Madame Bovary Backgrounds and Sources Essays in Criticism

"Consider Emma in the light of suburban life today. She is bored with a devoted husband, whom she chose for herself; she is bored with her child, except when she chooses to play the role of loving mother; she is demanding, capricious, extravagant, self-pitying, sentimental, hard and totally selfish. But all of these things flow from her idleness. She is beautiful and intelligent....What destroys her is the combination of this cheaply romantic, self-dramatizing habit of mind and the dullness and emptiness of a provincial village life....The imagination of an Emma is always one step ahead of her circumstances.Flaubert, Gustave is the author of 'Madame Bovary Backgrounds and Sources Essays in Criticism' with ISBN 9780393096088 and ISBN 0393096084.