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  • Essay / The dynamic between a written word and a dialogue in Madame Bovary

    In Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, the quest for sublime and perfect expression seems prisoner of the inability to succeed in verbalizing thoughts and interpreting words of others. The relationship between the written words and the way they are translated into dialogue and action is central to evaluating Emma's actions and fate, and ultimately prompts the reader to examine the intricacies of communication. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Flaubert's portrait of Emma's reading habits provides the basic framework for evaluating how she processes information. In the purest depiction of Emma's readership, she "picked up a book, then, musing between the lines, dropped it into her lap" (43). Flaubert uses the reading to establish Emma's short attention span to any thoughts outside her own. The book falling towards the ground symbolically creates the space for his illusions - notice that Flaubert chooses the word "dream" instead of "read", emphasizing his imaginative tendencies rather than those of a critical nature. In representing Emma's interpretive skills, her distortion of the material becomes a semi-conscious decision because she chooses to deviate from the original text, but sometimes her manipulation of words is more accurately described as misinterpretation . When Léon praises the entertainment value of simplistic novels containing "noble characters, pure affections and images of happiness", she misses his further conclusion that "as these works fail to touch the heart, they pass to side, it seems to me, of the true end of art” (59). The subtext implies that she is unable to distinguish differences in the quality of expressions and understand emotional depth because it is these very novels that she judges to be the pinnacle of expression. From the outset, Flaubert recognizes that Emma's quest is doomed to failure because she attempts to imitate passion from a material that initially lacks it. Ironically, Emma seems to recognize the implausibility of the ideals that guide her actions; she "hates banal heroes and moderate feelings, as we find them in nature (59). Flaubert seems to wonder to what extent Emma is aware of the formation of her illusions and, subsequently, what this has to do with her responsibility Charles provides a comic foil for Emma's inability to understand the "indefinable feelings of love that she [tries] to construct from the books she reads" (206). serious ones like "The Medical Hive", but her more pronounced inability to interpret or even understand anything let alone stay awake "five minutes" demonstrates a more primitive version of Emma's delusional dream state (44). The second time Charles launches into a "reading assignment" on how to perform surgery, he can't even pronounce the scientific terminology on how to describe medical deviations of the foot (125). suggests that words can pass through a man's mind but to be able to understand them in a relational context, understanding and pronouncing them, expressing them, represents them. the challenges of the interpretation process. Charles' mutilation of his patient embodies the distortion that the human mind creates in the process of interpretation. By illustrating the difficulty of translating ideas between the different mediums of writing, speech, and thought, Flaubert partially exonerates human beings from the inevitable distortion. Emma expresses the incompatibility of thoughts and words by describing herconversations with Léon: “they sometimes stopped from fully revealing their thoughts and then tried to invent a sentence which could nevertheless express it”. (168). Humanity seems condemned to live an existence in which “human language is like a cracked cauldron on which we strike air” (138). The incongruity of this metaphor reinforces the imperfect process of using words as a means of communication. Perhaps Leon's "indifference to the vibrations of love whose subtleties he could no longer discern" suggests that repeated exposure to highly emotional material eventually desensitizes man's powers of interpretation (211 ). Emma's appetite for "sinister novels where there would be scenes of orgies, violence, and bloodshed" (210) allows the audience to examine the consequences of exposure to extreme literature. The explosive action of fiction contrasts with the more monotonous activities of everyday life, helping to explain why Emma begins to find "in adultery all the platitudes of marriage" (211). didactic and emotionally empty instructions contained in her reading of fashion Her ability to hang curtains according to the latest customs suggests that she can deal with clear, directive texts that leave little room for deviation from the intention of. the author; Yet she errs in reading the novels as vehicles for the same educational goal. Flaubert implicitly suggests that the novel as a genre can be harmful if it overwhelms the senses to the point that they both become dulled. in the interpretation of writing and life. He subtly creates the space for the reader to come to this conclusion by ironically making the story of Emma's hysteria and tragedy seem uneventful, thus allowing the reader to better assess their use in the novel. Léon poses this problem when he asks: “Where could [Emma] have learned of this corruption so deep and so well masked that it is almost elusive? » (201). Perhaps we could even lay part of the responsibility on novelists, makers of “this corruption” (201) which makes it insensitive to the extremes of emotion and action. Flaubert reminds us throughout that Emma makes a conscious decision to expose herself to romantic fiction. Even when advised to direct her attention elsewhere when faced with medical difficulties, “she still prefers to sit in her room reading (59). As Emma draws all of her visions of an ideal world from the flat constructions of a page, the superficiality of inspiration permeates her character. Literary imagery and clichés saturate Emma's conception of love, suggesting that her thoughts are little more than abstractions of what she reads on the page. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great bursts and lightning -- a hurricane from the heavens, which falls on life, turns everything upside down, uproots the will like a leaf and carries the heart into an abyss (71). Despite Emma's search for eternal passion, the banality of her thoughts and her inability to evolve beyond this dream prevents her from truly developing into a rounded character. Flaubert communicates to the reader by forcing them to watch Emma play out the same hopeless romantic vision with Charles, Léon, and Rodolphe and ultimately creates a scathing warning against living through a novel. Emma's physical state during pregnancy, in which she "was growing on her hips without a corset" (62), creates a dimensional contrast with the flatness of "her affection" for her baby which "was perhaps altered from the beginning” (63). Although Emma's inability to interpret the emotional gravity of a new life and the potential for a new.