I wonder if there will ever come a time in my life when downing a handful of arsenic seems best answer to life's many questions. I do hope that moment never comes for me. Why Emma couldn't just tough it up is beyond me. First of all, she has a handful of men that over the course of her life have become infatuated with her. You would think she would be fairly happy with that. Even when she falls deeper and deeper into debt, and no one will help her out (even with some seducing), she still has a beautiful daughter, a husband that although embarrasses her loves her very much. Emma is a selfish, promiscuous lady who is too lost in the pages of her romance novels to deal with the harsh reality that there is no perfection in the world. Flaubert combats romanticism by showing how Emma, who strives her whole life to find the romantic relationship she reads about in those novels, ends up always being disappointed and never finding her ideal relationship. No matter how her men may love her, they are just never good enough as the men who sweep the fictional characters of her dreams off her feet. She is so caught up in her dream world that she can't handle reality. In her affair with Leon she buys many extravagant things, without a though towards her ever increasing debt. She only wants her relationship with Leon to remain as fantastical and romantic as she can. When she returns home to find the banks demanding her pay her debts, she tries to get more loans rather than working to pay it back. Even when her loans are denied she continues to try and borrow money by seducing other men.
Her fantasy life quickly falls apart and rather than trying to fix it, she chooses to "romantically" call an end to it. Much like in the romantic "Romeo & Juliette" she takes her life, rather dying than living a non romantic life. Emma is a selfish woman, living in world that does not mirror her novels. Emma cannot grasp reality, and thus is constantly disappointed with her less than perfect life. She leaves her husband and child to not only mourn her loss, but also pay back the debt she left them.
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Good post. I think your best point may be that Emma does not live in a world that "mirrors" the novels she reads. So, does Flaubert's book "mirror' the reality of the time period in which it was set? Is this what Realism is all about? And if so, this begs the question of whether or not we--like Emma--would rather read her books than Flaubert's. Taking this one step further, does this mean that Flaubert is mocking us even as he mocks Emma?
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