Alternative Realities

We are continuously looking for an escape from our reality. We wish to be better and more than what we actually are. Sometimes this drive either brings us to insanity and sometimes it causes us to give up on ourselves as in Madame Bovary. When we give up on ourselves we sit back in the world and let it pass by, rationalizing our inaction. We look for vicarious versions of ourselves feel better. We find children and movie stars to live through. When they are contributing to charities it seems almost like we ourselves have done something good. By watching a movie that a certain actor or actress who are contributing to charities then it seems that we are helping feed children in Africa. In reality we aren’t doing anything. We are losing ourselves in our lethargy. 
In pursuit of our escape we have movies and theaters. We buy the biggest screens for our televisions possible in futile attempts to become more personalized and enveloped in the alternative universe of our choice. We fill ourselves with these illusions of life that we are somehow able to make so strong that we feel personal connections. We embody the actors and actresses who are making up this alternative universe. We understand in the end that it wasn't real, but it was so much easier to be who we wanted to be in the imagination of the director. Back in Madame Bovary’s time though, they had the theater.
The theater scene in Madame Bovary allowed us to see how Emma wanted her alternative universe to look like. The opera that Emma and Charles see is one that is full of passion and there is even a women deciding between two different men. Emma can see herself as the character played out, reinventing her life. However, this life that the actress is enacting is full of passion and suave men who want nothing but to please her. She becomes a part of the illusion and pulls into her life, "She recognized all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her" (Flaubert, 207).
To make it seem even more that the play was meant for Emma, Flaubert creates the actors in it to be ones full of lives of passion and adultery that seem to call to Emma. The main actor was one who had become a celebrity because he had let a Polish princess ruin herself for him and then he deserted her for other women. This is as dramatic as it gets and falls right in with Emma's personality that seeks the drama. Emma meets Leon, the man that she had loved in Yonville during the opera adding to the scene. Here the opera parallels with her life as she sits surrounded closely by her husband and future lover. Later in the book Emma is even more like a part of the actor’s story because she lets her lover ruin her. However, Flaubert has Emma, Leon, and Charles leave the opera before it finishes. Emma doesn't want to see the end; she only wants the beginning with the lust and passion. The last thing she hears before blocking the rest of the opera out is "Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour and all my dreams" (Flaubert, 211). Emma does not want to see the end to the passion; she does not want to see the consequences that can occur from following your passions.