Flaubert's description of Madame Bovary is the most accurate portrait of the modern middle class. She has no worries about food and clothing, with a husband, a house, a daughter, and social engagements—her life is considered proper, stable, and respectable by success standards. But from start to finish, she only has one feeling: being deceived by fate.

It's not that someone signed a conspiracy contract; it's that society, culture, education, and literature all promised her a certain way of life. Following the rules, she finds that what she can actually get is completely different from her expectations. This gap is the daily reality for many in the middle class today.
What was Emma promised? Romantic texts: castles and knights, lovers who step forward in danger, love at first sight, grand and dazzling destinies. They didn't tell her how to manage household chores, pay bills, or care for the sick, but repeatedly instilled that a truly worthwhile life should be full of passion, drama, and ritual.
This is the childhood and youth experience of the modern middle class: school education, movies, online ads, success stories—telling you from all angles that as long as you work hard, get into college, you can find a decent job, get married, have children, buy a house, travel, and live a fulfilling, dignified life. Life is like a clear roadmap; follow it, and happiness is basically predictable.
Emma married Dr. Bovary. She is inherently kind, diligent, honest, but clumsy, slow-witted, lacking taste, and not understanding romance or deep conversations. Suitable as a stable family pillar, but extremely unlikely to be the hero of a romantic story. Moving to a small town, with patients coming and going, household chores, meal planning, holiday visits—topics always revolving around weather and crop prices.
This is a scene countless middle-class people are familiar with today: studying, taking exams, entering companies, working overtime, attending meetings, writing reports, earning a not-so-low salary, living in a not-so-bad house. Weddings, mortgage, car, children’s training classes, and decent consumption—none are missing. But the passion, freedom, and self-fulfillment once promised are almost entirely squeezed out of life. Every day is filled with unread messages, project schedules, kids’ homework, relatives’ visits, and mortgage payments.
After twenty years of effort, what you get are days crushed by schedules and loans—nothing like the bright life you once believed you would have. Anxiety is no longer about work pressure or lack of money; it’s a structural doubt: do I believe the story I’ve been told from the beginning is a lie?
Emma is caught in the middle: food and clothing are worry-free, but she has the energy to feel boredom and emptiness; she’s not wealthy enough to rewrite her life with money and power. Having high expectations but lacking real resources to change her fate, this position itself is a breeding ground for anxiety. Almost all modern middle class people live in this space.
Her way of trying to fill the gap is exactly the path countless middle class people copy today: consumption and emotional risk-taking.
Consumption: obsessed with beautiful clothes, exquisite jewelry, elegant furniture—what they buy isn’t just dresses, curtains, silverware, but an entire narrative of identity. They try to assemble a scene to detach themselves from their current reality. This aligns with today’s middle-class consumption logic: high-end decorating styles, textured clothing, phones, bags, furniture, restaurant and travel destinations—all must be recognizable on social media as living a good life. They tell stories through objects: I am walking the right life path.
Consumption can temporarily relieve the feeling of suffocation, but it cannot address the root of anxiety. Once objects become part of daily background, they no longer support the illusion that I deserve a better life. So, they pursue more expensive and novel things, and debt snowballs grow larger. The more they want to prove they aren’t deceived through consumption, the more they see cold, hard numbers on bills: in fact, they are paying for this narrative with decades of future labor.
You know very well that many things bought are just to maintain face and self-esteem, but you dare not remove the disguise because it means admitting the story is false. This tacit absurdity is a shared secret among the modern middle class.