The story is a paradox to disparage romanticism and to explore the comparison and link of beauty to corruption and of destiny to free will. The beautiful Emma Bovary has notions about romance that originates from her delusion fed by her continuous reading of novels since her childhood. Emma’s husband Charles Bovary, on the other hand, is obtuse, inept, dull, clumsy and everything that Emma Bovary abhors. Emma doesn’t know this at all when she married Charles. Having lived the simple life of a daughter of a farmer, all her fantasies about marriage, love and wealth are just by-products of reading works of fiction, and she at first, sees Charles as a representation of those fictional characters. Charles, being the insipid and mediocre medical practitioner that he is, never once thought and felt that he is not making Emma happy in their marriage. And since the milieu of the story is at a time when women can’t do anything but get married, sew, cook and look after their families, Emma never has the chance to pursue her dreams on her own. Society just doesn’t allow her to. In many ways during the nineteenth century, circumstances, rather than independence and self-autonomy, control and decide the situation of women.
Emma is disillusioned by all things happening around her---from the simplicity of her bedroom, her daily household routine, her inability to buy expensive clothes, her husband’s uncouth table manners and dirty nails, his insensitivity to her passions, to his bold confidence that he makes her happy. Charles is not at all romantic. He does not see the world as Emma does. He is unable to view things in an idealized way. Romance with all its fictional glamour being everything Emma desires, Charles becomes the direct contradiction of it. Her love, or the feeling that she at first thought is love when she married Charles, finally gives way to her unhappiness, doldrums and discontent. Unfortunately, Emma is very much unable to accept her...