Madame Bovary is the portrait of a woman trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage in a prosaic bourgeois town. Her attempts to escape the monotony of her life through adulterous liaisons with other men are ultimately thwarted by the reality that the men she has chosen are shallow and self-centered and that she has overstretched herself financially. In despair, Emma resolves her predicament by taking her own life.

What should we make of this rather slight story, initially based on the life of a real woman who, like Emma, scandalized her village with her affairs with other men and her extravagant lifestyle? Is there a lesson or a moral to be drawn from Emma's folly and the tragedy of her death? Part of the difficulty - and, indeed, of the pleasure - of reading Madame Bovary is that Flaubert refuses to embed the narrative within an overriding moral matrix, refuses explicitly to tell the reader what lesson s/he should draw from the text. Madame Bovary was a novel shocking to its contemporaries because it did not appear to articulate a clear and unambiguous moral viewpoint and it is because of the ambiguity of the novel's moral stance that Madame Bovary found itself taken to court for its offence to public and religious morality. The challenge today's readers are left with is how to make sense of Emma's story.

A common interpretation of the novel maintains that Emma Bovary's downfall is due to the fact that she is both foolish and romantically inclined. Emma comes to a tragic end because she has been self-dramatizing and impulsive and, above all, because she has believed in the ideals of the Romantic literature of which she has been an avid consumer since adolescence. This is the view adopted by many critics who have viewed Emma as mediocre and trite, her dreams shoddy, second-hand and second-rate. The literary critic Allen Tate, for example, described Emma as a `silly, sad and hysterical woman' (quoted in Brombert: 1966, p.84).

Another view holds that Emma is an essentially tragic figure, a figure of epic proportions whose ideals are thwarted by a petty and money-grabbing society. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, however, saw Emma as a heroic creation and described her as `très sublime dans son espèce, dans son petit milieu et en face de son petit horizon' (Baudelaire: 1976, p.83). She is a truly epic heroine in thrall to an excessive but splendid passion. She has heroic potential - Baudelaire was a writer keen to discover and celebrate what he called `l'héroïsme de la vie moderne' - but who has the misfortune of inhabiting a mediocre environment far too small for her considerable energies. In this particular interpretation Emma stands out as a figure representing a challenge to the sterility and materialism of the new `bourgeois century'. Emma is almost an artist, almost a rebel in her challenge to the priorities and ideals of her age. As such, she is ultimately an awe- inspiring and tragic figure.

Another possible interpretation of Emma's downfall is that it is primarily due to her being a woman and not to her being foolish. In this essentially feminist reading, Emma is a victim of patriarchy, destroyed by a society that can conceive of no other role for women than that of wife and mother. Emma is essentially in revolt against the patriarchal order, although, of course, she lacks the insight and the vocabulary to conceive it in those terms.

Madame Bovary is an unusual novel insofar as it has given its name to its own psychological condition: bovarysme. This may be defined as the condition by which we delude ourselves as to what we are and as to life's potential. The Petit Robert has the following definition of the term: `BOVARYSME - Insatisfaction romanesque; `pouvoir qu'a l'homme de se concevoir autre qu'il n'est' (Jules de Gaulthier: 1865)

For many critics Madame Bovary is essentially a study of this condition, the story of one woman's faulty perception of reality. In an early version of the novel Flaubert included a scene at the ball at La Vaubyessard in which Emma is seen looking out at the landscape surrounding the house through coloured panes of glass (`verres de couleurs'). This scene was clearly meant as a representation of Emma's projection onto the world around her of an illusory model of reality. Flaubert used a similar image in an early story called Mémoires d'un fou: `Chacun de nous a un prisme à travers lequel il aperçoit le monde'.

Emma cannot see the world as it truly is - and, indeed, she cannot see herself as she truly is - because she is constantly imposing onto herself and her surroundings the criteria of Romantic literature. Enid Starkie has claimed that, in Madame Bovary, Flaubert sought to `study clinically the disease of Romanticism' (Starkie: 1967 p.297). This is a popular reading of the text: Flaubert has written a novel about the dangers of reading Romantic novels, a fiction about the dangers of Romantic fiction. Emma is essentially someone corrupted by what she has read, she is the inheritor of a second-hand set of attitudes and poses. It may be worth citing Enid Starkie in greater detail:

What is so wrong with Romanticism, claims Starkie, is that it fosters a fundamentally false understanding of the world. It encourages expectations that have no reasonable hope of ever being realized. Soon after Emma's marriage to Charles in the first part of the novel she is seen musing on her disappointment:

This sets up a pattern which recurs throughout the novel: Emma dreams of one thing but gets something else. The characteristic rhythm of her experience is of espoir followed by échec. Marriage, motherhood, adultery all fall short of Emma's expectations and she seems constantly doomed to disillusionment. The flat Norman landscape that surrounds her is at odds with the exotic lands of Romantic fiction, (Swiss chalets, the Scottish highlands etc. Folio p.71); Tostes, Yonville-l'Abbaye and even Rouen are no match for the erotic and artistic promise of Paris (Folio pp.92-3); and Emma's men fail to correspond to her fantasies of the perfect lover despite their initial promise. Charles, for example, is no figure from Romantic adventure:

Even Rodolphe, who comes closest to fitting the bill, with his expensive riding boots, gloves and substantial income, is ultimately considered coarse and vulgar by Emma. And Léon - the very image of the young Romantic artist - leaves her when he is made `premier clerc' (Folio p.370) inciting Emma's disgust and realization that adultery contains `toutes les platitudes du mariage' (Folio p.371).

Time and time again we see Emma trying to impose onto her world the criteria of Romantic literature and time and time again we see her disappointed with the results:

Although Starkie and other critics have taken the view that Emma's over-exposure to Romantic literature is largely responsible for her faulty perception of the world, this is not entirely accurate. Much of the responsibility for Emma's outlook lies with her convent school education. It is there that Emma is seduced by `les douceurs inattendues' (Folio p.65) of the sermons, prayers, masses and religious texts with their powerful images of a suffering Christ to which she is constantly exposed. Through the influence of an elderly spinster of a once powerful aristocratic family who would visit the convent to do the laundry Emma is introduced to the world of Romantic literature:

During Emma's adolescence her mother dies and her grief encourages her immersion into `les méandres lamartiniens' (Folio p.68) of the world of Romantic literature. Not long after her mother's death her father withdraws her from the convent but it is too late as Emma's sensibility has already been formed. She believes that she may find the passion she has read so much of in her later marriage to Charles but this proves to be a disappointment. Her experience at the elegant aristocratic ball at La Vaubyessard encourages her fantasies, as do both Léon and Rodolphe, who, in different ways, conform superficially to the stereotyped males of Romantic literature.

Emma's downfall is, in part at least, a result of a fundamental décalage between expectation and reality fostered by readings of Romantic literature. Emma has allowed an unreal world of love and adventure to impose itself upon her consciousness and with which the real world cannot compete. Her suicide may be read as a negative value judgement on a life not worth living. This however, raises an interesting question: are Emma's expectations of life too high or is life fundamentally deficient?

It is now perhaps time to consider another interpretation of Madame Bovary as a victim of the `Bourgeois Century'.

It is possible to consider Emma as a woman crushed by a materialist and complacent century. The society portrayed in Madame Bovary is shown to be one stratified in terms of class. We see different examples of the peasantry from Emma's father to Catherine Leroux; the old aristocracy at La Vaubyessard and in the character of Rodolphe, a gentleman farmer and rentier; and, of course, numerous examples of the bourgeoisie. Madame Bovary is very much a book about the bourgeoisie, very much a portrait of a class in the process of finding and defining itself and consolidating its position in society. Particularly in the characters of Homais and Lheureux we see bourgeois money on the move in search of new profits and power. The main action of Madame Bovary is much financial as it is erotic. Madame Bovary is full of scenes of buying and selling, borrowing and lending. Even personal relationships fall under the sway of financial considerations. For example, Charles's first wife is chosen for him by his mother on the grounds that she is a wealthy widow - she manages to outwit a grocer who has the support of the village priest in the competition for her - and Emma's father allows Charles to marry Emma because he is unlikely to try to haggle over the dowry.

Money is as important in Madame Bovary as it is in the fictional universe of Balzac's La Comédie humaine. Stephen Heath has written of Balzac's `epic fascination with money as demonic power' (Heath: 1992, p.58) but has claimed that Flaubert's treatment of money in Madame Bovary lacks the moral intensity of the financial dealings in La Comédie humaine. There are no handsome aristocrats in search of lost fortune playing the roulette wheels of Parisian casinos or the equally dubious operations of La Bourse in Madame Bovary, just the banal and petty financial calculations of self-seeking provincial businessmen like Lheureux and Homais. This is one of the (many) ways in which Flaubert re-wrote the Balzacian fictional model. The grand gestures and dramatic successes and failures of the characters in La Comédie humaine have been replaced by the piecemeal and meticulous manoeuvrings of a new commercial bourgeoisie.

According to the rules of competition in capitalist society there has to be both winners and losers. An increasingly prosperous society generates its human `garbage' as much as its wealthy entrepreneurs. Just like the stories of La Comédie humaine, Madame Bovary contains its losers like Catherine Leroux, Mère Rollet, Hippolyte, the blind beggar and, at the end of the novel, Berthe; and its winners like Lheureux - a merchant-draper who profits from artificially created dreams and desires and who extends credit to local businesses only to buy them up when they cannot pay - and, of course, Homais, the chemist and key exponent of scientific progress, technical advance and modernity. There are even more losers in the novel: Charles, of course, who loses out to the implacable advances made by Homais's pharmacy, his father who is a failure in business, his first wife who cheats him on the dowry and Emma's father who loses his farm.

Emma's behaviour throughout the novel directly contravenes the money-making ethos of Lheureux and Homais. What is particularly notable about Emma is her prodigality. She spares no thought for expense and consumers beyond her means. She offers her lovers extravagant presents:

Emma also rejects good economic management, thrift, hard work and parcimoniousness and dedicates herself to style. Towards the end of the novel Lheureux rebukes Emma with the words: `Tandis que je suis, moi, à bûcher comme un nègre, vous vous repassez du bon temps' (Folio p.374). For Stephen Heath Emma represents: `a threatening disturbance to the good commerce of society' (Heath: 1992, p.56), a challenge to the very principles on which her century is based. Flaubert too was opposed to the active success of the practical world of the bourgeoisie with their `can-do' attitude and concern for commercial and industrial success and it is tempting to see in Emma a portrait of the artist. Emma's attitude, for all its triviality, may be viewed as constituting a serious critique of her society. Emma's dissatisfaction with the world, her rejection of it in favour of the superior world of imagination and passion may be interpreted, as Diana Knight has claimed, as having a `positive moral value' (Knight: 1985 p.67). Reality, as represented by self-seeking and materialist characters like Homais and Lheureux, is somehow inferior to the imaginative world created by Emma as a virtual and substitute reality. Here is Diana Knight on this point:

Although many readers of Madame Bovary have seen in Emma a pattern valid for all human experience - high expectations followed by disappointment - this may be considered an inaccurate universalisation of an experience which is specific to women, or rather, to a certain class of woman in nineteenth-century France. Emma's downfall can be viewed as mainly due to her being a woman in a society in which women's roles were both limited and clearly circumscribed and in which any transgression was severely punished. One might argue that the central conflict in Madame Bovary is that of a woman who tries to shrug off the reductive definitions of woman conceived by patriarchy. Emma, of course, is not a particularly self-conscious character and does not conceptualize her dilemma in these terms. However, she does actively resist the position she is allotted in life and seeks a problematic fulfilment through adultery, an act which unsettles the stable categories of wife and mother.

Let's briefly consider the position of women in nineteenth- century France. Women in nineteenth-century France were denied most of the freedoms women enjoy today. The moral, intellectual and physical inferiority of women was inculcated in women from birth.

Women could play no active role in public life and were excluded from adopting professional responsibilities which would give them economic independence. Woman's place was in the home as wife and mother and, although we see working women in Madame Bovary, their work is usually related to the domestic sphere as wetnurses, servants, laundresses and the like. The only exception to this rule is Mme Lefrançois whose business falls victim to the fierce competition offered by Lheureux's Favorites du commerce. Women had no positive role, only a passive one restricted to the confines of home and garden. Women were regarded as possessions, as decorations to men's social standing and success. This is how Emma is seen by Charles and the inhabitants of Yonville-l'Abbaye:

Under the terms and conditions of the Napoleonic Code Civil women were regarded as perpetual minors. Fathers and husbands were the time- honoured guardians of women. The Code Civil had transformed marriage from an essentially religious sacrament to a legal contract in which authority was henceforth invested in the husband. The relatively progressive legislation put in place in the wake of the revolution of 1789, such as the introduction of divorce in 1792 was repealed by the Napoleonic Code Civil which denied women all rights. A law prohibiting divorce was passed in 1816 - which was to last until 1884 - making women the virtual prisoners of their husbands. Not substantially changed until 1938 the Code Civil stated that `... le mari doit protection à sa femme, la femme obéissance à son mari'. The husband had the sole right to administer whatever wealth the family possessed, both property and dowry. Furthermore, in theory women risked imprisonment for committing adultery whereas a man risked only a fine, and only then if he had introduced his mistress into the family home. Due to the abolition of divorce which lasted between 1816 and 1884 women were the virtual prisoners of their husbands, trapped in marriage and unable to change their situation.

Until 1880 there was little provision for formal education at both primary and secondary level. The few who were fortunate enough to receive the little education available to them - mainly from convent schools - found the emphasis placed on religious instruction and indoctrination. An advisor to Napoléon III suggested that the goal of education for women was to `faire des mères'. Such was the education that Emma Bovary née Roualt received in Madame Bovary:

Whilst the dull-witted Charles finds fulfillment as a medical officer, his more intelligent wife, Emma must languish as she finds no outlet for her creative energies.

In nineteenth-century France, and particularly during the Second Empire, the franchise was extended to only a few and it was not until the introduction of universal suffrage in 1944 that women could vote. Far more insidious than the legal oppression they faced was the ideological oppression of which they were the victims. The conventional view of women in the nineteenth century was unfavourable: they were the `weaker sex', constantly prone to illness and hysteria. The Grand Dictionnaire Universel of 1871 went so far as to assert: `La femme n'est point l'égal de l'homme'. Women's domain was the home and any attempt to move outside this proper domain and to pursue a career of one's own was met with ridicule. Working women were disparagingly known, as they were known in England, as `les bas bleus'. Early socialists such as Saint-Simon and Fourier had spoken of `l'esclavage de la femme' as early as 1829-30 yet theirs was a lonely voice in a society in which a crassly philistine utilitarianism was rapidly becoming the dominant ideology. Also in 1848, after the revolution of February, there was a sporadic outburst of feminist activity, although it only consisted of a few maverick individuals like Flora Tristan and Ubertine Auclert.

Literature too, was not a career open to women. In general, throughout the nineteenth century access to the means of literary production was a largely male prerogative and those women who became successful writers did so by adopting male pseudonyms like Georges Sand in France or George Eliot in England. Although this is a generalisation, you could argue that it was left to men to take the side of women and to give expression to their experiences, to voice their grievances. By and large, this was a challenge men failed to take up on behalf of their sisters with the exception of a number of texts by writers such as Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert who all wrote novels depicting the frustrations and failures of women in an oppressive patriarchal society.

A lot of other nineteenth-century novels are about women and have women characters but they are often only seen from the perspective of a more prominent male character. One could cite Constant's Adolphe, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir and Balzac's Le Père Goriot as instances of this tendency. Man as central character, woman as a figure in the landscape of his consciousness, his drama, his story, history. This is a recurrent feature of most novels. Madame Bovary differs from most other nineteenth-century novels in that a female character moves from a walk-on part to take the centre stage. A woman, her life and her aspirations provide the central focus of the narrative of Madame Bovary.

But Madame Bovary is a book written by a male author and as such I think it raises a such all sorts of questions about the degree to which a man can fully understand what it is to be a woman. Despite this initial doubt I think that one could make the valid claim that Madame Bovary represents an advance, a step forward in the representation of female characters and what one might clumsily term `la condition féminine'. I say clumsily because, in fact there are many `conditions féminines' in the plural.

Prior to the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 women had been, by and large, deprived of their rightful place in French literature (more specifically in the canon of great French literature). Only the novelist Georges Sand (also a friend of Flaubert) provides an exception to this general rule. Madame Bovary helps to restore the balance by according to a female character full psychological complexity. Flaubert dramatizes with unprecedented insight the plight of the unhappily married woman - la femme mal mariée - and provides a valuable corrective to the misrepresentations of women in the nineteenth-century novel. The radical nature of Madame Bovary resides in the way it asks, and struggles to answer the following questions:

Flaubert was no feminist but he was critical of the ways in which women's lives were circumscribed by men. In his correspondence he produced an unorthodox and questioning view of women:

The point Flaubert appears to be making in this statement is similar to the distinction commonly made today between sex and gender: sex is a matter of biology and gender a matter of social conditioning. Flaubert's distinction between `femelle' and `femme' then anticipates contemporary feminist theories on sex and gender. Flaubert is doing something really quite radical for his age: he locates a fundamental problem for women, namely, that their identity has been defined by men. Although it would be quite wrong to claim that Flaubert was a feminist - for Flaubert all progressive movements such as feminism or socialism were forms of romantic illusion and bêtise - he does express an intelligent grasp of the conditions of women's lives in the nineteenth century. Men have provided models of feminine behaviour convenient to their own interests. Flaubert problematizes the whole question of male and female roles and shows social and cultural conditioning to be a major factor in gender behaviour.

The education and upbringing Emma receives offers her no scope to realize her potential. She attends convent school during which time her head is filled with a series of erroneous fictional models. Flaubert was particularly alert to the ways in which women, through their education, were susceptible to what Lucette Cyzba calls a `mythologie de l'amour' (Cyzba: 1983 p.66). At convent Emma assimilates the view that passion and joy may be found in marriage. This belief is at variance with her later experience. Charles can't swim, ride or shoot. Worst of all his conversation is boring. Whilst he finds some fulfilment in his job Emma languishes at home, trapped like her greyhound running around in circles (Folio p.76). Later, Emma comes to see women as constantly held back by society and, on discovering that she is pregnant wishes for a son through whom she can fulfil her own desires:

The story of Emma is in part about her attempts to resist a role she finds limiting. We see Emma refusing her identity as woman and adopting men's behaviour, dress codes and freedoms.

The world described in Madame Bovary is a particularly enclosed and restricted one. Images of enclosure and entrapment are abundant from the very outset of Emma's marriage. Indeed, marriage is a kind of prison to Emma. Her first house is described as `trop étroite' (Folio p.153) and her marriage to Charles is likened to `l'ardillon pointu de cette courroie complexe qui la bouclait de tous les côtés' (Folio p.154). Perhaps the most potent image constriction and containment is the wooden contraption Charles makes to cure Hippolyte's club foot and which makes his leg turn gangrenous.

These images of constriction are clearly related to the reading of Emma's story as that of a women trapped by alienating and restrictive ideals of femininity. She tires of the confines of her alternatively dusty and damp home with its `éternel jardin' (Folio p.75). Emma feels trapped within the confines of the domestic sphere and sees no escape:

When Emma attempts to escape the confines of her world through adultery, it is interesting to note that much of the adultery takes place in open space. The first act of adultery with Rodolphe takes place in the forest al fresco and there is a scene during her later relationship with Léon which takes place in the open air floating down a river (Folio pp.331-333). There is, however, a certain degradation and Emma's adultery soon finds itself confined to hotel bedrooms whose limited spaces are a repetition of the restrictions of married life. The enclosed space of the fiacre ride in Rouen with Léon anticipates this process of entrapement. Adultery turns out to be another kind of prison:

Another recurrent image in the novel is that of Emma seated at the window dreaming of a realm beyond the bounded space of home and garden that constitutes her existence. Emma is constantly seen dreaming of escape to an idealized ailleurs (Folio p.71) as in the following extract:

Emma is also often seen experiencing feelings of nausea and suffocation and runs to the open window for fresh air:

But, as Victor Brombert argues, images of Emma at the window also reaffirm her entrapment and powerlessness:

Perhaps the most interesting window scene takes place at the ball at La Vaubyessard when some servants break a window to let in some fresh air and Emma sees a group of peasants looking in at the spectacle of luxury and indulgence taking place:

In this strange scene Emma is confronted with an image of herself - the peasants are a reminder of her own class origins - looking in at a world of elegance and excess that is forever denied. As Stephen Heath claims:

None of the action in Madame Bovary takes place in Paris and yet the capital is a place which casts a powerful spell over the minds of many of the characters and none more so than Emma. On a number of occasions Emma is seen dreaming of another life in the metropolis:

Paris is, for Emma, the antithesis of the banality of her immediate surroundings - `campagne ennuyeuse, petits bourgeois imbéciles, médiocrité de l'existence' (Folio p.93) - a place of distinction, imagination, glamour, luxury and refinement. Most importantly, Paris represents passion. Paris is seen as a place of erotic fulfillment. It is, perhaps, this category that is most important. Paris is a place which promises sexual gratification. This is the lure of Paris for Léon too:

At the beginning of their sexual relationship Léon persuades Emma to enter the cab in Rouen with him with the line: `Cela se fait à Paris!' (Folio p.315) eliciting the response: `Et cette parole, comme un irrésistible argument, la détérmina' (Folio p.315).

Although Paris exerts a special influence over Emma it is typical of her experience that she never reaches it. Doomed to stagnation in the provinces, the closest Emma gets to the `New Babylon' is Rouen. Rouen is, in Madame Bovary a parodic Paris, a sorry substitute for a dream that Emma is forever denied.

Related to the theme of Emma as an intelligent and energetic woman restrained by the norms of society, there is in Madame Bovary an attention to the details of Emma's clothes. Clothes are important in signifying who we are and our status in the world. It is, after all, through clothes that we signify our gender in society. The first time we see Emma she is described as:

The description of her dress with its three petticoats corresponds to the feminine ideal of the time but also suggests a certain restriction. There are a number of descriptions of Emma's dresses throughout the novel which stress this point. Emma wears `une robe de soie bleu à quatre falbalas' (Folio p.287) and on other occasion the comment is made that Emma's dress `aux plis droits cachait un coeur bouleversé' (Folio p.152). This sense of restriction is accentuated when she marries Charles and loses even more of her freedom. Her wedding dress is too long and heavy and trails along the ground picking up thistles (`La robe d'Emma, trop longue, traînait un peu par le bas' Folio p.54). The dress is burdensome like her new social status as a married woman. Interestingly, her marriage to Charles is likened to `l'ardillon [prong] pointu de cette courroie [belt] complexe qui la bouclait de tous les côtés' (Folio p.154). When she and Charles move to Yonville l'Abbaye there is an interesting scene (Folio p.119) in which she raises her dress slightly so as to warm herself by the fire of the Lion d'Or inn. This corresponds to the way in which she will attempt to free herself from the restraints of her position and open herself up to a new range of sensual experiences.

Despite the images of confinement and constriction that accompany description of Emma's clothes, there is also in some scenes the suggestion of rebellion. In one scene (Folio p.142) the expansion of Emma's dress in voluminous folds suggests a strong presence on Emma's part. Emma is expressing herself through a dress which cannot contain or restrict her exuberance. In another scene Emma is wearing a yellow dress whose movement evokes a stirring of energy within her (Folio p.179). Moreover, there are a number of descriptions of Emma's clothes that suggest an assumption of male dress codes and a rejection of her socially circumscribed gender identity. We see Emma striving towards the mobility and strength of men: `[e]lle portait, comme un homme, passé entre les boutons de son corsage, un lorgnon d'écaille.' (Folio p.40). Another scene has Emma wearing `un gilet à la façon d'un homme' (Folio p.254). There are also Emma's riding trousers (Folio p.213) which are linked to mobility, movement and escape.

Emma's appropriation of male dress codes is, I would argue, a rejection of her status as a woman and is linked to what has been called Emma's virilization, or Emma's masculinization. We often see Emma behaving in a what would be considered, by the standards of the nineteenth century at least, a manly way. Emma doesn't behave like women are supposed to behave. This is a point that Baudelaire noted in his review of Madame Bovary:

For example, the day after her wedding we are told that it is Charles who behaved like the virginal bride: `C'est lui plutôt que l'on eût pris pour la vierge de la veille' (Folio p.57). She loathes to feel weak and dependant - `[l]'humiliation de se sentir faible' (Folio p.228) - and resents the mediocrity of her husband. Whereas dull, plodding Charles finds satisfaction in his job as a medical officer riding from village to village, intelligent, imaginative Emma languishes in the confines of domesticity and continually dreams of travel.

When Emma rebels against her lot through her adulterous liaisons she often adopts a more active role. Although she adopts a more passive role with Rodolphe she is nonetheless seen acting in a domineering way. Take the presents she continually offers Rodolphe:

She also becomes more enboldened in her behaviour and opinions with others:

Particularly in her relationship with Léon it is Emma who adopts the more dominant, the more `masculine' (according to the standards of the nineteenth century) role as the following extracts illustrate:

In his book Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression (1979) Tony Tanner writes of what he calls the `morcelization' of Emma Bovary. He uses this term to describe the way in which Emma can never locate or define herself in terms of the roles and positions offered to her by marriage and by motherhood. She never achieves any kind of completeness. She is always incomplete or `morcelée', to use Jacques Lacan's term.

Throughout Madame Bovary Emma is seen to be constantly prone to dizzy spells, nervous attacks, anxiety, feelings of suffocation, instability, melancholia, and boredom. All of these conditions are symptomatic of hysteria. In the work of Sigmund Freud, hysteria is the expression of a failure to find a stable identity. This is how Stephen Heath relates its importance to Madame Bovary:

A little later on in his argument Heath claims that:

Bibliography