![]() ![]() Thornton believes Flaubert uses imagery of Emma’s surroundings to parallel her innermost emotions. ![]() Lawrence Thornton, in his 1978 criticism of the piece, proposes that Emma Bovary exists in a fantasy world fabricated by “Three visual modes…descriptive, hallucinatory, and autoscopic.” He asserts the descriptive manner of vision explains Madame Bovary’s internal condition and conveys why she reacts to external stimuli in the way she does. In Madame Bovary and in civilization today, both the beauty and danger of illusion is that it removes one from reality in such a way that the latter then loses some splendor of its own. Ironically enough, those the couple encounter in the treacherous society encroaching on them are the ones closest to reality. Charles believes he is living a fairy tale with a loving and obedient wife, when in fact it couldn’t be farther from the truth. He cannot detect the indiscrete schemes of his plotting wife. ![]() Her husband, Charles, is sadly also in an imaginary world of his own. Emma is never able to see the magnificence in relationships and love she is swept away by the pretentious ideas of Romanticism and luxury. Emma, perhaps inadvertently, falls into a parallel world of wining and dining, balls, and other opulent misgivings that eventually lead her to a feeling of disgust for her true vitality, consequently ending her life in suicide. Though the novel is often considered to be a commentary on the corruptible French Bourgeois, the story centers around the selfish machinations of Emma Bovary, a stifled housewife unsatisfied with the life she is leading. In few works is this persona better epitomized than in Gustave Flaubert’s classic 1857 publication Madame Bovary. ![]()
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