The Theme of Change in Madame Bovary Essay -- Madame Bovary Essays

The Theme of Change in Madame Bovary Change is a cardinal theme in the novel Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, and is key to understanding the division of Emma Bovary. Through parallel events the reader comes to realize that Emmas need for change is the resolvent of the influence her early flavor had upon her. At the convent Emma is left to develop into an original romantic with high hopes for upheaval and dreams of sensuous pleasures that will never be fulfilled. Thus, when life refuses to conform to her romantic notions Emma alternates between various activities in her immutable search for a way to consummate her romantic longings. As a young girl from the country Emma is placed into a convent in the city. present Emma develops and receives nourishment for her already sentimental psyche. She looks upon copper crosses, the sick lamb and the cabalistic ...altar with the vigor of a scholar on a quest for knowledge. She listens intently to the sonorous lamentation of r omantic melancholy which awakened unexpected joys in spite of appearance her. Emma, being isolated from the outside world, is left alone to develop her flakey dreams that she reads about in novels, gaining the hope of someday fulfilling these romantic and irritationate desires. Emma devours books that exact romantic woes, oaths, sobs, tears and kisses...gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs and continuously impossibly virtuous. Due to Emmas isolation from everyday living she develops the need for excitement and as a result cannot endure her own married life. heart with Charles simply does not fit the fictionalized accounts she reads of. Thus Emma turns to the comforts of adultery and when passion is not readily available she will resor... ...t look on Leon realistically without seeing all his human imperfections. In which case she soon tires of him, as he does her. As her relationship with Leon progresses she also comes to understand that the lover she dreams of is a ma n whose worldly existence is impossible. As the result of her childhood Emma Bovary spends her correct life in an attempt to escape her middle-class existence by dreams, love affairs and false pretensions. Emma constantly changes her activities, her surroundings and her love situations in a desperate attempt to grasp the fairy tales she entombed in her soul as a child. Although she longed for the superficial and materialistic Emma Bovary was one who ended her life without ever compromising her vision of something greater than she. Flaubert, Gustav. Madame Bovary (Lowell Bair, trans.). New York Bantam Books 1996