Madame Bovary

An important motif in this novel is the power of the narrative, both as texts and as the stories people tell themselves. Emma uses literature as escapism, but she doesn’t learn that literature is an exaggerated and perfected formulation of the real world, not necessarily a reflection of the real world. Narratives inspire Emma at a young age, starting with the stories of Catholic saints. In these stories, Emma finds that her emotions can be deeply moved, and she craves this stimulation for the rest of her life. In novels, Emma finds heightened emotions and dramas that make her feel excited by a life that is otherwise dull. The motif of narrative is also significant because Emma believes in her own narratives so thoroughly that she implodes her real life in favor of nurturing these narratives. Using the narrative form of the novel, Flaubert celebrates the power of storytelling while also warning against substituting real-life experience with fanciful narratives. Life, just like storytelling, affords the opportunity to tell oneself a version of the truth, or a certain narrative. In doing this, one can justify a multitude of behaviors, as Emma does, and also rewrite the stories of others, casting them in convenient rather than real ways. In this way, changing narratives can be dangerous as they omit the full picture, and reliance on narrative, whether personal or literary, does not provide a clear view of the world.