Emma Bovary is a victim of circumstance to the extent that her experience of the world is socially constructed. What has to be understood is that she cannot simply run away from home and make her way in the world alone. Men can do that in nineteenth-century France, but not (respectable) women. Her response is to attempt to shape her experience based on radical misconceptions of how the real world works. Her preconceptions of what married life will be like are the stuff of adolescent fantasy, informed by the 19th-century equivalent of mass-media messages of romance and adventure. She anticipates learning the meaning of "felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books" (Flaubert 21). Her attempts to inject some romance into her life with Charles, which are consistent with received wisdom of what married life is "supposed" to be like, fall before what she sees as his dull reality.
By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found that she was as calm after this as before, and Charles seemed to be no more amorous and no more moved (Flaubert 26).
Because she is "incapable . . . of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms" (Flaubert 26), the fact that Charles does not comport himself like a dashing romantic hero persuades her that he lacks passion, even though his apparent dullness can be interpreted as the comportment of an adult rather than an adolescent. On the other hand, his falling into the habits of his previous marriage also suggest that he personifies the circumscribed society in which Emma begins to anticipate she will always be obliged to operate and that she is beginning to resent just at the time of the ball given by Marquis d'Andervilliers. The lavish décor of the chateau and the sumptuous banquet confirm Emma's romantic conception of aristocratic life, but her attempts to...