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 and "masculine" side that it possess, comes fully and explicitly to light: "when she looked in the mirror, she was startled by her own face. Never had she had eyes so large, so black, so mysterious. Something subtle, transfiguring, was surging through her" (150). The blackness and mysteriousness associated with her face through the narrator's description of her thoughts is highly symbolic of the feminine receptiveness, while the force "surging through her" is more evocative of masculine entrance and movement. The fact that this...

It is her awakening to her own sexuality and feminine power in this scene, then, that ultimately and directly leads to her downfall. It is impossible to tell, however, whether or not her own feminine power would have proved so destructive had the restrictions of masculinity, as evidenced through imagery and the real-world politics and issues of Flaubert's world and the world in Madame Bovary, not been as present or as aggressive a force.