Who She Is
Daughter of Rouault, from whose farm Charles Bovary takes her to marry after being widowed, and mother of Berthe Bovary. She is a woman educated by novels, who expects from life what exists only in novels. The Chapter 6 of Part I returns to the convent to show where this vocabulary comes from: devotion consumed by flowers, by the lyrics of songs, and by mystical languor, and the cheap novels smuggled in by a seamstress, read without distinguishing one register from the other.
Il fallait qu’elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profit personnel; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son cœur [...] étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu’artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages, she had to draw from things a kind of personal profit; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate consumption of her heart [...] being of a more sentimental than artistic temperament, seeking emotions and not landscapes.
Trajectory
In Chapter 4 of Part I she marries Charles; in Chapter 5 of Part I, in the couple's bedroom, she sees the bouquet of orange blossoms of the dead first bride and imagines what would be done with hers if she died. In Chapter 7 of Part I she tries to love her husband by theory, reciting verses to the moon. In Chapter 8 of Part I, the ball at La Vaubyessard shows her for one night what is missing, and she keeps the green cigar case that Charles finds on the road back.
Son voyage à la Vaubyessard avait fait un trou dans sa vie, à la manière de ces grandes crevasses qu’un orage, en une seule nuit, creuse quelquefois dans les montagnes, her trip to Vaubyessard (see La Vaubyessard) had opened a hole in her life, like one of those great crevasses that a storm sometimes carves into the mountains in a single night.
In Chapter 9 of Part I, in Tostes, she abandons drawing, embroidery, and the piano, waits for something to change the course of her days, and throws into the fire the bouquet of her own wedding, found in a drawer during the preparations for the move. She leaves for Yonville pregnant.
Pourquoi jouer? qui l’entendrait?, why play? who would hear it?
Comme les matelots en détresse, elle promenait sur la solitude de sa vie des yeux désespérés, cherchant au loin quelque voile blanche dans les brumes de l’horizon, like sailors in distress, she cast desperate eyes over the solitude of her life, searching far off for some white sail in the mists of the horizon.
In Chapter 2 of Part II, at the arrival dinner, she builds with Léon a shared repertoire of sunsets, Swiss lakes, and books read by the fireside. In Chapter 3 of Part II she faints on learning that she had a girl, because she wanted a son.
She wanted a boy; he would be strong and dark, he would be called Georges, and this idea of having a male child was a kind of revenge for all her past frustrations. A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion and every land, overcome obstacles, taste the joys of the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually hindered in everything.
In Chapter 4 of Part II, during the evenings at Homais's house, she forms with Léon a complicity in which nothing happens, and it is in this setting that the text records the idea of love she carries.
love, she believed, ought to arise suddenly, with great tumult and flashes [...] a storm from the heavens that falls upon life and overturns it, tears wills away like leaves and carries the whole heart off into the abyss.
In Chapter 6 of Part II she goes to the church to seek Abbé Bournisien, who treats her anguish as hunger or cold. Léon leaves for Paris without a declaration; in Chapter 7 of Part II, in his absence, she curses herself for not having loved him; once the longing fades, she consoles herself by buying a Gothic prie-dieu, a blue cashmere dress, and the prettiest of Lheureux's stoles. At the show in Chapter 8 of Part II, Rodolphe Boulanger holds her hand while the president announces the cattle prizes.
Rodolphe pressed her hand and felt it very hot and trembling, like a captive turtledove that wants to take flight again.
In Chapter 9 of Part II she yields to Rodolphe during the ride in the woods and, alone before the mirror, repeats the phrase that places her among the type of passionate woman she envied in novels.
I have a lover! A lover!
In Chapter 11 of Part II, after Hippolyte's operation, she looks at her husband in panic, and the text names what she thinks of him.
Emma, in front of him, stared at him; she did not share his humiliation, but felt another: that of having imagined such a man could have any worth, as if she had not already verified dozens of times his mediocrity.
In Chapter 12 of Part II she begins buying on credit from Lheureux and arranges with Rodolphe a flight for September 4. In Chapter 13 of Part II, the letter of rupture leads her to the attic, to the edge of the skylight, and only Charles's voice calling for her stops her; a cerebral fever follows, and forty-three days with Charles at the bedside. In Chapter 14 of Part II come the devotion of convalescence and, at Homais's suggestion, the trip to the opera; in Chapter 15 of Part II, in Rouen, she projects a new fantasy onto the tenor Lagardy, and Léon reappears.
Why not end it all? Who would stop her?
Carry me off, take me away, let us flee! For you, for you! All my ardors and all my dreams!
In Chapter 1 of Part III she meets Léon again in Rouen and leaves the cathedral with him for the cab; in Chapter 2 of Part III she obtains from Charles the power of attorney; in Chapter 3 of Part III she spends three days with him at the Hotel de Boulogne; in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 of Part III she invents piano lessons with Mademoiselle Lempereur to go to Rouen every Thursday, and in Chapter 5 of Part III she signs Lheureux's bills of exchange.
her life had been nothing but a collection of lies, in which she wrapped her love as if in veils, to hide it
They knew each other far too well for those surprises of possession that multiply pleasure a hundredfold. Emma was as bored with Léon as he was weary of her. Emma now found in adultery all the insipidity of marriage
In Chapter 6 of Part III the summons for eight thousand francs in twenty-four hours arrives, and Lheureux shuts the door on her.
In Chapter 7 of Part III the house is seized, and she asks money of Léon and then of the notary Guillaumin, and refuses his advances. In Chapter 8 of Part III, she finally asks Rodolphe, hears his refusal, enters Homais's laboratory, and eats the arsenic from the blue flask.
You take advantage of my distress with impunity! I am to be pitied, not to be sold!
drawing it out full of a white powder, she began to eat it directly
Don't accuse anyone…
Bournisien anoints her in extreme unction, organ by organ, and Chapter 8 of Part III closes with a three-word sentence.
She had ceased to exist.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes running through her are Desire, Dream and fantasy, Marriage, Love, Religion, and Money and wealth. The reading of Chapter 6 of Part I on what convent formation gave her:
The effect is a sensibility trained to recognize only emotions in the form of cliché, and it is the key to reading the chapter and the whole book: Emma is not sensitive to the world, she is sensitive to what the world can give her in sensation.
And the two readings that place her on either side of the distinction between vice and incontinence:
In adultery, Emma is on the side of vice: evil does not show itself to her as evil, because the vocabulary of novels has dressed it as virtue, and before the mirror she celebrates it.
In devotion after Rodolphe, in Chapter 14 of Part II, and in the moments when she recognizes her daughter, she repents and tries to return, which is the sign of the incontinent person by Aquinas's criterion. The two phases coexist, and neither explains the other.
Twice the novel places in Emma's head a question of the same kind: "Who would hear it?", when she abandons music in Tostes, and "Who would stop her?", in the attic, after Rodolphe's letter. In the first there is no answer; in the second the answer comes from outside, through Charles's voice calling for her.
Relationships
- Charles Bovary: the husband, who discovers the lovers only after her death.
- Léon: the complicity without declaration in Part II and the Rouen lover of Part III.
- Rodolphe Boulanger: the lover of Part II, author of the letter of rupture and of the final refusal.
- Lheureux: the creditor who finances both adulteries and collects the debt.
- Homais: the pharmacist neighbor, who suggests the opera and from whose laboratory the arsenic comes.
- Abbé Bournisien: the priest who does not hear her question and gives her extreme unction.
- Guillaumin: the notary whose advances she refuses.
- Berthe Bovary: the daughter.
- Hippolyte: Charles's patient, to whom she offers the wooden leg that Charles pays for.
- Symbols linked to her: La Vaubyessard, the green cigar case, Yonville, and the cab.