pages read until chapter 4 of part 3-sandra

The part I read this time was pretty big so a lot of things happened, giving many things to comment on. For starters, Emma finally has her affair. After an enormous build up, she finally caves in to the temptations of adultery. I was disappointed with her choice in men; I would've rather read about her with Leon then Rodolphe for the mere fact that he was sincerely in love with Emma. The only reason Emma wants to do these immoral things is because she is so desperate; desperate for true love and passion and everything else she read about in novels. She isn't just bored of her husband; she has strong desires for more in her life then the mediocrity that includes her husband who she sees as an obstacle in the way to happiness. I wanted her dreams realised and think Leon would have actually been able to give her all the things she wanted. Rodolphe just uses her but because of her desperation, Emma doesn't realise how insincere he is. She is blinded with illusions of passion and desire and clings on to this tiny opportunity of getting her dreams and thus fails to see how it really is only an illusion. Emma might be considered naive for not being able to see what is really going on but I just feel bad for her. She puts so many "eggs" in Rodolpho's basket just because she is so extremely dissatisfied with what she has, which is a proper husband and daughter. And because of this attachment to her illusion, Rodolpho starts to find her annoying and doesn't want to be with her anymore, causing her to completely fall apart and consider suicide.
Then something changed for me. When she leaves for Paris to deal with her debts together with Leon and has an affair with him too, my sympathy for her just disappeared. The fact that she cheats on her husband again after she should have realized that affairs do not lead to anything from her previous disappointment is just immoral. It went too far for me.
I noticed that Emma's affair and financial status are in the same situation. The more present the affair, and immorality of this affair is, the more she buys, the more debts are created. Also when she has to solve her debts, she ends up having another affair with Leon.

nic chapters XIV-VIII

After Emma ended the affair with Rodolphe and began to see Leon again, the contrasts between both her lover became obvious and really stood out to me in this reading. While Rodolphe had total control of the situation and what he was doing with Emma, it is not difficult to see that Leon has no other intentions, and that his callowness is shown again and again through the form in which he is desperate to see Emma all the time, leaving his work and friends behind to constantly go after a woman who actually doesn’t know what she’s doing either. If in the affair with Rodolphe she had no control and “responsibilities”, here she is the one who is running the show. However, just as her former affair, Emma’s passion becomes obsessive, and even Leon can’t deal with her demands. Her hysterical moment after they cannot be together because Leon had to see Homais underlines her insanity and the decadent state she has whirl pooled into, and at that point she is already so full of debts that it seems like she can’t go down any deeper. The seemingly decent wife of the doctor has already been corrupted and at the rate that she is going, there seems to be no turning back.
When Emma is riding the carriage to Rouen a very peculiar (and I believe symbolic) character has joined the novel. It is the blind beggar who sings songs of innocence and animals while he is actually in a pitiful state. His situation reflects a lot of Emma’s condition, for as I stated earlier she may have appeared to be innocent and helpless in the past, but just as the beggars disease, all her morality has been eaten up by the terrible disease that is her desperation for the life she can’t have and the men she can’t have either.