Her affair with Rudolphe is not the end of her hysteria because Leon comes back into her life and once again, she begins an affair with another man that is not her husband. Even with massive debt on their hands, Charles still manages to take Emma to the opera because he feels that it might help her recover from her depressive state. While at the opera Emma admires the fashion and the way in which men and women hold themselves. The anxiety of I all becomes too much for Emma and she begins to believe that she smells gas and that she cannot breathe (Flaubert 144). However, once she finds out that Leon is at the show, and coming to see them, she is fine. Emma begins to have feelings again for him and shortly after they begin a very sexualized …show more content…
(Flaubert 201)
We find out later that this white substance was actually arsenic. Emma’s situation is so dire to her that she feels the only way for her to get out is through suicide and this is the part where a modern audience may have compassion for Emma and her situation and they may view her a victim. When Charles finds her in bed, she hands him a letter that he is not to open until the next day, but he opens it anyway and finds that she has taken arsenic and runs to the druggist who tries to find an antidote for the poison.
In her last scene Emma is the vision of a hysteric woman. She is lying in bed crying and gasping with her tongue outside of her mouth (Flaubert 369). She only comes awake to hear a man singing outside of her window and with that she falls back to her bed and dies (Flaubert 369-370). Her death is not the last in Madame Bovary though because after Emma’s funeral Charles finds all of Rudolphe’s love letters to her and learns of the affairs that she has been having behind his back. Charles, “suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influence that filled his aching heart” dies a mysterious and heartbroken death (Flaubert 223). Charles is found dead in his chair by Berthe, who then is sent to live with a poor relative who sends her to a cotton mill to make her own living. By dying Emma inevitably kills her husband and sends her child into a life of