Madame Bovary: Destiny Destiny: the seemingly inevitable succession of events.1 Is this definition true, or do we, as people in real life or characters in novels, control our own destiny? Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary exemplifies how we hold destiny in our own hands, molding it with the actions we take and the choices we make. Flaubert uses Emma Bovary, the main character of his novel, to demonstrate this. Throughout her life, Emma makes many decisions, each one of them affecting her fate and by analyzing these decisions one could see from the beginning that Emma is destined to suffer. However, one can also pinpoint su