“The big blue country” Symbol Analysis

When Emma is already growing bored with Léon, she tries to force love by imagining him as a composite of ideal qualities, living in a misty “blue country” containing little but the scent of flowers. Earlier, when she dreams of running away with Rodolphe, she imagines their future together as a vague “blue immensity”, perfect and empty. That blue nothingness is the world in which Emma always tries to live, a world made out of ideals and abstractions, free from the confounding detail that comprises the actual human world. To Emma, only that exotic place is suitable for love, and the man that dwells there, a ghost or a god, is the “incarnation of love itself.” But the novel teaches that love itself is nothing without human beings to give it meaning and contour. A person who is the incarnation of love is merely something becoming nothing.