Portrayal of Emma as a Critique of Romantic Worldview - Term Paper Example

By counting on their physical beauty women continually make themselves objects of male-desire. Flaubert has successfully manipulated literary tools such as irony and indirect libre to discover the underlying pitfalls, of Emma’s romantic illusion, that invites her moral as well as financial ruin over the course of the novel. The root of Emma’s tragic downfall lies in her dream of a highflying notion about life in contrast to her inability to accept her present condition. Her intrinsic chase after a wealthy lifestyle forces her to ignore her moral duty to her husband and her daughter.

At a time, she neglects both her womanhood and motherhood. Whereas she could seek for solace in her husband’s love and her motherhood, she remains blindfolded by her lust for money. Indeed Emma’s self-destructive romanticism can be viewed as Flaubert’s social commentary on bourgeois lifestyle. In a society that forms its identity according to the pompous and wealthy lifestyle of the bourgeois class, the masses’ dream always remains immaterialized. Also to those of this class, women are objects of sexual pleasures.

From the very beginning of the novel, Emma fails to perceive this tendency of the bourgeois class. The novel’s subjective third person narrator or indirect libre serves as a tool for the revelation of Emma’s romantic self and her conflicts with the naked reality. The narrator often merges himself or herself with Emma’s flawed perception of the reality and often sounds as if Emma herself is narrating the novel from a first person point of view. Thus while the readers learn about the reality from Emma’s first person point of view, they are warned, about the flaws of such romanticism, by the narrator.

The use of the subjective third person narrative allows the author to invoke an aura of self-deceiving romance around Emma. Because of its subjectivity, it helps the readers to learn about from her own point of view. Indeed the readers are offered to view and judge Emma both from within and outside and also to perceive Emma’s ignorance of the causes of her sufferings. When Emma's first-person experiences are blurred with the interference of a third-person narrator's perspective, the readers are able to perceive the flaws of Emma’s romanticism.

On the trail of an indirect speech of Emma, “She asked herself if by some other chance combination it it would have not been possible to meet another man” (Flaubert 74) comes a free indirect speech or indirect libre, “He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt” (Flaubert 74). In the first quote, the narrator tells something about what Emma is thinking. But the next quotation tells about Emma’s another thought in a way as if Emma herself is narrating about what her possible lover might be.

It is remarkable that Flaubert gradually slides down from the third person narration to the subjective third person narration, in order to bring his readers close to Emma. Consequently readers become absorbed in romantic illusion as much as Emma is. When Flaubert says, “Emma repeated to herself, ‘Good heavens! Why did I marry?”