Madame Bovary 447“the convention restraining.” At other times, she
equates freedom with wealth, as when she says to
Rodolphe that he cannot be “wretched,” because
he is free, he is rich. Long after their affair fades,
she still describes Rodolphe as “rich and happy and
free.” In Emma’s imagination, these are synony-
mous. Men are rich, happy, and free, while women
are poor, miserable, and subservient to the men
around them.
Emma is not deluded in seeing the world this
way—her possibilities are limited in comparison to
the men of the novel. Rodolphe is free to seduce
whomever he wishes and to end the affair at a time
of his choosing. But Emma herself freely embraces
the affair, fulfilling her own desires despite the
weight of convention. Léon is free to leave Yonville
for Paris when he tires of provincial life (and his
unfulfilled longing for Emma), a choice that she
lacks. But Emma and Léon seem to be relative
equals at the beginning of their affair, and ultimately
he becomes her mistress as she comes to dominate
their relationship. She has more freedom than she
realizes, although not as much as her male compan-
ions. But even they are less free than she imagines.
For Charles as a young man, playing dominoes is
“a precious act of liberty,” an entrée into a forbidden
adult world. He begins to enjoy life, memorizing
poetry and hanging out in taverns; all of which leads
him to fail his medical exams the first time out.
Successful the second time, he begins his practice
and his mother finds him a wife. Foolishly, Charles
thinks this will be his chance to escape his mother’s
rule, to be truly free; he “had pictured marriage as
the advent of a better life, thinking he would be
more free, and able to dispose of his own person
and his own money.” But just as his mother domi-
nated his youth, Charles’s first wife is master during
their marriage. Freedom comes with her death, and
Charles is briefly happy living alone, until he begins
to long for Emma. After their marriage, Charles is
happy and free again, because he is “the master of
this lovely woman whom he adored.” Given that she
feels trapped and miserable in the marriage, his own
freedom is short-lived.
After Rodolphe breaks off his affair with
Emma, she recognizes a different kind of freedom,
the freedom to end her life. “Why not have done
with it? Who was to stop her? She was free.” At
the last minute Charles’s shouts of “Wife! Wife!”
call her back, and she does not commit suicide—
yet. Later she pursues an affair with Léon, and
throughout it all she continues to spend more than
she can afford on an endless supply of material
goods. When her debts overcome her, and her lov-
ers refuse to help her, she sees no other way out; she
swallows arsenic.
The novel’s last word on the complex relations
among freedom, gender, and wealth is the plight of
Berthe, Emma’s daughter. When Charles dies not
long after Emma, poor Berthe is sent from rela-
tive to relative until she is taken in by a poor aunt,
who sends young Berthe “to earn her living in a
cotton-mill.”
James Fordlove in Madame Bovary
Love is a fickle sentiment in Madame Bovary, flar-
ing brightly, dying quickly, and rarely producing any
happiness. The first hint of this is the account of
Charles Bovary’s parents. The narrator explains that
Charles’s mother was initially “mad about” his father,
but the “servility” of her love only turned him against
her. Her affection for her husband quickly turns to
rage at his carousing. She focuses her attention on
her son Charles, who will himself be doomed to
unhappy marriages. Madame Bovary chooses a wife
for her son, an ugly, older widow, desired by many
for her money. Charles expects to be free and happy
in marriage, but is soon disappointed. His wife is
his master, and his life is a boring routine until he
falls in love with Emma, the daughter of one of
his patients. Meanwhile, the manager of his wife’s
money runs away with it all, much to the chagrin of
Charles’s parents. Only a week after a confrontation
in which Charles tries to defend his wife from his
parents, she dies. He mourns her briefly (“she had
loved him, after all”), but then is free to pursue a
new life. He is happy for a time, living alone, until
he begins to think again of Emma. Soon they marry,
and all seems well. Charles loves his wife, but it is a
one-sided love; he is blissfully happy to be “master
of this lovely woman whom he adored.”
For Emma, love is a “lightning flash” and a
“tempest.” She longs for the kind of passionate love