Madame Bovary Essay, Research Paper

A theme throughout Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is escape versus

confinement. In the novel Emma Bovary attempts again and again to

escape the ordinariness of her life by reading novels, having affairs,

day dreaming, moving from town to town, and buying luxury items. It

is Emma’s early education described for an entire chapter by Flaubert

that awakens in Emma a struggle against what she perceives as

confinement. Emma’s education at the convent is perhaps the most

significant development of the relationship in the novel between

confinement and escape. The convent is Emma’s earliest confinement,

and it is the few solicitations from the outside world that intrigue

Emma, the books smuggled in to the convent or the sound of a far

away cab rolling along boulevards.

The chapter mirrors the structure of the book it starts as we

see a satisfied women content with her confinement and conformity at

the convent.

At first far from being bored in the convent, she enjoyed the

company of the nuns, who, to amuse her, would take her into the chapel

by way of a long corridor leading from the dining hall. She played

very little during the recreation period and knew her catechism well .

The chapter is also filled with images of girls living within

the protective walls of the convent, the girls sing happily

together, assemble to study, and pray. But as the chapter progresses

images of escape start to dominate. But these are merely visual images

and even these images are either religious in nature or of similarly

confined people.

She wished she could have lived in some old manor house, like

those chatelaines in low wasted gowns who spent their days with their

elbows on the stone sill of a gothic window surmounted by trefoil,

chin in hand watching a white plumed rider on a black horse galloping

them from far across the country .

As the chapter progresses, Emma continues dreaming. While in

the convent, the images she conjures up are of exotic and foreign

lands. No longer are the images of precise people or events, instead

they become more fuzzy and chaotic. The escape technique that she used

to conjure up images of heroines in castles seems to lead inevitably

to chaos and disintegration.

And there were sultans with long pipes swooning on the arbors

on the arms of dancing girls; there were Giaours, Turkish sabers and

fezzes; and above all there were wan landscapes of fantastic

countries: palm trees and pines were often combined in one picture

with tigers on the right a lion on the left .

Emma’s dreams by this point are chaotic with both palms and

pines mixed together with lions and tigers. These dreams continue and

change themselves into a death wish as swans transform themselves into

dying swans, and singing into funeral music. But Emma although bored

with her fantasy refuses to admit it and she starts to revolt against

the confines of the convent until the Mother Superior was glad to see

her go.

The chapter about Emma Bovary’s education at the convent is

significant not only because it provides the basis for Emma’s

character, but also because the progression of images in this chapter

is indicative of the entirety of the novel. The images progress from

confinement to escape to chaos and disintegration. In Madame Bovary

Emma changes from a women content with her marriage, to a women who

escapes from the ordinariness of her everyday life through affairs and

novels, to a women whose life is so chaotic that she disintegrates and

kills herself. Indeed, Madame Bovary is like a poem comprised of a

progression of repeating images.

Emma Bovary found interest in the things around her which

prevented her boredom. In her early education it was the novels she read,

“They were filled with love affairs, lovers, mistresses, persecuted

ladies fainting in lonely country houses.” She also found interest in

the sea but only because it was stormy. Of all the things that Emma

found interest, she soon became bored with, from Charles to Leon. This

cycle of boredom and the progression of images of confinement, escape,

and chaos, parallel both the Chapter on Emma’s education and the

novel as a whole the entire mural of the novel as Emma’s journey from

boredom in reality to self-destruction in fantasy.