Introduction
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) emerges out as a strikingly ‘modern text’ in terms of its treatment and presentation of the pathologized romanticism of Emma Bovary and further in carving out a fairly complex catalogue of the various relationship matrices which unfolds between Emma and the other male characters. Gustave Flaubert portrays Emma’s role as immersion in sentimental Romantic literature, a destructive psychological and emotional condition—one that distorts her perception of reality, triggers chronic dissatisfaction, and drives self-destructive behavior.
Gap between romanticism and realism
Flaubert vacillates between romanticism and realism to create a picture of provincial life which occupies a peculiar position, a position which Emma Bovary will continue to embody psychologically. In her formative years in the convent Emma begins to develop a dissociative identity, a persona and a self-image which is far more divorced from her material and social reality. Emma begins to develop germs of a fragmented existence similar to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, wherein her psychological or imaginary reality transcends the social scape programmed for a farmer’s daughter in rural Normandy. The convent education which was primarily meant for the aristocratic women creates a chasm in Emma and makes her discontented with life.
Charles Bovary (Emma’s husband) for Emma appropriates the manifestation of a non-masculine man devoid of any social ambitions. For Emma Charles betray the denotations of “felicity, passion and rapture” by his inertness, his coarseness and by the banality of his existence. Emma accuses Charles of being devoid of any desire, however, Emma’s own desires are constantly meditated by hollow romanticism, taking the silhouette of what Girard calls “metaphysical desire”, a desire that has lost its natural object and instead is meditated by secondary desire. Her desires are borrowed from the desires of the heroines of the chivalric romances and Arthurian legends, and therein they do not engender any form of originality or essence. As a consequence of these superfluous desires, there is a mimetic repetition in her life, in her expectations in all her relationships. The overarching mimetic development in Madame Bovary goes from the real to the unreal. All relationships tend to move toward the unreal. In Emma thus one finds a sense of pathos affixed with a misguided and misinformed imagination. The inner paraphernalia of the chivalric romance which Emma constructs is not exposed to the men in her life, in her imagination they become actors which can be interchanged, replaced or can be eliminated.
Emma’s Romantic Influences and Delusions
Emma grows up in a convent where she secretly reads and romanticises romantic novels—tales of grand passions, luxurious settings, exotic adventures, heroic lovers, and transcendent emotions. These readings shape her world view that life should offer intense feelings, elegance and escape from ordinary. She marries a mediocre country doctor, Charles Bovary, expecting to classic, copybook and passionate union. But she confronts domestic routine, provincial boredom, snoring husband and an unrefined life. Interestingly, Emma’s response is grounded in escapism, pursuit of fantasy and substitutes. Her affairs with Rodolphe (a cynical seducer) and Léon (a more idealistic but weak clerk) provide a romantic escape from routine domestic life, but eventually transcend boredom, cliché and abandonment.
Flaubert repeatedly portrays this dissatisfaction in terms that resemble pathology:
- Emma becomes obsessed with fantasies rather than actual experiences.
- She suffers recurring states of boredom, melancholy, restlessness, and emotional excess.
- Her desires escalate continuously; satisfaction is always temporary.
- She confuses literary conventions with real life, interpreting events according to romantic clichés.
In this sense, romanticism functions like a chronic condition: it creates a gap between expectation and reality that can never be closed. Nevertheless, Emma’s romanticism is pathologized not only in her multiple love affairs but also in her consumerism. She indulges in luxury goods, fashionable clothing, furniture, and social prestige with the same intensity that she longs for romantic fulfillment. The novel is a hallmark of literary Realism, reacting against Romantic excess by showing its repercussions in domestic routine provincial life. Flaubert pathologizes Emma’s romanticism as a contagion, embedded in illusion, born of out of her bad reading and unexamined desire.
Chandra, S. 2026
