Madame Bovary deals with themes of love, marital discord, medical mistakes and sexuality. Emma Bovary is deluded by literature. Her drama is the gap between desire and its fulfilment. In her search for ecstasy and transcendence, she falls madly in love with a cad, then with a coward, ignoring the plodding husband and child, both of whom adore her. She is looking for a life other than the one available to her as the wife of a bourgeois country doctor. But in this quest she finds only self-destruction.