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The whole of the sequence leads one to believe that Charles is so daft that he would put his own life, not only his reputation on the line if Emma believed that it should be so. Charles from this point forward in the work becomes a piteous example of a spineless fool, and Emma likes him even less for it and therefore becomes even more distant.
When Emma begins her infatuation with Leon, at first she is able to control her desire to become his lover, though others clearly notice her favoritism of him and assume that such is the case. Charles ignores many of his wife's detractors in the community and even goes without questioning her extravagant gift giving to Leon, he sees no real danger just an innocent infatuation. After Leon leaves unrequited, Emma is seduced by the cad Rudolphe and proceeds to have a long sordid affair with him, she is then able to respond to Leon when she meets him later. After Rudolphe abandons her and Leon proves an unsatisfactory replacement Emma shows all the signs of a woman scorned. All the while Charles sees all that everyone else sees, her fondness for Leon and her time away with Rudolphe and still believes his wife to be virtuous, even when many around them do not. (97)
Even after many years of watching his wife travel through the throws of love and rejection with other men, Charles still defends her after she has died and he finds love letters from Rudolphe. (336) Charles is hopelessly blinded by his love for Emma and his complete faith and trust in her. He gives little thought to the faded letters and the unpaid bills and allows his life to slip completely out of his own grasp.
Charles' blind faith in Emma even allows...
When Emma is sad and/or particularly frustrated with Charles she then seeks to spend and spend, against credit that could never really be repaid. This economic devastation, Charles was only limitedly aware of given he had done nothing to curb her spending but instead signed his life away to the money grubber Lheureux to keep her happy. (249, 255, 2267...) in the interim Charles sought help from his mother, who agreed to mortgage her own property to help him pay the substantial debts his wife had accrued, and at the same time his mother offered significant criticism of Emma, which he again defended and denied to be true. (341)
There is no question that Charles' spineless ways and his desire to please his "perfect" wife resulted in the development of substantial debt, emotional ruin and even the loss of stability for his daughter. There is no way in which to fully describe the manner in which Charles allows his life and even his profession to be completely lost to him at the whim of a woman who had been nothing but indulged and therefore nothing but trouble. Emma builds in the fiction of this work a life dependent upon fantasy, fantasy that has no chance of becoming real. Because of Charles' blind love for her he sets aside all the clues and even the overt assassination of Emma's character for the sake of believing in her virtue and therefore his own choices.
Works Cited
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town. Trans. Lowell Bair New York: Bantam Classics, 2005.
Works Cited
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town. Trans. Lowell Bair New York: Bantam Classics, 2005.
Charles in Madame Bovary Charles in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary represents a provincial archetype -- in fact, the exact sort of common countryside provincialism that his wife Emma comes to resent, find banal, and from which seek to escape. Yet, it is exactly this provincialism that allows Charles to remain grounded in his work and life: his "common sense" as it might be called keeps him, essentially, from becoming a "jealous
"(Flaubert, 235) Her spleen seems to spring from an almost metaphysic lassitude with life. Emma is never satisfied, and for her, as Flaubert puts it, no pleasure was good enough, there was always something missing. If Emma cannot kiss her lovers without wishing for a greater delight, it is obvious that she cannot cling to anything real, but only to the ideal dreams. She desperately tries to find a responsible for
There is a feminine side to his masculinity, that is, and this passage shows that Emma has an equal share in this dichotomy. Hours after she is back at home, after Charles has left her alone in the house to attend to something, Emma shuts herself in her room to contemplate her experience and her joy. It is here that the realization of her own feminine power, and the active
Flaubert's novel also presents an overwhelming dissatisfaction over the French bourgeoisie at that time through the eyes and in the person of Emma. She only reflects the aspirations of her time for refinement and sophistication of the higher social classes where she desires to belong. Those of her class do not have the wealth and nobility of those in higher levels. Those above are materialistic, indulgent and wasteful without discrimination.
At last! My darling is recovered, and she seems almost back to her old, dear self, with an increased passion for her religion, I notice. Tuesday - My darling, I cannot believe you have left me. Devastated and alone, I fear that your creditors will be the death of me, as well. You would not know your home, Emma, as I have had to sell almost everything in order to
It seems to her, says Flaubert, that her being, rising toward God, is going to be annihilated in love like burning incense that dissipates in vapor. But her response during this phenomenon remains curiously erotic... The waving of the green palm leaves relates this scene to the previous scenes of sexual seduction. (Duncan para, 5) At times, the green in the novel moves from springtime to the idea of the