Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen and Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

In eighteenth century which feminist in social status was not popular by that time, author can only through literature to express her thought and discontented about society. Jane Austen’s Emma advocates a concept about the equality of men and women. Also satirizes women would depend on marriage in exchange to make a living or money in that era. By the effect of society bourgeois, Emma has little self-arrogant. She is a middle class that everyone could admire, “Young, pretty, rich and clever”, she has whatever she needs. She disdains to have friends with lower levels. However, she is soon reach satisfaction with matchmaking for her friend. Story characterizes a distorted society images and the superiority of higher class status. It

Literature is the window to realizing the negatives of society and how destructive certain norms can be. Readers are brought into a completely different story than their own, but by using similar issues in today’s world, the readers can actually learn from the story and its overall message. All writers write for a purpose, whether it’s for a new meaning to life, to live a different life than our own, or to impact others on an emotional level by teaching them to see the importance of the little things. As a reader, you search for pieces of literature that interest you whether you find the story like your own, or wish you lived the life in the story. By using issues in today’s within their works, authors are able to grab the reader's attention long enough for them to get across what they wanted to get across. Often in many works of literature, writers use societal issues as their basis for the work’s themes and symbols. By doing so, this allows the reader to question the morality behind social norms and how impactful certain ideals can be in people’s lives.

In Madame Bovary, Emma creates conspicuous goals based off romantic novels she reads. In reaching her goals, she requires a level of

Women roles have drastically changed since the late 18th and early 19th century. During this time, women did not have the freedom to voice their opinions and be themselves. Today women don’t even have to worry about the rules and limitations like the women had to in this era. Edna in “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin and Nora in “A Doll House” by Henrik Ibsen were analogous protagonists. The trials they faced were also very similar. Edna and Nora were both faced with the fact that they face a repressive husband whom they both find and exit strategy for. For Nora this involved abandoning her family and running away, while Edna takes the option that Nora could not do-committing suicide. These distinct texts both show how women were forced to

     I’ve chosen this statement for several reasons. Ibsen’s character, Hedda Gabler, represents the women of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Hedda stands the issues of self-worth and the deflated value that each woman places upon her own importance as a result of male dominance.

Hedda Gabler is a play in which the author, Henrik Ibsen, demonstrates the heavy shackles of society and the burden it impinges on women through the words and actions of the protagonist, Hedda Tesman. Hedda is a woman living for her own pleasure. At twenty-nine-years-old and having been recently married, she is under enthused with her surroundings and yearns for titillating experiences. Obsessed with the aesthetics of the world, she wants to lead a poetic life filled with lust and luxury, yet is too frightened by what her Victorian values deem proper, to do so. Ibsen constructed a brilliant character that simultaneously arouses both sympathy and scorn from the reader through Hedda’s own words and actions.

I have chosen to look at the way we approach living life. You can look at the glass as half empty or half full. Your choice will determine how you look at things. In Hedda Gabler, I think that her approach to living life was looking at the glass as half empty. She was negative about everything and she was also a very manipulating, ungrateful, crazy woman. I wish I got to go on a 6 month honeymoon like she did!! She didn’t seem to appreciate her long honeymoon. Not many people get a 6 month honeymoon. Hedda looked at suicide as a beautiful thing and that is not having a positive look on life. She was unhappy in her marriage. Her husband’s love wasn’t enough for her. She only married him because she felt it was her best option. I don’t know how you can live your life being married to someone who you don’t love.

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert shapes Emma, the protagonist, into a woman who deceives herself, through romantic novels, into believing her life is better than it actually is. Emma—like most things in her life—romanticized what marriage would do for her. At the start of her marriage to Charles, she believed marriage would be the means at which she transitioned from a farm girl to a wealthy woman. She believed that marriage would bring her all she had longed for. However, her marriage to Charles is opposite to that. Thus, she is constantly searching for something or someone to satisfy her. She spends majority of the novel aspiring to be a part of the upper

In Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen portrays the hopeless struggle of woman in the Victorian era through the protagonist, Hedda. From 1837 to 1901 in England, women experienced unrestrained oppression, were expected to follow the orders of their husbands, and were believed to be unwise. In the play, the newly wed Hedda has just arrived to her new husband, Tesmun’s home town, and her whole world seems to be shrinking inch by inch, expressed mainly through elements of stagecraft. The play is mostly focused around the main character, Hedda, a tragic heroine. Her need to manipulate others grows ever stronger as her boredom and despair increase, due to the new middle class atmosphere she is forced into. At last, she frees herself from all of the social restrictions society has imposed on her, by completing the act of suicide. Through the characterization of Hedda, Ibsen explores the oppression of woman in the Victorian Era.

In Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary, Emma Bovary is unknowingly a slave to her desires. Emma is so infatuated with the thought of falling in love that it causes her to experience many problems in every aspect of her life. For example, Emma is married to Charles Bovary, however, she is not particularly in love with him. Most people get married because they are in love with each other and want to spend the rest of their lives together. Nevertheless, the thought of spending the

In the 18th century, European society put an emphasis on social standing; each social class was expected to act differently, thus affecting the way one would get treated and the amount of opportunities available to them. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, food imagery and the way each character acts towards food reveals the distinctions between the various social classes and, more importantly, the mediocrity of the French bourgeoisie. However, Flaubert chooses not to focus on all of the social classes, but solely on the characteristics and mannerisms surrounding the middle and the high classes. Revolving the novel around middle-classed characters who represent the middle class, Flaubert criticizes the bourgeoisie through their desire to escape

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler introduces its audience to a paradoxical protagonist, Hedda Tesman. Ibsen’s delineation of Hedda presents her as a petty and frivolous woman whose sole motivation is to seek her own amusement with no regard to those around her. If some tragedy had befallen Hedda in her formative years and thus shaped her into the cold, callous woman she would become, Ibsen purposely omits this from this play: whatever judgment the audience might make of Hedda as a character must derive almost exclusively from the behaviors she exhibits in each of the work’s four acts. Ibsen does not intend for his audience to readily sympathize with Hedda. By not endearing Hedda to his audience, the subject of her suicide in the final act is

    Hedda Gabler is perhaps one of the most interesting characters in Ibsen.  She has been the object of psychological analysis since her creation.  She is an interesting case indeed, for to "explain" Hedda one must rely on the hints Ibsen gives us from her past and the lines of dialogue that reveal the type of person she is.  The reader never views Hedda directly.  We never get a soliloquy in which she bares her heart and motives to the audience.  Hedda is as indifferent to our analysis as she is to Tesman's excitement over his slippers when she says "I really don't care about it" (Ibsen  8).  But a good psychologist knows that even this indifference is telling.  Underneath the ennui and indifference

This image and atmosphere of mundane imperfection is a far cry from what Emma expects after reading the romantic novels she smuggled in at the convent. From those foppish texts she gathers the impression that ladies such as she should be “lolling on carriages” or “dreaming on sofas,” or perhaps embracing some dashing “young man in a short cloak” (Flaubert 32). Yet such is not the reality in which she lives.

This essay focuses on Ibsen’s way of representing women, it explains why does he represent them in that specific particular way and how the time, era and context he lived in affected this aim.