Madame Bovary: Emma's Desire To Control Her Surroundings

Part I of Essay
Often, people fantasize a world in which all their goals and aspirations come true. In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Emma is a woman with dull expectations of life, which gives her a desire to control her surroundings. She creates many illusions due to her tedious l ....

Part II of Essay
.... go to an old maid to hear fantastic stories about “love, lovers, mistresses, persecuted women… gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, 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 t ....