Madame Bovary Part One, Chapters IV–VI Summary & Analysis

Summary: Chapter IV

In spring, when Charles’s mourning period for his first wife has ended, he marries Emma. The wedding is a huge event all around Rouault’s farm, and the guests come dressed in fancy clothes that they are not used to. After the wedding, they all return to the farm in a long and festive procession that stretches out “like one long coloured scarf that undulated across the fields.” They consume a massive all-night feast that includes an incredibly elaborate three-tiered wedding cake. The next day, after the wedding night, Charles is obviously overjoyed. Emma takes her loss of virginity calmly and coolly in stride. As the couple departs for their home in Tostes, Rouault reminisces about the happiness of his own wedding day.

Summary: Chapter V

Back in Tostes, Emma inspects her new home, where she makes Charles remove his dead wife’s dried bridal bouquet from the bedroom. As Emma plans further small improvements to the house, Charles dotes on her in a daze of love and happiness. Emma, on the other hand, feels strangely dissatisfied by her new life—she always expected marriage to lead her to romantic bliss. Instead, she feels that her life has fallen short of the high expectations she received from romantic novels: “Before marriage she thought herself in love; but since the happiness that should have followed failed to come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words bliss, passion, ecstasy, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

Summary: Chapter VI

Emma remembers life in the convent where she was educated. At first, she threw herself into religious life, treating religion with the same passion she devoted to reading romantic novels and listening to ballads of love. When her mother died, she immersed herself even more passionately into her grief. It pleased her to think of herself as an example of pure melancholy. But she soon grew tired of mourning and eventually left the convent. For a while, she enjoyed life on her father’s farm, but she soon found herself bored and disgusted with her life. In this state of disillusionment, she first met Charles, but he did not provide the happy escape for which she had hoped.

Analysis: Part One, Chapters IV–VI

Flaubert’s shifting of the point of view from character to character follows the pattern of the novel’s plot. After Charles marries Emma, her point of view takes over. This shift in perspective begins at the end of Chapter V and coincides with the contrast between Charles’s blind love for Emma and her own disillusionment. In Emma’s meditation on her marital dissatisfaction, we catch our first real glimpse of her thoughts, and the stage is set for the escalating crisis of personality that will eventually claim her life.

A third-person narrator tells the story throughout most of Madame Bovary, focusing primarily on Emma’s thoughts and actions. However, the narrator’s point of view does change, and the narrator adopts several different tones. The narrator frequently speaks as an outsider, commenting objectively, but also shows us things subjectively through the characters’ eyes, telling us what they feel and think. Flaubert often employs free indirect discourse, a technique in which the narrator’s words sound very much like the thoughts and speech patterns of one of the characters, even when the narrator is not directly quoting the character. For example, when Rouault remembers his wedding in Chapter IV, Flaubert writes, “How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road.” The narration moves directly from transcription of Rouault’s thought to description of his action, without setting the thought apart in quotation marks. As a result, we must often stop to consider whether we are hearing the voice of the narrator or that of a character.

One of Emma’s most important characteristics is the conflict between her romantic nature and her tendency toward discontent. Emma’s flashback shows how far back her taste for romance extends. Even at age thirteen, she was unable to resist the melancholy, romantic atmosphere of the convent and steeped herself in romantic novels and songs, whose stories she desperately wished would be realized in her own life. Emma, however, is easily discontented. Things that she believes will save her, such as the convent, the farm, and married life, always fail to fulfill her desires. Her high spirits after the wedding, for instance, fall the moment she encounters Heloise’s bridal bouquet in Charles’s house, and she immediately begins to wonder why her life does not match the sentimental fictions she had expected to come true.

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