In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert attacks all kinds of vices and virtues; its targets include adultery, romance, religion, science and politics. The characters are almost universally unlikeable; those who aren't are just pathetic. But the negativity throughout the book, always contrasted with impossible happiness, is not as dark as it seems. Or if the characters actually face dark situations, they do so out of an inability to accept a reality that was perhaps less than what they wanted, but better than what they let it become. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Madame Bovary is above all a novel about romance, and it is reasonable that marriage should be attacked. Charles's first marriage is arranged by his mother to Madame Dubuc, an ugly and domineering woman three times Charles's age, who is supposedly rich. Charles's married life is miserable, and yet when his wife finally dies, he reflects that "she had loved him, after all" (42). Thus Dubuc, who affirmed that “if [Charles] hovered near her, it was surely to see her die” (35), becomes the first and only loving wife of the novel. Charles' mother, faced with an adulterous and spendthrift husband, “suffocates her rage” (30); the only other wife in the story, Madame Homais, seems to get along with her husband, but her feelings are not addressed. The single, loving husband besides Charles is Monsieur Rouault, Emma's father, but his wife died several years before the action of the book begins, and we never meet her. The reality of marriage contrasts with Emma's ideas about love. At the start of their marriage, Emma and Charles are “happy and carefree” (53). Charles devotes himself to his wife, yet for Emma, ​​"the happiness which should have resulted from this love had not come" (55). His expectations of life outside the farm: “dark forests, romantic misfortunes, oaths, sobs” (57), etc. are found nowhere in the marriage, and in fact Charles' happiness consists in the opposite: "Emma's comb, her rings, her shawl" (55), worldly pleasures. The Bovarys' marriage begins well, but Emma's ideas about marital happiness do not correspond to reality and doom her life with Charles The marriage is not perfect, but not all married characters are unhappy Emma's efforts to achieve happiness. within her marriage are erroneous and are the result of a fantasy She thinks that by being a good wife, she will bring her existence closer to an ideal. When she falls in love with Léon, she sees an opportunity to overcome the. temptation and to transform her life into a moral example Emma begins to raise her own child, to go to church, to worry about Charles she tells herself “I am virtuous” (118) and in short becomes the woman; inaccessible to her courtly loves There is no reason for this to make her happier, and Emma's fantasy soon clashes with the reality of her environment; "[Charles's] conviction that he made her happy seemed an imbecile insult...For whom then was she virtuous?" (118). To the same extent that her marriage falls short of her ideals, Emma becomes a less than ideal wife. The fault lies in an equal measure with reality, because Charles is really annoying and boring, and Yonville is able to withstand the strongest constitution, and with Emma herself. For example, Emma's later attempt to improve her life involves encouraging Charles to operate on the clubfoot of Hippolyte, a stable boy at the local inn. For Homais and Emma, ​​thinking that the procedure has a chance offunctioning is pure fantasy, rooted in the ambition to succeed. “Emma had no reason to think that [Charles] was not a competent doctor” (173), aside from her disgust at his stupidity, a thought she sets aside because it conflicts with her fantasy according to which Charles could "increase his reputation and fortune". " (173). Charles, who is a health worker and not a doctor, attempts a new procedure in a magazine and operates on a perfectly healthy patient. Emma's ideals of doing to Hippolyte exactly what they are doing to her wedding; the boy's leg must be amputated. The situation dismays Canivet, a real doctor. Medical science is as bad as marriage, that is to say, it can work (Homais may be an eccentric, but Canivet does not. is not), but it is fallible and even disastrous when one embarks on it without reason but with absurd expectations. Moreover, when its practitioners ignore the warning signs, such as the swollen and convulsed foot of. Hipployte, parallel to Emma's agitation and crying attacks, the situation worsens in their disgust and optimism, Charles and Homais continue their approach when a stop could have saved their victim's foot; Religion suffers the same failures as science, for the same reasons The local priest is to souls what Charles is to bodies, and in relation to Emma the priest is, like Charles, completely overwhelmed. “'I'm in pain,'” Emma said to him; “'these first heat waves are terribly weakening'” (121), is his response. The priest worries about the cold and hunger, but he doesn't understand why Emma would be upset. Every time Emma turns to religion, she expects miracles; she visits the church “prepared for any act of devotion provided that she can give her soul there and make her entire existence disappear” (120). No wonder she is so annoyed by books like "The Man of the World at the Feet of Mary, by Monsieur de ____, holder of several decorations" (208), that she cannot accept that religion is usually prosaic in its daily operation. When Emma “addresses to the Lord the same affectionate words that she had once murdered to her lover in the ecstasies of adultery” (208), she tries out another imaginary world that turns out to be anchored in reality. Religion is for Emma like adultery, and she finds “in adultery all the banalities of marriage” (272). Most of Emma's disillusionments indeed involve adultery. Her meeting with Rodolphe at the Salon de l'Agriculture vividly reveals the extent to which she is isolated by her illusions. As Rodolphe offers Emma such seductive and irresistible sentiments as “I bury myself in my sadness” (143) and “Our duty is to discern the great and to cherish the beautiful” (148), they are interrupted by men chair bearers and advertisers offering prizes. for the best manure. According to Homais, Yonville “thought she was transported to the heart of a dream from the thousand and one nights” (156) at the Salon, but Emma did not notice the denigration of her fantasies. Rodolphe, her first lover, is pragmatic and manipulative, not the romantic she imagines him to be. They plan to leave, or rather Emma plans to and Rodolphe does not contradict her. Finally, Rodolphe retreats, Emma contemplates suicide and falls into catatonia. Rodolphe, who has had many other lovers, does not understand that Emma loves him more than other women. “Emma resembled all his former mistresses... This man, so experienced in love, could not distinguish the dissimilarity of emotions behind the similarity of expressions” (188). He considers Emma a completely typical lover, while she, as usual, dreams of traveling with him to "a splendid city with domes, bridges, cathedrals, ships, forests" (192). . Emma is adisappointed again because she expects this affair to be bigger than it is. Emma's affair with Léon is worse than her affair with Rodolphe, if only with regard to the debt she incurs during it. Money fuels Emma's fantasy life, and the more she spends to be with her lovers, ignoring reality, the more she leads her family to ruin. His enchantment for Léon begins to fade when he cannot make rounds because Homais has cornered him; from this slight and tiny lack of perfection comes the destruction of his love. Léon is fallible, and therefore Emma “hates him... You must not touch idols, the gilding rubs off on your hands” (265). At this point, the reader is more dismayed by this turn of events than Emma. Emma Bovary, a romantic and idealist, has, like Dorian Gray, become increasingly corrupt as the trappings of her life have increased in opulence. During a visit to Léon, Emma "laughed loudly and dissolutely as the champagne foam overflowed from the fragile glass onto the rings on her fingers" (251), and Léon finds her "the lover of all romances , the heroine of all dramas... an angel” (251). She transformed into her ideal, at least for her lover. But she pays for the rings and the champagne with her daughter's inheritance and her husband's gift; she can only apprehend her fantasy at the expense of reality. "One evening, she did not return to Yonville [from a visit to her lover in Rouen]. Charles was crazy with worry, and little Berthe, who did not want to go to bed without seeing her mother, sobbed as if her heart was breaking" (260). It is indeed Emma who creates this situation, Emma who ruins her daughter's life, who makes her own deathbed, rushed because of debt. When “lying [becomes] for her a need, a mania, a pleasure” (256), when she runs to Rodolphe for money, “by prostituting herself” (283), or when she offers Léon to embezzling her employer's funds to pay her debts, Emma is much worse than ordinary. She sacrifices her life, that of her family and her morals to fantasy. After Emma's suicide, Charles is possessed by her spirit, but in a way it inhabited her throughout her marriage. Only the content of his fantasies changes. Charles assumed Emma was happy; he loved her and he thought she loved him back. He was the only one in Yonville who didn't suspect Emma of having an affair. “Maybe [Emma and Rodolphe] loved each other platonically” (316) he thinks when he finds Rodolphe’s farewell letter. Charles did everything he could to make Emma happy, but when it came to his affairs and expenses, he lived in a fantasy world. When his mother protests Emma's power of attorney, "Charles, rebelling for the first time in his life, takes his wife's side" (259). Any force that could cause Charles to contradict the elder Madame Bovary would have to be powerful indeed. As long as he could believe that Emma was his, Charles was content, and he never dared admit that she was disloyal. He cared about her, spending more than a month at her bedside when she fell ill, but at the same time she fit into his dream of a perfect bourgeois life; his achievements in entertaining and household management made him “esteemed all the greater because he possessed such a wife” (61). So, instead of responding to Emma's misfortune, Charles ended up unwittingly encouraging her adulteries, by offering to visit Léon and paying for her fictitious music lessons in Rouen. And if Charles isn't responsible for Emma's death, he is for his own. He dies after learning of his wife's adventures and one day after meeting Rodolphe. Charles is killed out of pure disillusionment: Canivet “did an autopsy but found nothing.