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Motif
Explanation and Analysis—Flowers:
The novel often uses its setting to reflect the mood of a scene, with flowers being a consistent motif. Flowers are used to externalize Emma’s feelings or the state of her love life, which she is not always forthright about to those around her. The comparison between Emma and flowers is established directly in Part 2, Chapter 12:
Her cravings, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure and her still-fresh illusions had brought her gradually to readiness, like flowers that have manure, rain, wind and sun, and she was blossoming at last in the splendour of her being.
The flower motif surrounding Emma expands on her belief that love can only be produced in certain conditions, like the requirements of a plant, and highlights how she sees herself as molded by the world around her with little agency of her own. Furthermore, the comparison indulges Emma’s love for aesthetics by portraying her as delicate and beautiful. One example of flowers reflecting Emma’s emotions is in Part 2, Chapter 6 after Léon leaves for Paris:
But a gust of wind curved the poplars, and now the rain was falling; it spluttered over the green leaves. Then the sun came out, the hens clucked, sparrows shook out their wings in the damp bushes, and as the pools of rain on the gravel ebbed away they took the pink flowers fallen from an acacia.
The acacia petals being washed away by the storm’s attack on the greenery and flowers mirrors how Emma’s budding feelings for Lèon and hope for love washed away with his sudden departure.
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