The elder Madame Bovary

This woman is a typical mother. Charles is his son, and she does everything to help him. She doesn’t want him to become a doctor, to marry Emma, as she sees her insincerity and dishonesty. Also, she loses a battle with Charles when she was trying to force him to control Emma’s money.

She has many lines in a book, and she is clear and understandable to the end.

But to be honest, who knows if her behaviour was so bad at all? If he controlled her finances who know, maybe she would never get in those debts and financial problems, and as a result, she wouldn’t commit suicide. We can’t judge the elder Madame Bovary as her only struggle was to help her son, even after he refused to listen to her pieces of advice.

Also, we the book shows us true reasons for this overprotective behaviour. The Mother was trying to compensate for the unhappiness she had in her own marriage. She was unhappy and made a lot of mistakes that she wanted to omit in her child’s marriage.

When Charles was getting adult, she started to become very overprotective and indulgent mother. She was grasping and domineering and tried to run his life for him. Also, the book shows us that the Mother was very jealous seeing how much Charles loves Emma and stops paying that great amount of attention to his mother. That is why this became the main reason of why Emma and the elder Madame Bovary never get along well.