Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert Blind Trust – Compensation for Betrayal

Charles gives Emma blind trust to take Intimate betrayal—abuse, infidelity, deceit from her.
Charles adores his wife and finds her faultless, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. He never suspects her affairs and gives her complete control over his finances, thereby securing his own ruin. Despite Charles's complete devotion to Emma, she despises him as he is the epitome of all that is dull and common. Emma becomes more capricious and ludicrous in the light of everyday reality. Yet the self-important banality of the local people is magnified by the protagonist's yearnings. Emma, though impractical, her provincial education lacking and unformed, still reflects a hopefulness regarding beauty and greatness that seems absent in the bourgeois class.
Emma longs for more—excitement, passion, status, love. She shows restraint at first when smitten law clerk Leon Dupuis (a boyishly romantic Ezra Miller) skittishly professes his affections for her. But she’s definitely ready for extramarital activities once the dashing Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green) makes even more overt advances. The affair emboldens her and gives her glimpse of the good life, inspiring her to spend more and more money she doesn’t have on lavish dresses and decorations from the obsequious dry-goods dealer Monsieur Lheureux (Rhys Ifans), who’s all-too happy to continue extending her credit. Marshall-Green and Ifans both do their best to enliven the proceedings, the former with sheer sex appeal and the latter with sly menace.
When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair.
Charles Bovary is a shy, oddly dressed teenager arriving at a new school where he is ridiculed by his new classmates. Charles struggles his way to a second-rate medical degree and becomes an officier de santé in the Public Health Service. Charles Bovary is a very simple and common man. He is a country doctor by profession, but is, as in everything else, not very good at it. He is in fact not qualified enough to be termed a doctor, but is instead an officier de santé, or "health officer". He marries the woman his mother has chosen for him, the unpleasant but supposedly rich widow Heloise Dubuc. He sets out to build a practice in the village of Tostes (now Tôtes).
One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg and meets his patient's daughter, Emma Rouault. Emma is a beautiful, daintily dressed young woman who has received a "good education" in a convent. She has a powerful yearning for luxury and romance inspired by reading popular novels. Emma Bovary has a highly romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion, as well as high society.
It is the disparity between these romantic ideals and the realities of her country life that drive most of the novel, most notably leading her into two extramarital love affairs as well as causing her to accrue an insurmountable amount of debt that eventually leads to her suicide.
Charles is immediately attracted to her and visits his patient far more often than necessary until Heloise's jealousy puts a stop to the visits. When Heloise dies, Charles waits a decent interval before courting Emma in earnest. Her father gives his consent, thus Emma and Charles marry.
The novel's focus shifts to Emma. Charles means well, but is plodding and clumsy. After he and Emma attend an elegant ball given by the Marquis d'Andervilliers, Emma finds her own married life rather dull and becomes listless. Charles decides his wife needs a change of scenery and moves his practice from the village of Tostes to the larger market town of Yonville (traditionally identified with the town of Ry). There, Emma gives birth to a daughter, Berthe, but motherhood proves a disappointment to Emma. She becomes infatuated with one of the first intelligent young men she meets in Yonville, a young law student, Léon Dupuis, who shares her appreciation for literature and music and who returns her esteem. Concerned with maintaining her self-image as a devoted wife and mother, Emma does not acknowledge her passion for Léon and conceals her contempt for Charles, drawing comfort from the thought of her virtue. Léon despairs of gaining Emma's affection and departs to study in Paris.
One day, a rich and rakish landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger, brings a servant to the doctor's office to be bled. He casts his eye over Emma and imagines she will be easily seduced. He invites her to go riding with him for the sake of her health and Charles, solicitous for his wife's health and not at all suspicious, embraces the plan. Emma and Rodolphe begin an affair. She, consumed by her romantic fantasy, risks compromising herself with indiscreet letters and visits to her lover. After four years, she insists they run away together. Rodolphe never really shares her enthusiasm for this plan and on the eve of their planned departure he ends the relationship with an apologetic, self-effacing letter placed at the bottom of a basket of apricots he has delivered to Emma. The shock is so great that Emma falls deathly ill and briefly turns to religion.
When Emma is nearly fully recovered, she and Charles attend the opera, at Charles' insistence, in nearby Rouen. The opera reawakens Emma's passions and she encounters Léon who, now educated and working in Rouen, is also attending the opera. They begin an affair. While Charles believes that she is taking piano lessons, Emma travels to the city each week to meet Léon, always in the same room of the same hotel, which the two come to view as their home. The love affair is ecstatic at first, but by degrees Léon grows bored with Emma's emotional excesses and Emma grows ambivalent about Léon, who himself becomes more like the mistress in the relationship, comparing poorly, at least implicitly, with the rakish and domineering Rodolphe. Emma indulges her fancy for luxury goods with purchases made on credit from the crafty merchant Lheureux, who arranges for her to obtain power of attorney over Charles’ estate. Emma's debt steadily mounts.
When Lheureux calls in Bovary's debt, Emma pleads for money from several people, including Léon and Rodolphe, only to be turned down. In despair, she swallows arsenic and dies an agonizing death. Charles, heartbroken, abandons himself to grief, preserves Emma's room as a shrine, as well as in an attempt to keep her memory alive adopts several of her attitudes and tastes. In his last months, he stops working and lives by selling off his possessions. When he by chance discovers Rodolphe and Léon's love letters, he still tries to understand and forgive her. He becomes reclusive. His remaining possessions are seized to pay off Lheureux. He dies and his young daughter Berthe is placed with her grandmother, who soon dies. Berthe then lived with an impoverished aunt who sends her to work in a cotton mill. The book is concluded by stating that, after Charles's death, Homais has gained prominence among Yonville people and has been awarded for his medical achievements.
The book was in some ways inspired by the life of a schoolfriend of the author who became a doctor. Flaubert's friend and mentor, Louis Bouilhet, had suggested to him that this might be a suitably 'down-to earth' subject for a novel and that Flaubert should attempt to write in a 'natural way', without digressions. Indeed, the style of the writing was of supreme importance to Flaubert. While writing the novel, he wrote that it would be 'a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the external strength of its style'.: an aim which, for the critic Jean Rousset, made Flaubert 'the first in date of the non-figurative novelists' such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Although Flaubert avowed no liking for the style of Balzac, the novel he produced became arguably a prime example and an enhancement of Realism in the vein of Balzac. The 'realism' in the novel was to prove an important element in the trial for obscenity: the lead prosecutor believing that not only was the novel immoral, but that realism in literature was, in itself, an offence against art and decency The realist movement was, in part, a reaction against romanticism. Emma may be said to be the embodiment of a romantic: in her mental and emotional process, she has no relation to the realities of her world. Although in some ways he may seem to identify with Emma, Flaubert frequently mocks her romantic daydreaming and her taste in literature. It is often asserted that Flaubert said 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' ('Madame Bovary is me') but the accuracy of this assertion has been questioned. He never wrote such a thing and in his letters often distanced himself from the sentiments expressed in the novel. For example, 'Tout ce que j’aime n’y est pas':'all that I love is not there'(letter to Edma Roger des Genettes) and 'je n’y ai rien mis ni de mes sentiments ni de mon existence.':'I have used nothing of my feelings or of my life'(letter to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie) For Mario Vargas Llosa, Emma's choice of reading may have contributed to her inability to come to terms with the situation in which she found herself. 'If Emma Bovary had not read all those novels, it is possible that her fate might have been different.'
Poor Emma Bovary. She will never escape the tyranny of her desires, never avoid the anguish into which her romantic conceits deliver her, never claim the oblivion she sought from what is perhaps the most excruciating slow suicide ever written. Her place in the literary canon is assured; she cannot be eclipsed by another tragic heroine. Instead, each day she will be resurrected by countless readers who will agonize over the misery she brings herself and everyone around her and wonder at Flaubert’s ability to, godlike, summon life from words on a page.
The power of “Madame Bovary” stems from Flaubert’s determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes.
Adultery, financial ruin: these dramas played out in every social circle, Flaubert’s included. Emma’s fate is borrowed from two real-life cautionary tales, the adultery and suicide of Delphine Delamare, and the heedless extravagance that bankrupted Louise Pradier. If the plot was a simple enough equation, adding one vain, selfish act to another until they collectively resulted in disaster, the demands Flaubert placed on his execution of the narrative were severe and absolute.
On the face of it, Emma Bovary’s life assumes the shape of that of another celebrated heroine. Anna Karenina has a repellent husband, embarks on an affair with a man who ultimately betrays her love, and commits suicide. But Anna is sympathetic; her tragedy results as much from her circumstances (a woman who must yield to the conventions of 19th-century Russian society) as from her character. Married to an unfeeling man 20 years her senior, Anna doesn’t smother the passion Vronsky awakes in her. Her innate decency cannot overcome her hunger for love. Readers root for Anna and watch Emma with increasing horror, because Emma forces us to confront the human capacity for existential, and therefore insatiable, emptiness. Fatally self-absorbed, insensible to the suffering of others, Emma can’t see beyond the romantic stereotypes she serves, eternally looking for what she expects will be happiness. Anna remains vulnerable to her husband’s threat to take away the son she loves; when Emma isn’t being actively cruel, she ignores her daughter, motherhood having turned out to be one more reality that didn’t measure up to her fantasy of it.
Emma doesn’t have character flaws so much as she lacks character itself. She’s a vacuum, albeit a sensitive and sensual one, sucking up every ready-made conceit. As a convent student Emma mistakes her “ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-¬fated women” like Joan of Arc for a religious vocation, dreaming of voluptuous sacrifices perfumed by incense. Contemplating her future with Charles Bovary, she wanted “to be married at midnight, by torchlight,” expecting matrimony to teach her the meaning of “the words ‘bliss,’ ‘passion’ and ‘intoxication,’ which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.” Seduced by Rodolphe, Emma feels her most intense pleasure alone, before a mirror, when she looks at her newest self and repeats over and over: “I have a ¬lover! A lover!”
As for that lover, after taking Emma riding into the woods and ravishing her there, “¬Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.” This sentence is worth a day’s work, if that’s what it took Flaubert to assemble the details necessary to illuminate so critical a moment in Emma’s plummet. The dastard’s teeth already sunk in a subsequent gratification of his appetite; the phallic penknife; the broken restraint; the experience of drawing a previously chaste woman into adultery so unaffecting that his attention has already strayed to a routine chore: what more is needed to confirm ¬Rodolphe’s base nature? The seduction accomplished, it’s only a matter of time before he casts Emma aside, before she takes and is disappointed by another lover, before she falls prey to the money-lender Lheureux.
Flaubert’s “scorn for the bourgeoisie,” whose essence he intended Emma to represent, was based, above all, in its tendency to unconsciously appropriate and serve existing sentiments. Because Emma never questions the validity of her fantasies, borrowed from romance novels or inspired by attending an aristocrat’s ball, she embraces the terms of her disappointment over and over again. Turning her back on the real love she is offered, Emma is always waiting for someone or something better, at the very least the next distraction from her restless ennui. Her 19th-century death — after swallowing the one thing to permanently satisfy hunger: poison — might occur in any age, including our own, and summons less grief than gratitude. At last she has solved the problem of herself.

she is morally corrupt and unable to accept and appreciate the realities of her life. Since her girlhood in a convent, she has read romantic novels that feed her discontent with her ordinary life. She dreams of the purest, most impossible forms of love and wealth, ignoring whatever beauty is present in the world around her. Flaubert once said, “Madame Bovary is me,” and many scholars believe that he was referring to a weakness he shared with his character for romance, sentimental flights of fancy, and melancholy. Flaubert, however, approaches romanticism with self-conscious irony, pointing out its flaws even as he is tempted by it. Emma, on the other hand, never recognizes that her desires are unreasonable. She rails emotionally against the society that, from her perspective, makes them impossible for her to achieve.
Emma’s failure is not completely her own. Her character demonstrates the many ways in which circumstance—rather than free will—determined the position of women in the nineteenth century. If Emma were as rich as her lover, Rodolphe, for instance, she would be free to indulge the lifestyle she imagines. Flaubert suggests at times that her dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society she lives in is justified. For example, the author includes details that seem to ridicule Homais’s pompous speechmaking or Charles’s boorish table manners. These details indicate that Emma’s plight is emblematic of the difficulties of any sensitive person trapped among the French bourgeoisie. But Emma’s inability to accept her situation and her attempt to escape it through adultery and deception constitute moral errors. These mistakes bring about her ruin and, in the process, cause harm to innocent people around her. For example, though dim-witted and unable to recognize his wife’s true character, Charles loves Emma, and she deceives him. Similarly, little Berthe is but an innocent child in need of her mother’s care and love, but Emma is cold to her, and Berthe ends up working in a cotton mill because of Emma’s selfish spending and suicide, and because of Charles’s resulting death.
We can see that Emma’s role as a woman may have an even greater effect on the course of her life than her social status does. Emma is frequently portrayed as the object of a man’s gaze: her husband’s, Rodolphe’s, Leon’s, Justin’s—even Flaubert’s, since the whole novel is essentially a description of how he sees Emma. Moreover, Emma’s only power over the men in her life is sexual. Near the end of her life, when she searches desperately for money, she has to ask men for it, and the only thing she can use to persuade them to give it to her is sex. Emma’s prostitution is the result of her self-destructive spending, but the fact that, as a woman, she has no other means of finding money is a result of the misogynistic society in which she lives.
Charles represents both the society and the personal characteristics that Emma detests. He is incompetent, stupid, and unimaginative. In one of the novel’s most revelatory moments, Charles looks into Emma’s eyes and sees not her soul but rather his own image, reflected in miniature. Charles’s perception of his own reflection is not narcissistic but merely a simple, direct sensation, unmediated by romantic notions. The moment demonstrates his inability to imagine an idealized version of the world or find mystic qualities in the world’s physical aspects. Instead, he views life literally and never imbues what he sees with romantic import. Thus it is the physical aspects of Emma that delight Charles. When the narrative focuses on his point of view, we see every detail of her dress, her skin, and her hair. When it comes to her aspirations and depressions, however, Charles is at a loss. He nods and smiles dumbly as Emma conducts the same sorts of conversations with him that she does with her dog. Charles is too stupid to manage his money well or to see through Emma’s obvious lies, and he is a frighteningly incompetent doctor. In one scene, as he goes to repair Rouault’s leg, we learn that he is trying desperately to “call to mind all the fractures he [knows].” His operation on Hippolyte’s clubfoot, while it is not his idea, is a complete failure. Charles is more than merely incompetent, however. He is physically repulsive, though it’s hard to tell from Flaubert’s descriptions whether he is actually an ugly man or whether he appears disgusting only through Emma’s eyes.
Despite his unimaginative nature, Charles is one of the novel’s most moral and sincere characters. He truly loves Emma, forgiving her even when he finally recognizes her infidelities. He does everything he can to save her when she is ill, and he gives her the benefit of the doubt whenever her lies seem to fail her. Literal-minded, humble, free of temptations, and without aspirations, Charles is Emma’s opposite. While she possesses some beauty, sensitivity, and intelligence despite her moral corruption, Charles remains good-hearted despite his boorishness and stupidity.
Wise trust is an assessment that the probability of betrayal is low.
Intimate betrayal most often occurs when partners violate their deeper values to gain a temporary sense of empowerment. The way that potential partners empower themselves when feeling vulnerable is the most telling way to assess the probability of betrayal.
Human beings need to trust. Trust allays anxiety, helps lift depression, and makes it possible to consistently invest interest and enjoyment in one another. There could be no civilization, enduring health, or mental wellness without trust. The most ordinary interpersonal, commercial, medical, and legal interactions would be impossible without some degree of trust. In contrast, distrust is fraught with anxiety and resentment. No loneliness is lonelier than distrust.
Yet the human need to trust persists, creating an internal storm of wanting to trust while being terrified of it. Most people respond to this internal turmoil in one of three ways.
Blind trust puts faith in someone without regard to demonstrated reliability or trustworthiness. It’s more a reluctance to experience the doubt, anxiety, and loneliness of distrust than an endorsement of the other person’s better qualities.