all, Emma could not imagine how ordinary people could ever think that they were truly experiencing life, because her definition of life included noting commonplace or ordinary and only included exaggerated ideas of riches and romance. Emma had no empathy for anyone and lived her life based on her own lustful hunger, constantly seeking ways to satisfy her voracious desires.

The tragedy of Emma's relationship with her lovers is that she expected them to satisfy the longings that her husband had been unable to satisfy. Somehow, some way, these men were supposed to transport her from the ordinary and mundane into the extraordinary. "Everything immediately surrounding her-boring countryside, inane petty bourgeois, the mediocrity of daily life-seemed to her the exception rather than the rule. She had been caught in it all by some accident: out beyond, there stretched as far as eye could see the immense territory of rapture and passions" (926). Emma thought that her lovers would waft her to that "immense territory of rapture and passions." Instead, the intimacy of Emma's lovers became the same as that of her husband's--it was unable to satisfy her. Emma became jealous and possessive, treating her lovers as if they were her husband, as if they had entered into a marriage relationship with her. The tragedy of these relationship is that each one began with love and ended in disgust. One lover reacted to Emma's possessive lust by cruelly separating himself from her, while the other lover became overwhelmed by her avid passions and seemed more of a mistress to her than she to him. "Each time, Leon had to tell her everything he had done since their last rendezvous. . . . He did that less out of vanity than out of a desire to please her. He never disputed any of her ideas; he fell in with all her tastes: he was becoming her mistress, far more than she was his. Her sweet words and her kisses swept away his soul

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Approximate Word count = 2266
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English