Madame Bovary a Psychoanalytic Approach

2941 Words12 Pages
CHAPTER 4 Emma Bovary as the main female characters of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is portrayed as morally corrupted. In the novel, she is depicted as a woman who is dissatisfied by her marriage. While she might give her consent to the marriage, she does not think that her marriage goes as she has initially expected – that being married will give her better access to romantic experience. As it is told earlier in the novel, Emma always expects that her marriage life will be like the one she often reads in the romance stories, such as the one in Paul et Virginia a novel by Bernadin de saint Pierre , which according to Chadwick , St. Pierre ‘s novel is a fairy tale of romantic love that predictably ends with happily married heroine. With all the lacks in her own marriage, this book appeals to Emma tremendously. The highly romantic love story of the heroine in that book inspires Emma in her romantic pursuit; she develops expectations that she would somehow lead the kind of life this heroine lives upon her marriage. To the extent of how far the romantic and sentimental novels affected Emma’s life is that Emma is unable to separate fiction from reality. It stimulates Emma to spend her whole life searching for perfection in love. However, in Emma’s time, the notably Victorian period, marriage was not as romantic or ‘fairytale-like’ as depicted in many novels of the time; on the contrary, love actually played a very minor role in the majority of ‘matrimonies’ that took place at the time . Finding her marital life is away from her imagination, Emma begins to see marriage as boring and too strictly binding that she want to escape. Emma’s dissatisfaction with her marital life causes her to pursue happiness outside the institution of marriage. Vorvola mentions that home and marriage were the sources of nineteenth century women’s despair that sometimes they needed to
Open Document