Analysis of Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is a book written anti-romantically on purpose. In his book, Flaubert reflected relationships, adultery, hypocrisy and many other aspects of his time with his realistic characters. This paper is designed to analyse those main characters of the book, function of the community in the book, Emma’s adultery and reactions against it, Emma’s suicide, her husband’s reaction against it and her relationship with her daughter.
Flaubert is a conscious anti-romantic and his aim is to show cold facts and criticise romanticism by being realistic. Although Flaubert represented a limited time span, his themes are of universal value. Today, we still talk about the book Madame Bovary and we still discuss the themes of the book. The most important theme in the book is obviously adultery. Before discussing adultery, it is important to know about the condition and nature of the heroine and the impacts of the other characters on her condition.
As we know, the heroine of the book is Emma Bovary. Other main characters that have impact on Emma are Charles Bovary, her husband, Monsieur Homais, apothecary, Rodolphe Boulanger, Emma’s first lover, Leon Dupuis, Emma’s second lover, Monsieur Lheureux, money lender. As it is said above, all of these characters have an impact on Emma. They are all functional and these characters are to reveal Emma’s true nature and give us clues about the society of the time.
As for Emma, very briefly, we can say that she is a dreamer, an adventurer, a romantic, a wife, a mother and a mistress. She is portrayed as an irresponsible, immature, greedy, selfish woman. She is unable to adjust to the realities of life. She is a beautiful, charming woman that most men want to pay court to her. Those are the general characteristics of Emma. However, Emma has a very important function beyond these. Flaubert functionalizes Emma in order to show that romanticism is harmful. Emma reads romantic novels during her...