Madame Bovary: Similes 4 key examples

This simile draws on the association with birds to freedom to convey how Emma views love as a pathway for escaping mundane life, such as how Charles provided an escape from her father’s farm. She conflated the additional freedom that Charles could provide with love, but as she finds herself trapped in a different type of tedious lifestyle, she realizes her mistake. Furthermore, the simile reveals how she views love as unattainable, as the pink bird is flying out of reach in an intangible poetical heaven. In contrast, Emma is quite stationary, trapped in her father’s and then Charles’s home and, more broadly, in provincial towns. As such, she still sees love and freedom as something she can only access through literature.

However, this simile also foreshadows her growing association of love with the rich, specifically high-status Parisians, as she later portrays Paris as a place between heaven and earth. Thus, the bird’s ascent can represent her similar desire to rise in status, which she sees as the gateway to love and freedom. In other instances in the novel, Emma depicts love as requiring the right conditions, with these conditions requiring a certain amount of wealth to attain. By reducing love to a tangible figure of a bird, which she desires to “possess,” the novel emphasizes her materialistic view of love, which stems from her bourgeois values. 

By comparing her heart to a stained shoe, the novel highlights how Emma demeans her self-worth into something superficial because of her obsession with a materialistic and extravagant lifestyle. Something as precious as her heart becomes a stained shoe. While Emma’s shallowness and the juxtaposition of such romantic imagery of the heart with the more mundane and tarnished image of the shoe invite the reader to criticize her frivolous bourgeois values, it also evokes pity by highlighting Emma’s low self-worth. While she presents herself very proudly throughout the novel, seeing herself as above the other provincial townsfolk, this moment reveals how much of her bravado hides her feelings of inadequacy as she aspires to a higher status.

Furthermore, the care and esteem with which she treats these items further paint her as a naive dreamer for her misplaced sentimentality. The moment reminds the audience that Emma is just a young girl reeling from her first brush with the type of life every piece of literature she’s ever read has told her would produce happiness. As such, it’s natural for her to overly prize such a seemingly worthless item, even as the reader laughs at her a bit for it.

The specific requirements Emma describes mirror her previous recounting of the various tropes she’s encountered in the novels she’s read. This demonstrates how she thinks her life needs to follow a literary plot to have any meaning or produce happiness and love. Furthermore, she only understands love through the context in which it has been presented to her in literature, highlighting her lack of understanding of the real world. Emma’s attempts to marry fiction to reality by making such a scientific comparison to love heightens the comedy and contrast of her romantic ideals and reality. Ironically, despite her romanticism, she expects love to be confined to a very logical and formulaic set of parameters.

Furthermore, in this simile, she focuses on the material conditions rather than the active behaviors involved in cultivating either tropical plants or love. She does not talk about the work of planting, such as digging a hole for the seed, but talks about the dirt itself. Similarly, she does not discuss actively courting a lover but the material items and passive effects of her ideal courtship, such as dramatic sighing and beautiful balconies. Her limited focus on the aesthetics of love reflects her bourgeois materialism and the lack of a work ethic involved in achieving her dreams, as she views love as something that will just happen once she’s in the right setting. Furthermore, it again emphasizes her misunderstandings about what love is because she has only seen it in romantic novels, which often only discuss love in a heavily stylized manner. The novelistic details she uses to describe these requirements become comic absurdity when placed in a realistic setting.

Emma expresses her feelings of loneliness and confinement by comparing herself to a sailor. Like a shipwrecked sailor, she desires adventure and freedom but lacks the means to escape. Emma’s entrapment is due to her position as a woman, which confines her to a tedious life centered around the home and dictated by her husband. The sailor is equally trapped by circumstance in the confines of an island. Both must rely on some external source to save them. For the sailor, this salvation comes by ship, but for Emma, escape comes in the form of a male lover. Her desire for any shore or boat emphasizes her desperation and foreshadows her eventual turn to reckless means, such as adultery and overspending, to achieve any sort of life satisfaction.

Similarly, her understanding that she has to settle for “what her luck might bring” again emphasizes her lack of agency and instinct to go along with anything that could give her the briefest moment of pleasure. Emma’s use of simile also reflects how she romanticizes her misery by comparing herself to characters or archetypes (as her comparison likely draws from literary sailors) to cope with the lack of power she has over her life.