No doubt that Emma Bovary is about the most sensuous character in literature - Flaubert, renowned for his ability to capture a scene, is no slouch either when it comes to depicting a character. Lesser writers, in describing a character for the first time focus on features, mostly facial features, and if they're of little imagination they'll endow the characters with distinguishing marks - e.g., he had a drooping white mustache ... - but Flaubert, of a much higher order, does give us some general terms of description of Emma - we all know that she had big eyes, very dark, almost black, but deep blue in certain light, for example - but mostly describes her (and others) by action and incident. When she fist begins to come on to Charles she is doing some needlework, and Flaubert notes how she continues to prick her finger with the needle and lick off the blood. What a detail! It's sexual and suggestive, and also shows that she can act domestic but that she's not really good at it - shes not going to sit around doing housework for sure. So, yes, she's tremendously attractive - but there are aspects to Emma Bovary that are not attractive at all. Putting aside feminist readings, which do make sense as one way to look at her - she's an item of chattel that is bartered away, sold to the highest (male) bidder - but she as a character has little sympathy with other women and absolutely no sympathy with other social classes. We clearly see that she is enraptured with the aristocracy - the ball and party she and Charles attend, the beginning of her estrangement from him - but she sees a "higher" class as something she simply deserves. She has no comprehension of her exploitation of others - she is generally cruel and unthinking regarding her servants, firing a long-time servant on the spot for some petty infraction. If in some ways she is the embodiment of the provincial bourgoisie, she is also enamored of a class structure that is for the first time threatened - her only problem isn't social class, it's what she considers her consignment to a class that is beneath her. She is very scornful of Charles - when it's obvious he is a doting husband who could have been a very fine mate, for someone else; part of her disappointment in him is sexual (her sullenness after the wedding), but part is also her sense that he is beneath the class to which she aspires - it's not that she mind