Madame Bovary

“She would have liked, even if just during the winter, to live in town, although the long fine days made the countryside even more tedious, perhaps, in summer; and, depending on what she was saying, her voice was clear and high-pitched or else, suddenly full of languor, would modulate to a drawl then almost to a whisper, when she was talking to herself—sometimes she seemed joyful, with her eyes innocent and wide, and sometimes she was lost in boredom, with her eyelids half closed and her thoughts wandering far away.”

In this quote, Emma Bovary is characterized through her chronic dissatisfaction and shifting moods. Because of her lack of mobility and autonomy, she fantasizes about what it would be like to live several different lives at once. Her dissatisfaction in life is reflected in her shifting moods, which alternate between joy and boredom. This is one of the first introductions the reader gets to Emma’s character, and it is notable that these characterizations of her flip-flopping attitude don’t alert Charles to the possibility that Emma will forever be unhappy with him.

“[S]tood a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin ribbons. It was a bride’s bouquet, the other one’s bouquet! She stared at it. Charles, noticing this, picked it up and took it away to the attic. While her belongings were being arranged round the room, Emma sat in an armchair, thinking about her own bouquet packed in its box, and wondering dreamily what would be done with it if she were to die.”

The bouquet symbolizes the lingering presence of Charles’s first wife, whom he was not in love with. The bouquet also symbolizes how quickly Charles moved on from his first marriage. The bouquet is not even dried up and discarded before Charles seizes the chance to marry Emma. This emphasizes Charles’s passion for Emma and the life he held with his first wife as an unfilled, incomplete life. This quote also asks what will happen to Emma’s bouquet if she were to die suddenly, which symbolizes Emma’s subconscious dread that she will die in Charles’s boring house in a small, provincial town.