Hoping to escape from a future without horizon, Emma marries the good and kind Charles Bovary, a doctor. Finding herslf in another sort of prison however, she seeks comfort in the arms of lovers, and plays into the hands of opportunists. She has not, after all, moved upwards, but rather sideways, into an even more claustrophobic existence. Trapped in a net of her own making, she becomes desperate. The more she struggles, the more she entangles herself.