Farewell, Emma, for now

Madame Bovary is for sure one of those novels I will get back to. In French the mere sound of the language will attract me over and over again, this I know. Me and my husband have read the novel side by side, but he took the Swedish translation and cannot read my essay on this perfect sample of novel, since I wrote it in French. I am therefore translating it into English here:

Emma Bovary, a not very amiable woman and the author who fell in love with his creation

Part I. Who killed the Bovarys ?

Emma seems to be a young woman with a recurring bi-polar mental illness. Her shop-o-holic  and sex addicted behaviour indicates that. For that reason it is rather difficult to pait a moral portrait of this young woman. You have to be able to distinguish the sickness from her sane and conscious behaviour. I am certain of that the fact  that Flaubert himself suffered from a  mental illness made his descriptions of Emma's recurring periods of ill health so accurate. Nevertheless Flaubert is judging Emma's moral harshly, he find few excuses for her behaviour and depicts her, at least in the beginning of the novel, as a woman deprived of morality.

However, after the indcident when Emma rejected the offers of the accountant Gullaumin, Flaubet seems to have changed his mind about Emma. She is not only a victim of her own delusions, which she found in the romantic novels she eagerly devoured, she is also a victim of a society of respectable men such as Rodolphe, Lheureux and Homais. The three of them representing each, one influential group in society which all re the culprits in this tragedy; Rodolphe the rich aristocrat with whom Emma thought she had found true love, but Rodolphe was only interested in seducing her since he was in a habit of seducing women all the time. He used the naive Emma for his pleasures without any feelings of remorse.

Lheureux represents  the greedy merchant who willingly pushes Emma over the cliff to her economic ruin. Last but not least Mr. Homais, the half-educated, faking friendlyness and kindness, hypocrisy in flesh, is the one to blame the most for this tragedy. Thus these men represents the aristocracy, the power of money and education and science standing against the helpless couple of Emma and Charles Bovary.