Confining Spaces in Madame Bovary

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s incorporation of confined spaces reveals Emma’s literal and metaphorical imprisonment. Starting from her adolescence, Emma becomes held back from the world at both the convent, and the farm. Flaubert depicts these confinements as literal. Later, Charles, her husband, physically overpowers her when they meet, and metaphorically suppresses her throughout the rest of the marriage. Finally, Emma imprisons herself when she becomes ill, and mentally encloses herself from her husband and the rest of the world. This continues with her affairs as she incarcerates herself once again from the world. These acts of confinements expose Emma’s reclusive nature.

Emma’s isolated childhood sets her up to expect nothing less than the life of her childhood romance novels. At thirteen, Emma’s father brings her to the convent. While at the convent, she goes through two different forms of isolation. First, the convent holds her back from exposure to life in the outside world. Flaubert writes, “If her childhood had been spent on the shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of nature, which usually come to us through translation in books” (24). Flaubert acknowledges Emma’s restriction to access of a normal childhood. Second, Emma experiences isolation inside the convent as well. At the convent, Emma spends most of her time alone, “She played very little during recreation hours . . . living thus, without ever leaving the warm atmosphere of the class-rooms” (24). From her novels that she read at the convent, Emma creates an internal dream world to cope with her lack of knowledge of the external real world. Because of Emma’s altered state of reality, and her over-a...

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...rom the world in her affair with Leon. Emma escapes reality and her morals by enclosing herself in the cab, "a cab with blinds drawn, and which appeared this constantly shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel" (172). By not being able to see out of the cab, and no one being able to see in, Emma can neglect the societal morals she already lacks.

Flaubert portrays Emma's confining circumstances as either literal or physical, and the constricting person differs between childhood, marital, and internal confinement. By characterizing Emma as an imprisoned housewife, Flaubert reflects the societal norms of the wives being the housekeeper, and child bearer of the families in the 18th century, and limited to outside activities and social standings.

Works Cited

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling. Mineola (NY): Dover, 1996