Part III

I'm not yet at the end of Part III in Madame Bovary, but it doesn't take a genius to predict she is on the decline. The way that Flaubert portrays Emma's development as a character reminds me of a binge-eater. Eventually she's going to make herself terribly sick-- or unappealing. Sometimes I wonder if her character would have been more or less tragic and unattractive if she ate or drank herself into ruin. Instead she is destroying herself on a diet of questionable love and dubious lies.

As their affair progresses, even Leon begins to feel a little unsettled by Emma's transformation. At one point he wonders: "Where could she have learnt this corruption so deep and well masked as to be almost unseizable?" (219.)  This question has several answers. One of them is Rodolphe. Before Rodolphe, the novels Emma devoured set the stage for the romantic disorder that her affair with Rodolphe cemented. Rodolphe's life reflects the link between consumption and corruption, indulgence and indifference. Flaubert gives us a glimpse of his history in the following passage: ". . for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing was left; whatever entered there, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall." (162).

After Emma recovers from Rodolphe, she emerges in Leon's eyes as "woman of the world" (209). She satiates herself with pleasures during her relationship with Leon, to the point where love no longer even factors into her feelings. Though in many ways she becomes, at the height of her powers, more physically attractive to Leon, her mentality approaches that of an ever-expanding glutton. Flaubert's genius lies in his ability to portray with daring irony and sensuality the point where the path of a distinctive personality crumbles into pathology.