Madame Bovary (Week One)

At the beginning of Flaubert's “Madame Bovary”, I had mistaken the story as being Charles Bovary’s. The reader is introduced to his upbringing, his brief debauchery in early adulthood, and, most importantly, his first marriage.
In the Zizek video we watched in class (“Why be happy when you can be interesting?”), Zizek uses the classic example of a man who dreams of what it would be like if his wife were to disappear or die and he was able to live happily with his mistress. This happens to Charles. He starts to fall in love with Emma and when he really starts to feel the weight of his marriage to a wife he doesn’t really love- POOF- she dies and he is able to propose to Emma. The very same things happens in Nabokov’s Lolita. Humbert Humbert is thinking of ways to get rid of his wife (lolita’s mother) so that he can live happily with Lolita and voilà, she's hit by a car and dies instantly. Zizek says that if the wife actually does leave the picture, there is no such happy ending, which is the case for Humbert, who tells the entire story from death row. But it seems, for the time being, that Charles is happy in his ignorance...
Emma Bovary is suffering from continual doses of reality. She is so caught up in the fictional stories that she had come accustomed to that she doesn’t know how to be content with her life. She had thought, at first, that Charles would be to her what gallant knights were in her stories. But Charles is just a gentle country doctor. He is easy to please and quick to give compliments, which, of course, is not what she wants. Almost as if she were a child, she slips into an excessively long tantrum.
Then Emma thinks that she’s in love with Léon. She uses him to emotionally torture herself. Even Léon has tricked himself into thinking that he doesn’t just want her for her body. But then Léon leaves and she slips back into her perpetual angst which had been momentarily quelled by her delusions about Léon. He leaves town without having had sex with Emma, and then another guy comes around and does have sex with her and she forgets all about Léon, proving that she didn't really love Léon to being with.
Which leads us to Rodolphe. He, for a time, was my favorite character simply because his honesty was a breath of fresh air. After he had met Emma, he was thinking of ways to have sex with her, and then get rid of her. He’s despicable, no doubt, but it was the first time a character didn’t delude themselves into thinking they were in love or make excuses to stay in an unhappy relationship other than the fact that it created a much needed barrier to their desire.
After having had sex with Rodolphe, Emma, ironically, started to appreciate her marriage a bit more. She thought that she wanted to live happily with her lover, but now that she has a lover, she can’t remember why she wasn’t happy with her marriage in the first place. Yet, it’s clear that Emma’s life will take a turn for the worse. She isn’t being very diligent at hiding her secret trysts with Rodolphe, and if we are to follow the pattern of every other story of passion, lust, and adultery, she’s probably going to die. Soon.