Madame Bovary

Even though Flaubert's style of writing is purely realistic, there is a clever contrast between real life and Emma's fairytale-esque ideal of what love really is. In her marriage to Charles, she soon became bored of him after the initial fire of pre-marital bliss was extinguished. From constantly reading romantic novels all of her life she had built up the ideal love that was only tangible in the fairy tale's she read as a young girl. However once real life kicked in she became bored and disgusted with her once desirable husband, and strayed to fulfill her romanticized ideals. She was constantly in search of a new, more desirable love affair, however once the lust died off and the spark wasn't as strong, and what was left was actual life thats when she took off in search of a new love interest. She it seems as though she doesn't want to accept the realities and hardships of real life, but rather live vicariously through the romantic novels she read as a child. It frustrated me that her husband was so in love with her and wanted to make the marriage work, but as soon as she realized that her marriage wasn't the perfect "novel like" romance, she forced herself to view her once desirable husband as crude and obnoxious. Seeing as though she grew up reading the ideal romantic novel, its hard to say that she in fact knows the true meaning of love, she just knows the empty shell, the lust; not the true feelings that make it real.