Winners and Losers

In every book there are winners and there are losers. In Madame Bovary, it is obvious which characters are the losers: Charles, Emma, and Berthe and which are the winners: Rodolphe. Rodolphe instantly sees Emma’s preoccupation with the ideal and Romanticism. After he first meets he, he says to himself, “Poor little woman. Gasping for love, like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water” (137). Like the sad carp, Emma cannot discern that she will not be able to find what she is looking for, and Rodophe plays that to his advantage. Many “enlightened” people, like Rodolphe or Madame Bovary senior, can see that Emma lives in a world full of the ideal, and whenever she tries to combine fantasy with reality—something goes awry. Even Emma’s daughter suffers because of this. Emma laments, “She yearned for the child to be born in order to know how it felt to be a mother. But not being able to spend as freely as she wished—to have a cradle shaped like a boat with pink silk curtains an embroidered baby caps—she abandoned her dreams of a layette…And so she did not enjoy those preparations that stimulate maternal tenderness, and her affection from the beginning was perhaps weakened on that account” (101). Emma so closely ties the ideal picture she has in her mind of lavish nursery with a glowing mother cradling her rosy baby that when reality falls short of this, she takes an immediate dislike/disinterest in being a mother. Emma spends all of her time reading books and living in the world of imagination that she is blind to Rodolphe’s less-than-genuine motives behind wooing her. When reality fails to live up to her fantasy—the overwhelming debt and Rodolphe not eloping with her—she kills herself, because she cannot live in the real. Charles is also a loser, for he lives in a world of fantasy, even if his fantasies are much more simplistic. He is blind to his wife’s affair, until he finds concrete undeniable evidence, and then he too dies. His daughter Berthe must resign to a cotton mill in order to pay her now-dead family’s debts. A rather tragic ending…the only person walking away relatively unscathed is Rodolphe, who has the money and power to live out his dreams, without living in a fantasy. During his bleedings, he is unruffled by the sight of blood and maintains a Stotic-like consistency throughout the novel.