Escape and Confinement in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

A t stitche by dint ofout Flauberts Madame Bovary is escape versus restriction. In the brisk Emma Bovary attempts once to a greater extent and again to escape the ordinariness of her life by reading novels, having affairs, mean solar day dreaming, moving from town to town, and buying luxuries items. It is Emmas early education described for an good chapter by Flaubert that awakens in Emma a struggle against what she perceives as confinement. Emmas education at the convent is perhaps the most significant development of the dichotomy in the novel between confinement and escape.The convent is Emmas earliest confinement, and it is the few solicitations from the outside world that intrigue Emma, the books smuggled in to the convent or the sound of a far The chapter mirrors the social system of the book it starts as we see a satisfied women content with her confinement and conformity at At first far from being tedium the convent, she enjoyed the company of the nuns, who, to amuse h er, would take her into the chapel by way of a long corridor leading from the dining hall.She played very little during the entertainment period and knew her catechism well. The chapter is also filled with images of girls living with in the protective walls of the convent, the girls blether happily together, assemble to study, and pray. save as the chapter progresses images of escape start to dominate.But these are merely visual images and even these images are either ghostlike in nature or of similarly She wished she could have lived in just about old manor house, like those chatelaines in low wasted gowns who washed-out their days with their elbows on the st whizz sill of a gothic window overcome by trefoil, chin in hand watching a etiolate plumed rider on a black horse galloping hem from far across the country. (Flaubert 32. ) As the chapter progresses and Emma gos dreaming while in the convent the images she conjures up are of exotic and foreign lands.No longer are the i mages of precise people or event merely instead they become more fuzzy and chaotic. The escape technique that she used to conjure up images of heroines in castles seems to lead inevitably And on that point were sultans with long pipes swooning on the arbors on the arms of dancing girls there were Giaours, Turkish sabers and fezzes and above all there were wan landscapes of fantastic ountries palm trees and pines were often combined in one picture with tigers on the right a lion on the left. (Flaubert 33. ) Emmas dreams by this point are chaotic with both palms and pines mixed together with lions and tigers.These dreams continue and change themselves into a death wish as swans transform themselves into death swans, and singing into funeral music. But Emma although bored with her fantasy refuses to admit it and she starts to revolt against the line of the convent until the Mother Superior was glad to see The chapter about Emma Bovarys education at the convent is ignificant not on ly because it provides the basis for Emmas character, but also because the progression of images in this chapter is indicative of the holyty of the novel.The images progress from confinement to escape to chaos and disintegration. In Madame Bovary Emma changes from a women content with her marriage, to a women who escapes from the ordinariness of her everyday life through affairs and novels, to a women whose life is so chaotic that she disintegrates and kills herself. Indeed, Madame Bovary is like a poem comprised of a Emma Bovary found interest in the things around her which revent her boredom in her early education it was the novels she read, They were filled with love affairs, lovers, mistresses, persecuted ladies fainting in nongregarious country houses.She also found interest in the sea but only because it was stormy. But all the things that Emma found interest in she in short became board of from Charles to Leon. This cycle of boredom and the progression of images of confine ment, escape, and chaos, parallel both in the Chapter on Emmas education and the novel as a whole the entire mural of the novel as Emmas journey from boredom in naive realism to self-destruction in fantasy.