ntic fiction and so is destined always to be disappointed in a real world that does not provide the kind of stimulation found in romantic fiction. Emma's boredom is thus caused both by the reality of the social conditions of her time and by the fact that she cannot accept that 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. She marries Charles Bovary with pictures of a romantic and dashing heroic figure in her head, but in truth Charles is a dull man who works as a country doctor and who is perfectly happy to remain in the same place doing the same thing for his whole life. Charles is contrasted with the more romantic figure of his father, someone who might be more to Emma's liking in terms of her vision of what a man should be like. Charles finds that nothing comes easily to him--he must work hard for everything, and hard work is part of his nature. He is also a man who has always been dominated by women--first his mother, then the first wife chosen for h...