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passage has a narrative structure not unlike the one which Freud discusses in his essay The Theme of the Three Caskets. Of the choices which characters often must make among three possibilities, where the correct one is the most attractive but represents death, Freud writes, Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. Thus man overcomes death, which in thought he has acknowledged. No greater triumph of wish-fulfillment is conceivable. Just where in reality he obeys compulsion, he exercises choice; and that which he chooses is not a thing of horror, but the fairest and most desirable thing in (76). Emma, the initiate, must first learn how to make the choice; for now a proxy chooses for her. Beginning with, ne savait pas valser (86) (Emma did not know how to [37]), and moving through Emma's envious thought, Elle savait valser, celle-lk! (That woman knew how to waltz!), the last dance at the ball shows Emma just starting to cross a mental and dramatic threshold. Although she will never waltz again, she will spend the rest of her life trying to place herself in the position which she imagines the other woman occupies. Throughout the novel, Emma appropriates a freedom of choice which repeatedly unveils itself as illusory. By this time in the novel we sense that forces we only dimly perceive have shaped the story's outcome. forces of necessity which dictate Emma's choice and thus her death-wish are psychological and economic within the realities of her world. I will argue that another kind of force shaping her experience, one of a different order, is the popular motif of the dance of death, transformed and embedded by Flaubert in the novel's structures. Flaubert seems to have explored, in Madame Bovary, the way both the features and the movement of a popular motif can provide a model for understanding experi-