The story of Emma Bovary as told by Gustave Flaubert is told in a way that deliberately avoids grand moral dilemmas and dramatic action, and doing so is part of Flaubert's approach to literature. He places great emphasis on character, however, and this can be seen with reference to Emma Bovary herself, a woman who interacts with several men in the course of her story and who has a belief in high ideals and a romantic and adventurous life and is always seeking something other than what she has. as such, she is both an individual and a representative of her sex and class, allowing Flaubert to comment on the social problems and mores of his age. This desire on Emma's part for romance and adventure, for instance, contrasts with the banality of her middle-class existence, and Flaubert emphasizes this difference as a way of illuminating Emma's character by showing the difference between her dreams and her reality. Her high-mindedness could be a source of ambition and a spur to greater effort to achieve the ideal, but in this novel it makes Emma dissatisfied, hyper-critical of her surroundings and the people she knows, always ready to move from one person to another, and ultimately foolish. The affairs she has are with men she believes to be as noble and grand as the character of fiction, but here again she is bound to be disappointed in the reality and is betrayed again and again as a consequence.
Flaubert was a man who loved privacy and solitude and who had been dedicated to both from childhood. Such a predilection served him in his studies, and he would alter recall the joy he felt when he was alone. At the same time, he came to see over time that his desire for solitude was part of a need to protect his inner life, and "self-confinement became the means of salvaging his dreams and his memories" (Brombert 14-15). Flaubert talked of his life in images of confinement, of living above it all in an ivory tower, and of living a mon...