The Victim Of Provincialism In Ezra Pound's Emma Bovary

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
― Ezra Pound
A maiden with a heart filled with hope for love, shaped and twisted into a egotistical persona of her own waking. She is doomed to tragic prospects, created by her own raging expectations of romance. The maiden is Emma Bovary, whose mind is as similar of a slave to fantasy as she is to her feminine milieu. Her ideals not only harming her own mind, but also negatively affect those around her. Emma Bovary is a victim of provincialism, an occurrence where ones exposure to fiction, or otherwise, corrupts their views on life, leaving them ignorant. Emma, a beautiful but originally unamused girl on the countryside, grew weary of her surroundings. In her boredom, at the age

Surrounded by extravagance and of the ballroom she starts to compare it to her own lifestyle along with charles, who in her eyes is unsophisticated. Emma truly believe that charles is holding her back in every sense, not only romantic. She originally already hated his mannerisms, annoyed by the way he “licked his teeth and but in comparison it only shone brighter. She is now smitten with utter disloyalty toward charles, and after finding out she will bear his child, that only fuels the fire. Emma, at the very least, hopes she will have a baby boy in hopes that the child will become what she failed to become. Someone who is free. “She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past.” Like the other things to her life, her expectations were not met. And she was faced with giving birth to a girl. A recurring theme appears now. As Emma raises her expectations and they don’t follow through she tends to neglect the source of her dissatisfaction. In this case that source is Berthe, her child. For example, one instance, as Berthe attempts to embrace her mother Emma responded by elbowing her, “Will you leave me alone?” Emma snaps before pushing Berthe with her elbow.”(114). She is distraught and depressed and hates both her husband and her child. At least, there is

Perhaps, there would have been someone out there that she actually loved, but by coincidence men like Charles, Rodolphe, and Leon were in her way. For instance, how charles seemed to embrace her at certain fixe times” (43). Or how she was deceived by one of the men she had an affair with, named Rodolphe. Maybe, if she had a more free life, she wouldn’t feel so contained and desperate. To that I say, It is true that she would not feel so contained if she had the same privileges men at the time had. However, that does not mean that she was not provincial. The books she read, while letting her escape reality, it unfortunately only confined her more than ever before. The sort of “revolution” she wanted led her to believe that someone else such as a fiance or hero would do it for her. At this point, regardless of her gaining an open life, her independence is quite low. Now let us Say she even was able to go about her own ways, she would not realize that she had to depend on herself quick enough. She could learn, but it would likely kick her harder than how she is now. The world can be a cruel place. Her suicide borne of high expectations and let- downs is proof of her personal weakness. If one has a fairly wealthy family who loves them, most people, besides those helpless