ABSTRACT
Emma Bovary is the protagonist in a great example of modern fiction, building itself upon the dramatic isolation of an individual consciousness in a world which resists both her will and understanding. The removal of the author from value judgments has the effect of stressing and isolating the values of his protagonists, now seen clearly in dramatic collision with things as they are. The contrast is with things as they might be, in this case imagined in the subjective or solipsistic world of Emma Bovary. Emma Bovary, like any protagonist, is an agent of the sensuous, ethical and esthetic human imagination. The effect in Madame Bovary is that of the spirit of comedy without humor, and of the perspective of tragedy reduced to the grotesque. The theme is most serious, it universalizes itself; it has the sobriety, in fact, of metaphysical comedy.
