Emma likes the type of pulp, romantic and sentimental fiction condemned by Nabokov, the 19th century version of Harlequin Romances. Emma is not an artist of prose like her creator, she is a consumer of written culture in a very literal as well as a metaphorical sense, just as she consumes all sorts of material goods in her futile quest for fulfillment, and dies by consuming poison at the end of the novel.

This is what makes Emma so fascinating as a character. She engages in the same project of interpretation and authorship as her reader, even if it is a failed project. "But what interests me most in Madame Bovary is the heroine's fondness for reading. She dies because she has attempted to make her life into a novel -- and it is the foolishness of that quest that Flaubert's clinical style mocks." (Jong, 1997) Emma essentially dies of...
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