I read the book in high school, in a course called "Major Novels," but, alas, I have no real memory of it, although I can tell you that the death in the novel, too, is grim and realistic--the anti-beautiful death the way the affairs and dalliances have been anti-romantic.

What I find myself musing on right now is how having your interior vision diverge from the world as other see it is disastrous regardless of what your interior vision is. I'm not thinking of cases where your brain chemistry gives you actual hallucinations; I'm thinking precisely of the sort of interior worldbuilding Emma engages in--taking props from reality and then spinning a story of how things are around them. While there are still plenty of women who share Emma's desire to be carried away by a romantic husband or lover, it's not what she fantasizes about that's her downfall, it's letting her internal storytelling become more and more divorced from what's really happening. That can happen in any situation (a person might imagine themselves to be a trenchant voice of social criticism, for example, when really they're nothing more than an Internet troll).

And it's not like there's any clear line! It's kind of like the boundary between here and faerie--it won't bear direct examination, and it keeps moving and changing.

I think as a high schooler, I resented that Emma was portrayed (or I felt she was portrayed--maybe, in fact, Flaubert was more sympathetic than I understood) as a bubblehead, and I felt that somehow femaleness was being indicted. At the time, I had a "Not all women" reaction, but now I think I'd switch it around as say "Just as many men"--because that capacity for disastrous self-dilusion is absolutely equal opportunity across the gender spectrum.