Madame Bovary: Emma's Desire To Control Her Surroundings

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impossibly virtuous, always well dressed, who wept copiously” (Flaubert 57). When Emma married Charles, she expected this perfect man whom she had pictured from the many romantic novels she had read. It is these fairy-tale illusions that slowly bring the world crashing down on her.
Emma’s illusion of love and grandeur came from her knowledge of romance novels. After she had married Charles, she came to the conclusion that their love was not like the ones she had read about in her beautiful books. “But the happiness that should have resulted from this love had not come; she must have deceived herself, she thought.
Emma sought to learn what was really meant in life by the words ‘happiness,’ ‘passion,’ and ‘intoxication’—words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books” (Flaubert 55). Her illusion of what love should be is what blinds her to Charles’ love. She feels that love should always be passionate and “intoxicating”, and she is so absorbed by her dreams and illusions ...

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and husband. She pictured marriage as a grand occasion in which she would be able to live out what she has read in her novels. Ever since the marriage itself, Emma was not content. She “wanted to get married by torchlight at the unusual hour of midnight, but old man Rouault could not understand this notion at all. And so a wedding took place, to which forty-three people came and sat at the table for sixteen hours” (Flaubert 47). Emma believed that her marriage would be a grand festival, but it turned out to be a common wedding with boring people. This discontent continued as the reality of Charles, to her, is nothing like her illusion of a husband. She expected Charles to be ...

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