"Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert ---Episode 5

                             More About Emma's Daydreaming

  The theme of Emma's daydreaming has some connections with the whippet(greyhound) , the gift of a gamekeeper which she took "out walking (in Tostes), for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road . . . Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander at random, like her whippet, who ran round and round in the open country, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew -mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of some acres of wheat. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, 'Good heavens! why did I marry?' 
   "She asked herself if by some chance combination it would not have been possible to meet another man ; and she tried to imagine what would have been those unrealized events, that different life, that unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old schoolmates had married. What were they doing now ? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses blossom. But her life was as cold as a garret, whose dormer-window looks on the north, and boredom, the silent spider, was darkly weaving its web in every nook of her heart." 

   The loss of the whippet on the journey from Tostes to Yonville symbolizes the end of her mildly romantic, elegiac daydreaming at Tostes and the beginning of more passionate experiences at fateful Yonville.  
   But even before Yonville, Emma's daydreaming romantic image of Paris emerges from the silk cigar case she picked up on that empty country road returning fromVaubyessard. This vision of Paris is one of a succession of Emma's daydreams that appear throughout the book. One daydream, shortly destroyed, is that she can make the name of Bovary famous through Charles. Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of grim and passionate pursuits who work all night deep in their books, and finally at sixty, when the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a cross of honor stitched on their ill-fitting black coat ? She wished the name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers, repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition. 

                         Daydream Theme and Deceit Theme 

   The daydream theme joins quite naturally with the theme of deceit. She hides the cigar case over which she dreams ; she deceives Charles from the very first in order to have him take her elsewhere. By faking an illness, she is responsible for the removal to Yonville, supposedly a better climate : "Would this misery last for ever ? Would she never issue from it ? Yet Yet she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep ; she envied the lives of stir ; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield. 
   "She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her more. . . 
  As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began ti think seriously of setting up elsewhere. 
   From the moment she drank vinegar to make herself thin, contracted a sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite."

   It is in Yonville that fate will overtake her.The fate of her bridal  bouquet is a kind of premonition or emblem of her taking her own life a few years later. She had wondered when she found Bovary's first wife's bridal flowers what would be done to her bouquet. Now on leaving Tostes she burns it herself in a wonderful passage : "One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges . She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted ; and the shriveled paper petals, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney." 

The theme of daydreaming surfaces again in the romantic names she thinks of bestowing on her daughter. "First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala, ; she like Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better." The other characters are faithful to themselves in the names they propose. "Charles wanted the child to be named after her mother; Emma opposed this. " Monsieur  Leon, says Homais, "wonders why you do not choose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion now." 
  "But Madame Bovary senior cried out loudly against this name of a sinner.  As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for names that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a humane idea ... " One should note why Emma chose Berthe. "At last Emma remembered that at the chateau of Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe ; from that moment this name was chosen." 
   The romantic considerations in naming the child contrast with the conditions under which she had been farmed out to nurse, an extraordinary custom of those days. Emma strolls with Leon to visit the child. "They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuces, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several nondescript rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country. "