Emma Bovary, the main character in Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, shocked many when the novel was first published in 1857. She was a woman who lived in a society that was repressive and particularly so toward women. Emma did not fit easily into such a society because she had a romantic nature, one which was nurtured by her daydreams and her desire for excitement and change. In her world, a woman is expected to marry and then to subsume herself to the life of her husband, in essence disappearing into marriage and no longer being thought of as an individual even to the slight extent that she may have been before marriage. Emma, however, has been spoiled by the romantic notions she has acquired from romance novels she first read to escape the boredom of the convent. She is an example of someone who lives with an illusion about life and is disappointed to find that the illusion is not the same as the reality.
The life of Emma Bovary is fully developed in the course of the novel, and the novelist shows how her early life has influenced the development of her personality and the ways in which that personality is manifested in later life. Flaubert implies that the child was always sentimental in her outlook, and this sentimentality was nurtured over time rather than dissipating in the face of the realities of life. For one thing, the child was insulated for much of her life. She was sent to a convent, isolating her from the world, and it was there that she further nurtured her daydreams with the romance novels that gave her a false picture of life, a picture of heightened emotions, sentimentality, and excitement. Marriage in these novels offered the same sort of distorted picture, so it was inevitable then Emma would discover real marriage to be quite different when she encountered it in her own life. The romantic dreams of her youth could not be satisfied by the reality of marriage.
This is precisely what happens. ...