To what extent is fate responsible for Emma Bovary’s downfall?

Destiny: the seemingly inevitable succession of events. Is this definition true, or do

we, as people in real life or characters in novels, control our own destiny? This
produces the critical dilemma of Madame Bovary: is it a tragedy of dreams, or purely
that of environmental forces?

Madame Bovary has an insatiable hunger for pleasure, harboring idealistic romantic
illusions, coveting sophistication, sensuality, and passion, suffering from fits of
extreme boredom and depression when her humdrum life fails to match her
unreasonable fantasy. In chapters IV-VI, Emma’s meditation on her marital
dissatisfaction, shows us our first real glimpse of her thoughts, and her flashback
shows how far back her taste for romance extends. Even at age thirteen, she was
unable to resist the melancholy, romantic atmosphere of the convent and steeped
herself in romantic novels and songs, whose stories she desperately wished would be
realized in her own life. She dreams of the purest, most impossible forms of love and
wealth, ignoring whatever beauty is present in the world around her. Her readings
create a parade of romantic visions and provide the guideposts in her life, those points
of reference to which she frequently returns for orientation. Emma, however, is easily
discontented. Things that she believes will save her, such as the convent, the farm,
and married life, always fail to fulfill her desires.
Bovary, perpetually contrasting her actual surroundings with the ideal ones of her
imagination, tries to introduce into her life some of the elegance of which she has
read. And she fritters away her time. She has emotional and intellectual needs and
ambitions which lead her to aspire to a more elevated and choice existence, a more
embellished life than the one which it is her lot to live. Emma pursues ‘ideals’ of
passion and total happiness, preconceptions which prevent her ever seeing the world
or herself in perspective; she distorts each new experience to fit the mould of her
dream, gradually realizes it will not, makes a frenzied and fatal effort to force it back
into the mould, then turns desperately to repeating the same sequence in another
context, for surely a new place, a new lover, a new feeling will somehow give
complete and lasting satisfaction. Léon at first provides a muted echo to this theme,
but he is ‘d’une nature tempérée,’ and once his youth is over is destined to end in the
camp of the careerists.
After she attends an extravagant ball at the home of a wealthy nobleman, she
begins to dream constantly of a more sophisticated life. She becomes bored and
depressed, and, by steeping herself in fantasy, and the pressure of her constant
rebellion against reality makes her restless, moody and eventually physically ill. Her
inability to accept the situation and her attempt to escape it through adultery and
deception constitute moral errors. For many, it is these mistakes that bring about her
ruin and, in the process, cause harm to innocent people around her. Ultimately, the
novel’s moral structure requires that Emma assume responsibility for her own actions.
She can’t blame everything on the men around her. She freely chooses to be
unfaithful to Charles, and her infidelities wound him fatally to the end. Emma
logically carries her inability to accept the real world to the point of suicide.

Behind society and individuals, Flaubert constructs patterns of more general

implication bearing on the nature of a man and of his destiny. Emma’s failure is not
completely her own. Her character demonstrates the many ways in which
circumstance, rather than free will – determined the position of women in the
nineteenth century. If Emma were as rich as Rodolphe, for instance, she would be free
to indulge the lifestyle she imagines. Flaubert suggests at times that her dissatisfaction
with the bourgeois society she lives in is justified. For example, the author includes
details that seem to ridicule Homais’s pompous speechmaking or Charles’s boorish
table manners. These details indicate that Emma’s plight is emblematic of the
difficulties of any sensitive person trapped among the French bourgeoisie. Bovary’s
hope that her baby will be a man because ‘a woman is always hampered’ is just one of
the many instances in the novel in which Flaubert demonstrates an intimate
understanding of the plight of women in his time. We see throughout Madame Bovary
how Emma’s male companions possess the power to change her life for better or for
worse-a power that she herself lacks. Emma observes that ‘a man, at least, is free; he
can explore all passions and all countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most
distant pleasures.’ Emma’s lovers always enjoy freedom that she cannot.
Rodolphe tells Emma during the agriculture fair that their meeting and love are
due to fate, and, in his letter breaking off the affair with Emma, claims that ‘fate is to
blame’. Charles, crushed by the failure of his operation on Hippolyte’s foot and
Emma’s anger at this new evidence of her husband’s inadequacy, calls the disaster a
fault of fate. Later, when Charles meets Rodolphe after Emma’s death, he, too,
rationalises that ‘fate willed it this way.’ In a sense they are right. Fate, chance or,
more precisely, matters of social and economic class, certainly do play a role. After
all, it is not a function of Emma’s will that she was born into a middle-class family;
nor is it her fault that her lovers abandon her. It is even possible that her romantic,
idealistic nature is a result of fate, and that Emma can’t control her actions because
she can’t control her own identity or her natural inclinations.

The meaning of the Blindman, the final mocking message of Satan, and Emma’s
bitter reflections on life as she sat outside the convent, all express Flaubert’s view of
man’s ultimate fate. If Saint Anthony found solace in prayer, it was only because the
rising sun was driving away the darkness; with its setting, night and Satan would
return. For Emma, no more suns could rise: she faced man’s eternal meaning and
found there eternal darkness, malédiction. Where destiny is no more than average
probability, it appears inescapable in a peculiarly depressing way. Her end is
inevitable. This is because any element in it can be replaced by a substitute without
changing the outcome; e.g., if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have
found someone else. The last sentence of the book describes the honors accorded to
Homais, that torchbearer of bourgeois mediocrity, reminding us again that Madame
Bovary is a tragedy of class.