Madame Bovary and the Bitter‐Sweet Taste of Romance

This stylistic analysis focuses on one aspect of symbolism in Madame Bovary and was prompted by the apparent overdetermination of two strategically‐positioned references to white powder, one sweet, one bitter, which play a critical part in Flaubert's determinist aesthetics. The suggestive reference to sucre at la Vaubyessard is one of the props serving to fuel Emma's dreams of romance, whilst its counterpart, the reference to arsenic, marks the end of all illusions as reality supersedes dream. A variety of references to sugars literal and metaphorical underpin this central textual truth, whilst references to poison, literal and metaphorical, at once underscore Emma's delusional apprehension of reality and provide a coherent commentary on the inexorable shift from illusion to real as dreams are progressively deflated. The sweet sugar of Emma's worldview is at variance with the bitter arsenic that the text establishes as a corrective to that romanticized view. In this way, the motif of sweetness contributes to the structural and thematic coherence of Madame Bovary.