The theme of disappointment in Madame Bovary a Simple heart by Gustave Flaubert

The theme of disappointment in Madame Bovary a Simple heart by Gustave Flaubert

One of the most common emotions humans have is a disappointment or the feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Most often, this feeling comes through the loss of love. For example, breaking up with your partner can leave you feeling defeated and lonely. Once this happens, one usually attempts to move on and forget about that person, occasionally in the way of discovering somebody to fill their vacuum in their empty heart. In Gustave Flaubert’s master novel Madame Bovary, there are numerous encounters with displeasure that creates the theme of disappointment (Collas). The two main characters that Flaubert uses to demonstrate displeasure through are Emma Bovary, also known as Madame Bovary, and Charles Bovary.

The main character, Emma Bovary, is the image of a woman that is in search of something romantic and tragic, but at the same time, she is lost in herself and life and therefore ends up being disappointed (Vinken 765). She is unable to distinguish reality from her imaginary world.  The setting, in which Emma resides, influences her conduct significantly. To some extent, the author wanted to disclose all the evils of the people and the system of education in the community. Brought up in an unusual setting, quarantined from real life, Emma was brought up on passionate novels, far from reality (Vinken 764). She emulates the lifestyle of characters derived from the books she reads, which are only about love, lovers, sweethearts, heartaches, tears, and kisses. The lives of the characters of her novels become the very life of Emma ​​because she does not know what the real-life is.

As time goes by, Emma deepens into the world of fantasy that any events of her real-life are professed by her in an unnatural way. For example, Emma took the death of her mother as a pretext for external changes. As a result, she is glad that she “reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts (Collos).” Hence is the source of her ‘theatrical vulgarity.’ In essence, not knowing the life and growing up in the romantic novel, Emma pays more attention to outward expressions than to the appearance of the inner world of a person, the interpretation of the essence (Collos). And her whole future life is reduced to one thing – to reach this external form, to collocate with the characters of her favorite novelettes. According to the writer, the romantic education, which Emma got in the monastery, separated from real life, is to blame, because later it throws her in delusion. From the first days of her married life, she realizes that her ideas have nothing to do with her husband and her real-life in marriage.

Emma demonstrates her disappointment when she marries Charles. When they go for their celebratory in Tostes, Emma feels disenchanted not to be in a passionate villa in Switzerland (Vinken 769). This is triggered by the fact that she had an unrealistic expectation of how her honeymoon would be. As a result, she exposes herself to possible emotional and physical ill health. As a result of the high hope she had with her husband, she finds her husband dismal and undistinguished and begins to dislike his disinterest in a more passionate life (Vinken 769). However, Charles puts up with Emma’s poor behaviour and continues loving and cherishing her. The mother to Charles also visits the couple, and after realizing how cold Emma treats her son, she is disappointed at her and develops a hatred for Emma for winning her son’s love. After Charles’s mother embarks, Emma strains to fall in love with Charles to no avail. As a result, disappointment sets in, and she regrets why she started a family with Charles. She also wonders why she had not achieved the pleasure, she anticipated from matrimony and what happened became of words such as “bliss,” “passion,” and “ecstasy,” words that had sounded so delightful when read in volumes.

For instance, she thinks to herself, “Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,–a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss (Collos).” However, she failed to understand the difference between fiction and the real world, a fact that brought a lot of disappointments to her.

Emma also shows disappointment when she and her husband are invited for the Bovarys to a ball at his mansion. Although she is delighted by the kind of life the hosts live and the conducive environment, she is disgusted by Charles, whom she regards as an awkward, inexperienced oaf. She is hemmed in by prosperous, stylish aristocrats and women. When the ballroom gets too hot, a worker breaks the windows to allow for air aeration. When she peeps outside and sees the workers busy carrying out their duties, she remembers which now a life of the past seems. Back in Tostes, Emma is irritated with everybody around her.

Emma shows displays feelings of disappointment several weeks after the Vaubyessard Ball, still dreaming about the magical night she had. “From the beginning of July, she calculated on her fingers how many days remained before October, thinking that the Marquis d’Andervilliers would perhaps give another ball at Vaubyessard (Vinken 774). But the expected dates passed by without one letter or visit. After the distress of this disappointment, her heart once more remained empty. That night at the ball gave Emma a feeling like no other of how love should feel and look like. It seems like from that point on, and she has a concrete idea of what love is. “With the ball still humming in her ears, she was trying to stay awake to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life. This longing to back to such an “illusion” shows that Emma is continually being pulled away from Charles and toward something she cannot attain (Collos). Disappointed in her husband, Emma rushes in to the arms of Rodolphe Boulanger, in whom she sees her ideal love. She rejoices that she has a lover, not noticing the difference between the concepts of love and having a lover. It seems to her that she is able to become truly happy only with a good-looking man in a black velvet coat with long tails, soft boots, a sharp hat, and lace cuffs. Emma Bovary accepts a betrayal of her lover very tragic (Collos). She mistakenly sees the salvation in surrendering to another man. Having experienced disappointment in family life, she meets the same in loving affairs. All her life turned into a solid lie. The break of the heroine’s illusions leads to her complete moral decline.

Moreover, Emma shows her disappointment when she sinks into fantasies of high society life in Paris. She, therefore, grows unhappy and dejected and escapes her self-pity by acting irritated and erratic with her husband (Collos). Although Charles’s business flourishes, Emma becomes progressively irritated with his poor conducts and lifelessness. As her agitation, tedium, and despair deepen, she becomes physically ill. To treat her, Charles decides that they should travel to Yonville, a town in need of a doctor. Before the travel, Emma learns that she is expectant. In an expression of her disappointment, she throws her dried ceremonial bouquet into the fire and watches it prickle.

Emma has ideals to which she aspires. She is the only one of the characters who is not satisfied with her dull provincial life and cannot put up with it, as in which she is just cramped; she suffocates living side by side with mediocre people and her narrow-minded husband. She wants to break out of that musty life that surrounds her (Vinken 675). Emma is ready to do anything for love. Emma is a brilliant woman. She knows how to lie, how to keep her second secret life with her lovers, and other her affairs away from her husband.

Emma shows disappointment as her ideals are originally perverted, because she is raised on a distorted understanding of life, on unnatural examples from novels. Failure to see and to understand this problem is Emma’s tragedy, but it is not her fault. This tragedy can be transferred to the whole society, described Flaubert – low, with shared ideals, with the pursuit of outward prosperity, luxury, and the constant lies and ignorance, unwillingness to look into the eyes of the real life.

The author also shows Emma’s frustrations when she says, “but it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no more, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls the damp floor tiles and the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater, and she could nibble a few hazel-nuts or else, leaning on her elbow would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the points of her table knife (Collos).” From the above, individuals can realize that the author links emotions to objects to deny Emma her desire to escape from the physical world she inhabits and lives the life she imagines.

At the end of the novel, the author shows us the epitome of Emma’s disappointments when she commits suicide. Her death is not because of unrequited love; it is not a desperate protest against the hated world. The reason for her suicide is straightforward and banal – seeing the futility of attempts to get money for Lheureux. She sees the only way to way to escape from poverty and shame is to take poison. The surrounding provincial world ruins the heroine of Flaubert.

After the death of Emma, Charles is disappointed. He realizes that his wife was having an affair with individuals whom he thought were his friends. He is also disappointed with himself for not understanding that his wife was always unhappy and that he thought she loved him. He is also frustrated with the fact that he did all he could to show Emma that he loved her, but she ended up betraying their love. Besides, he shows his disappointment when he recalls how he contradicted his mother when the mother protested Emma’s power of attorney (Vinken 773). The frustrations that Charles faces after the death of Emma cause his death, which leaves their child orphaned and compelled to work in a mill.

From the analysis of the book, the author tries to show how individuals can end up disappointed due to their inability to view the environment as it is, and one cannot manage to make the environment as they want it to be. For instance, Emma got married to Charles, a man who belonged to the middle class, but she could not accept that fact and ended up being disappointed.  She, therefore, engages herself in fantasy and the pressure of constant rebellion against reality, which makes her life a living hell and eventually leads to her death (Collos).  It is, therefore, important for individuals to accept their facts in life to avoid disappointments, ill health, and, ultimately, death.

The theme of disappointment in a Simple Heart

The story a Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert refers to the lifecycle, the tastes, and the imaginations of a hardworking, kind-hearted servant named Félicité.  The story starts with an impression of Félicité’s occupational experience—most of which has been spent helping a middle-class widow named Madame Aubain, “who, it must be said, was not the calmest of a person to get on with (Sartre 1837). There are multiple encounters with dissatisfaction that creates the theme of disappointment.

Félicité spent a considerable amount of time with Madame Aubain, who was not easy to get along with. However, she did prove to be an outstanding housekeeper. According to the narrator, “No one could have been more persistent when it came to haggling over prices and, as for cleanliness, the spotless state of her saucepans was the despair of all the other serving maids.”

Although she was an industrious person, Félicité had to persevere difficult times during the early stages of her life. The first disappointment occurs when she loses her parents at a tender age. As a result, she undergoes complicated and painful emotions that come with grieving a loved one (Sartre 1837). For instance, she suffers from sadness, frustration, anxiety, guilt, and even anger. Felicite suffers another disappointment when she gets used to her nephew Victor, a sailor whose travels “took him to Morlaix, to Dunkirk, and Brighton, and after each trip, he brought back a present for Félicité.”  However, Victor succumbs to yellow fever during a voyage to Cuba (1839).  This also leaves her disappointed as everybody she cares about seems to die at an early age. After the death of her parents, she had to deal with several inhumane employers and unwelcoming workers who made her life a living hell and especially long before she met Madame Aubain. However, she did not give up but kept on pushing until she met Madame, where she settled, and her life took a different turn. In her prime years, Félicité also fell in love with a young rich man by the name Theodore and ended up suffering a heartbreak when the rich guy abandoned her for an older, wealthier woman.  However, Félicité secured a great deal when she was taken on to look after Madame Aubain and the two young Aubain children, Paul and Virginie.

In the house of Madame, Felicite finds peace of mind and enters the regular routine, which makes her life improve significantly. She works very hard and gains the favor of her boss through which she ends up feeling to be part of that family, which restores a sense of happiness and love in her.  Felicite falls in love with two of her boss’s children Paul and Virginia, and courageously saves them from the wrath of an angry bull (Hoeveler 95). Besides, she accidentally discovers a long lost sister and decides to support her family from her meagre income. Moreover, Felicite, Paul and Virginie become great friends. Virginie’s mother decides to send her to school to study bible lessons, which makes Felicite sad; however, she gets used to that idea. Felicite gets an opportunity to always attend the classes together with Virginia, where she can acquire religious-related education, although she was no religious. However, she ends up developing emotional attachments with the religious studies.  Felicite is excited about the success achieved by Virginia and celebrates her victory like it is her own. However, the joy proves to be short-lived when Virginia is sent to a convent school, which leaves Felicite disappointed (Sartre 1839). To distract herself, she asks for permission from her boss to have her nephew come to visit her on Sundays through which she would have an opportunity to cook for him and mend his clothes, but the boy’s parents started to take advantage of the visits to extract certain things from her whenever there was an opportunity.  Victor secures a job to work with a shipping company in Cuba and finally leaves Felicite. She is very disappointed and mainly when she hurries off to bid him goodbye but finds his ship going and barely gets a glimpse of him as the boat moves out. To avoid an additional disappointment, she worries about him each passing day, and especially when it takes longer to hear about his whereabouts for a long time. As a result, she takes the initiative of looking for a map and asks for help to identify which house her nephew could be living in. From her brother-in-law, which she is unable to read by her boss, comes to her aid. The letter leaves her in pieces as it carries the bad news that Victor had died.

Having attended a convent school, Virginia has lung cancer, and her condition deteriorates each passing day, making her weaker. She finally succumbs to the illness, thus intensifying the disappointments experienced by Felicite. To show her disbelief in the passing of Virginia, she keeps Virgil by the body for two full nights and prepares it for burial. Her disappointments spread further when Madame fails to get over the death of Virginia. She, however, steps up and gives Madame honest advice reminding her that she has to be healthy for Paul and the greater good of Virginia’s memory (Hoeveler 99). She, however, ensures that Madame follows the doctor’s directive of not visiting her daughter’s grave to avoid sinking into more grief. To show her loss, “For two nights, Félicité never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her first vigil, she noticed that the child’s face had gone yellow, the lips were turning blue, the nose looked sharper, and the eyes were sunken (Sartre 1843). She kissed them several times, and would not have been particularly surprised if Virginie had opened them again: to minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter. She laid her out, wrapped her in a shroud, put her in her coffin, placed a wreath on her, and spread out her hair. It was fair and amazingly long for her age. Félicité cut off a big lock, half of which she slipped into her bosom, resolving never to part with it.”

Time passes fast, and Felicite gets disappointed again when Paul engages himself in deviant behaviour such as abuse of drugs such as alcohol. She is much disturbed by the fact that Paul fails to fails to step up for his mother in an attempt to help her get over the death of Virginia (Hoeveler 99). Felicite takes up the mantle and engages Madame in taking a walk around the neighbourhood while talking about her deceased daughter. This plays a significant role in increasing the healing process and strengthening the relationship between the two ladies.

Felicite derives her happiness from helping the lowly in the community. She engages herself in helping the sick, cares for the homeless in the community such as father Colmiche, an individual was supposed to have committed atrocities during the French Revolution. Felicite is, however, disappointed when the older man dies, and a pet parrot is presented to Madame by an individual who was leaving the town (Sartre 1845). However, Felicite draws happiness from the bird and especially when she learns that the bird was from America as it reminds her of her nephew Victor, who had lost his life while on official duty in America.

Felicite passionately teaches the parrot to speak due to its annoying habits. However, she gets disappointed when the bird disappears, compelling her to look for it in the entire town. The bird finally shows up, but Félicité suffers a chill, which makes her lose her hearing ability. A couple of years later, she completely loses her hearing ability and can only communicate with the bird. Epitome of Felicite’s disappointment occurs when the bird finally dies (Hoeveler 100). She takes the action of having the bird staffed and is knocked down by a track’s driver but manages to lift herself.

Disappointments keep on following Felicite, and Madame finally dies. She mourned her silently while the heirs take possession of the majority of the left assets and are threatened with an eviction letter. However, since no one demands the house, Felicite continues living there before she finally suffers from pneumonia.

In a nutshell, disappointments as a result death and loss in the story is a repetitive theme. Disappointment, therefore, seem more significant in the story as a whole. Felicite is bereaved at a tender age and detached from her loved ones. She is finally able to locate one of her sisters whom they had been separated for a long time, and the lady is more interested in taking advantage of her. As time passes by, she suffers another disappointment when Theodore her intimate lover, Virginie, Victor, Paul, and even Madame Aubain (Hoeveler 105). She is, however, left to wallow in abject poverty, and after the death of her boss, she is threatened with an eviction letter from her home. Through the story, Felicite seems to have no control over her losses and hence suffers a lot of disappointments.  When her bird outflows, her endless struggles to get him proves futile, although the bird finally shows up on his own (Sartre 1848).  She suffers yet another disappointment when Victor’s ship leaves before she sees him off. She also misses on the chance to set her eyes on Virginie before she succumbed to her illness because she got late while locking the house as was expected by her employer. At the end of the story, she is substantially wearing out, growing lesser, and becoming deafened.  She can only literally hear the voices of the parrot, and the parrot can only repeat irrelevant phrases.

In conclusion, the theme of disappointment is brought up in the two stories. The main characters experience hardship in their lives but continue pushing on without losing hope. To avoid frustrations, however, individuals should not set unrealistic goals.

Works cited

Collas, Ion K. Madame Bovary: a psychoanalytical reading. Librairie Droz, 1985.

Hoeveler, Diane. “A Reading of the Emotions of Salome: Sympathy for the Devil, or Fear and Loathing.” Essays in Romanticism 9.1 (2001): 87-108.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857. Vol. 3. University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Vinken, Barbara. “Loving, reading, eating: the passion of Madame Bovary.” MLN 122.4 (2007): 759-778.

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The theme of disappointment in Madame Bovary a Simple heart by Gustave Flaubert