I. Artist MC Escher, famous for his deceptive manipulations of vignettes, once asserted that "reality cannot exist without illusion, and illusion not without reality." It is unclear why Escher and countless others care about the absurd, the gray matter of the world; it's difficult to understand how reality can become so bland and mundane that it forces us to escape it completely. After all, there are so many paradigms left to break, so many conceptual questions left unanswered. Perhaps there are people who naturally lack this recognition of the beauty and paradox of reality, others who choose to ignore the authenticity of the self and escape into misunderstanding, a dream. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Few works are better embodied in this character than in Gustave Flaubert's classic 1857 publication, Madame Bovary. Although the novel is often seen as a commentary on the corruptible French bourgeois, the story centers on the selfish machinations of Emma Bovary, a stifled housewife dissatisfied with the life she leads. Emma, ​​perhaps inadvertently, falls into a parallel world of fine meals, balls, and other opulent apprehensions that eventually lead her to a feeling of disgust for her true vitality, thus ending her life through death. suicide. Emma is never able to see the magnificence of relationships and love; she is carried away by pretentious ideas of romance and luxury. Her husband, Charles, unfortunately also finds himself in his own fantasy world. He cannot detect the indiscreet plans of his scheming wife. Charles believes he is living a fairy tale with a loving and obedient wife, when in reality this couldn't be further from the truth. Ironically, those the couple encounters in the treacherous society encroaching on them are closest to reality. In Madame Bovary and in today's civilization, the beauty and danger of illusion is that it distances the individual from reality in such a way that reality loses a little of its splendor.II Lawrence Thornton, in his 1978 review of the play, proposes that Emma Bovary exists in a fantasy world fabricated by "Three visual modes...descriptive, hallucinatory and autoscopic". He claims that the descriptive manner of vision explains Madame Bovary's internal state and explains why she reacts as she does to external stimuli. Thornton believes that Flaubert uses images of Emma's surroundings to parallel her most intimate emotions. In her hallucinatory state, Madame Bovary loses all sense of time and lets herself be carried away by her latest whim, whether it be a man or another object of her fleeting affection. Temporarily, she forgets that she is married and that she is on the verge of bankruptcy. Thornton seems to tolerate his behavior because of this delusional mode, blaming him and not the person it manifests on. Autoscopic vision seems to combine the first two, explaining the fusion of past and present and how it prevents Emma from always knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. Flaubert's style seems to fade behind Emma's own articulations, making this mode the most revealing of Emma Bovary's psyche. Thornton's ideas about Flaubert's use of imagery to parallel Emma's feelings are brilliant, but his analysis of three different modes of vision seems far-fetched and goes too far. Emma Bovary's notions and emotions almost always seem to be associated with a similar vignette, whether fanciful, desolate oreven promising. Flaubert indeed reveals in this technique how easily Emma is affected by the most subtle subtleties that surround her. Thornton claims that Emma no longer understands the concept of time, when in fact it is quite the opposite. Emma exists in her spell precisely because she is acutely aware of time. Madame Bovary knows that she cannot waste time as an obedient housewife and must expel her desires one way or another. Thornton confuses Emma's desires with ephemeral desires indifferent to time. Even though Emma aspires to stay young forever, she knows exactly where and how she is and does what she can to inject enthusiasm into her life. If Emma had no concept of time, she wouldn't be so desperate and ready to fall into illusion. Her perception of time is why her illusions are so dangerous.III If there was ever proof of Emma Bovary's false sense of what is ideal and what is right, it lies in the style of writing of Flaubert. Emma constantly scrutinizes her situation and is not appreciated by the most egocentric and pompous people in society. The journeys into Emma's thoughts perfectly express Flaubert's style, manipulating the reader into detecting the harmful effects of a false reality. Madame Bovary reflected: "Would this misery be eternal? Would she never escape from it? She certainly deserved as much as all these women who lived happily. She had seen duchesses in Vaubyessard who had more awkward shapes and more common manners. that she, and she cursed the injustice of God; she leaned her head against the wall and wept; she envied the tumultuous lives, the masked balls and the insolent pleasures with all the crazy distractions that they probably offered and that she did; had never known (83) This introspection conveys Emma's insight that probes no further than the material level, the outer surface of things. She continues to create a chasm between her own life and what she desires. , as evidenced by Flaubert's sentence structure To begin the passage, Madame Bovary uses two simple, segregationist sentences referring to the life she currently leads as the segment progresses. steers toward the life she longs for, her thoughts materialize in freight train phrases, displaying her boredom with current circumstances and a romanticized, garnished idea of ​​what she thinks she deserves. Flaubert uses this hidden technique throughout the novel, gradually increasing the gap between whim and reality. The tone is melancholic, but in doing so it is also latently manipulative. Emma is so distraught, so desperate for a new existence, that she almost provokes empathy from the reader. This is precisely Flaubert's strategy: he wants the audience to feel compassion for Emma. The reader quickly realizes that he should not feel sympathy for such an ungrateful adulterous woman and has faced the hazards of illusion. Emma is so disconnected from reality that she calls on the audience to side with her, proving the power of fantasy. Emma is already too justified in her mind to return to reality, as evidenced by the phrase "She certainly deserved as much..." She is convinced that what could be should be, and Flaubert describes this exquisitely through his style .IV Company is a corruptible entity; it is imperfect and responsible for the dangers that threaten the world today. There are many reasons for this imperfection of civilization and, as Madame Bovary illustrates, the error of understanding is among the most important. This does not mean that goals or ambitions are part of these terrible apprehensions, but rather that they are.