Emma Bovary and the Covent School

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Recommended: Evaluate the character of Emma Bovary

Emma Bovary and the Covent School

Emma Bovary; intelligent, spoiled, and utterly obsessed with material concerns, is ironically placed by her father into a convent school where she fails to learn the lesson that would be most useful in her life: how to seek fulfillment through her platonic side. The convent section is very important because it will set the stage for all of Emma’s material obsessions and spiritual failures throughout the story.

The entirety of Madame Bovary is diffused with a sense of hopelessness; the world is uncaring, fate is cruel, and God, if he exists at all, is painfully unsympathetic. This diffusion is carried out by the narrator, Flaubert, who seats himself on the empty observation post of god and regales us with this story in a matter of fact, scientifically cold way which fits so perfectly with the era’s transition to secularity.

It is quite funny then, that this detached narrator informs us of Emma’s early life at the convent; a place that should distance its inhabitants from the material world. Here, despite the wishes of the nuns, she finds se...

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