Following the French Revolution, the French feudal society came to an end and the bourgeoisie middle-class emerged. A prominent novel from this time period is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He tells the story of Emma, a young woman who dreams of love and prosperity. Nonetheless, Emma’s bourgeois aspirations are unattainable due to her marriage to Charles Bovary. Ultimately, Gustave Flaubert employs illusion to depict Emma’s longing for love, and Charles’s idea of a happy marriage but utilizes reality to disregard their fantasies.
Emma Bovary was fostered in a convent that forced her to glamorize reality. Hence, she fantasized over having a romantic relationship full of excitement and butterflies. Emma believed that love “...should arrive all at once with thunder and lightning - a whirlwind from the skies that affects life, turns it every which way, wrests resolutions always like leaves, and plunges the entire heart into an abyss” (95). According to this quote, Emma presumes that love is supposed to be intense and powerful similar to storms.
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However, the reality of her situation is that she has failed to find the excitement similar to her preconceptions of love. She sought that “Charles’s conversations was as flat as a sidewalk, with everyone’s ideas walking through it in ordinary dress, arousing neither emotion, nor laughter, nor dreams” (39). Emma has mistaken herself due to not feeling the expected happiness she thought she would feel while being married. As a result of Emma’s fantasizing reality and love, she is unable to adapt to real life.
Initially, Charles Bovary believes that Emma is the perfect wife. Charles could come home late from work and “Emma would serve him because the maid was asleep” (41). This represents Charles’s illusion of his marriage with Emma, in that she was being a thoughtful wife who served her husband. However, Charles is unaware of the reality of his marriage, as he does not thoroughly know Emma. He is oblivious to the fact that Emma asks herself “...why did I even get married” (43). The perfect wife would not have to ask herself that question. Furthermore, Charles additionally fails to recognize his wife’s infidelity. Emma searches for other companions to flee from her boring husband. In all actuality, Emma is not the ideal wife because she commits adultery and consistently questions her happiness with her so-called husband.
Flaubert appropriates illusion to demonstrate Emma and Charles’s ideals but nonetheless reality ultimately strikes them.
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