What happens in Part One, Chapter 6 of Madame Bovary?
Part One, Chapter Six takes a moment to explore the development of Emma Rouault's inner life before she marries Charles. Growing up on her father's farm, she is sent to the Ursuline convent in Rouen, where she initially flourishes amid the scents of incense, rituals, and a sense of feminine mysticism. Instead of embracing true religious devotion, Emma becomes captivated by its aesthetic: the languorous saints, the ornate altarpieces, and the poetic language of spiritual love. She eagerly reads illicit romance novels passed around by the nuns, filling her mind with images of troubadours, crumbling castles, and delicate ladies sighing at moonlit windows. An old seamstress who visits the convent shares ballads and secret stories with the girls, deepening Emma's desire for a life more vibrant than anything she has experienced. As the excitement of convent life starts to fade, Emma becomes restless and is eventually taken back home to the farm. She tries to find purpose in the daily routines and in caring for her sick father, but the gap between her imagined life and her real one has already widened—silent, vast, and impossible to bridge. By the end of the chapter, it becomes clear that Emma didn't just choose Charles; she chose to escape, and that choice will come at a great cost.
Analysis
Flaubert's masterstroke in this chapter lies in his use of structural irony: he presents Emma's education as a series of beautifully misguided lessons. The convent, meant to curb desire, ironically becomes a nurturing ground for it. Flaubert lists Emma's reading with the same clinical detail he applies to Charles's medical tools, suggesting that both fail their users—one lacks precision, while the other cuts too deeply. The prose mirrors the very romanticism it critiques: sentences stretch and flourish when Emma daydreams, then snap back to stark statements when reality intrudes. This shifting tone is the chapter's key technique, guiding the reader to sense the allure before recognizing the trap.
The theme of second-hand experience runs throughout. Emma never experiences romance firsthand; instead, she engages with its representations—novels, engravings, ballads, and embroidered handkerchiefs. Flaubert is meticulous about this mediation: Emma does not love; she loves the idea of love as seen through the lens of cheap print. The old seamstress serves as an ironic muse, a figure whose own life remains unseen, existing only to provide fictions for impressionable girls.
The chapter also introduces the window as a recurring symbol. Emma frequently gazes outward, a stance Flaubert will revisit throughout the novel to indicate her inherent longing—always reaching for a life that lies just beyond the frame she occupies. In this sense, the convent walls and the farmhouse walls are one and the same.
Key quotes from Part One, Chapter 6
“She had to get some profit out of things, and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate satisfaction of her heart's desires.”
Flaubert's narrator summarises Emma's relationship to knowledge and experience, exposing the ruthless selectivity that her romantic imagination imposes on reality.
“Instead of following the Mass, she used to gaze at the azure-bordered religious drawings in her book. She loved the sick lamb, the Sacred Heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries.”
Describing Emma's conduct during religious services, this passage reveals that her engagement with faith is entirely aesthetic and sentimental rather than devotional.
“She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, under the trefoil of the pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a white-plumed knight galloping on his black horse from the distant fields.”
One of the novel's most cited passages, it crystallises Emma's imagination as a collage of received images—medievalism, chivalry, and passive feminine longing borrowed wholesale from the novels she has read.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part One, Chapter 6
- convent
- A religious community of nuns; here the boarding school run by nuns where Emma received her education and developed her romantic fantasies.
- clavichord
- An early keyboard instrument, quieter than a piano, whose strings are struck by small brass tangents; Emma plays one as part of her genteel accomplishments.
- prie-dieu
- A small kneeling bench with a shelf for a book or hands, designed for private prayer; its presence in a domestic scene signals religious observance or its performance.