Essay on Lacanian Desire: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

Unconscious sexual drives are the most powerful behaviours of mankind. Libido, colloquially known as sex drive, drastically affects one’s thoughts and actions and leads to abnormal behavioural consequences. Guy de Maupassant’s “Was It a Dream?” is about a man who spends all his spare time mourning over his lover’s grave. The story reveals the adverse psychological relationship to sexuality, as the man’s actions are molded by his affection towards his lover. Hence, sexual drives lead to an unconscious mind and results in displacement of love as it is a powerful and pleasurable tool that all human beings desire.

The human mind is a complex place filled with a variety of thoughts and desires. One may hide the deepest

Frankfurt suggests that desiring something often relates to only a specific moment or something that benefits oneself. He uses the example of a person who has free time and decides

Set in the Victorian era of the 1800’s Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert exemplifies society’s views on the established gender roles of this time. Flaubert utilizes Emma Bovary’s masculinity to accentuate Emma’s desire for control. Her desire for control extends from the social pressure of the period, revealing her envy towards men. Flaubert undoubtedly depicts Emma’s characteristics to have a masculine undertone and throughout the novel her femininity deviates as her priority shifts. Emma’s lack of femininity translates to her relationships by maneuvering an interchanging role of a girlfriend or boyfriend.

We come into this world wanting things that are not ours, and things we do not deserve.

It seems quaint to a viewer in 2012 to consider that François Boucher's paintings were, by some of the artist's contemporary critics, viewed as pornographic. For those of us who live in the era of internet pornography, nothing could seem more quaintly innocent than Boucher's eroticized rococo. The twenty-first century viewer faces Boucher quizzically: we are left wondering how Boucher's work could have defined an artistic school and moment so completely, and also earned such opprobrium not only from his contemporaries but from subsequent generations. The simple answer although it would hardly appear obvious from Boucher's work is politics. Contemporary and subsequent response to Boucher's work is defined by a response to his powerful patrons. Melissa Hyde sees Boucher's work almost as a collaboration with that of his powerful patroness, and notes that Boucher would serve as tutor to Madame de Pompadour, and eventually received the highest honors that a painter could attain in his time, by becoming officially "premier peintre du roi" (the king's first painter) and the director of the French Academy. This paper suggests that we may look in Boucher's use of classical motifs through his repeated depictions of the goddess Venus and understand an implicitly political ideology even in so unlikely a place as the eroticized frippery of the rococo. What may seem like vaguely classical decorative art in Boucher may be understood as implicitly offering an ideological stance: in some

Whether it is hope for a better position in society, or hope for a lover's companionship, the attachment to desire ignores the eventual reality of impermanence. Death assures our mandatory individuality. Though we may accumulate relationships and material possessions throughout the course of our earthly life, we are nonetheless subordinate to the limits of time.

In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, it is difficult to know what to think of Monsieur Binet and his lathe. His constant devotion to such an unrewarding pursuit would seem to act as the bourgeois backdrop to Emma Bovary’s quest for eternal passion and excitement, a polar opposite with which Emma can stand in sharp contrast. However, it turns out that Binet and his lathe have more in common with Emma and her rampant desires than what would first appear obvious. Binet’s lathe still serves as a background with which to compare Emma’s quest for love and riches, but instead of acting as a complete antithesis to everything she does, the lathe is meant to be subtly different

Written by Gustave Flaubert and published in 1856, Madame Bovary tells a story about the life and death of Emma Bovary, a middle class woman living in mid-nineteenth century France. This novel is known as one of the best examples of literary realism ever written, and for good reason. Through his writing and attention to detail, Flaubert does an excellent job of giving the reader an idea of just how mundane everyday life was like in France during the mid-nineteenth century. Through the various characters in the novel, Flaubert is also able to portray many positive and negative characteristics he saw in the people living during this time. Of the many different characteristics and ideas that Flaubert uses to describe characters throughout the novel, I think that the many aspects he saw in the bourgeoisie class and materialism are uniquely important. I believe that the ways Flaubert uses the ideas and issues of materialism and similar principles he saw in the bourgeoisie to tell the story of Madame Bovary, to criticize the bourgeoisie, as well as show how harmful and destructive he believed these issues could be to a society.

The middle class in France during the early 1800s, otherwise known as the Bourgeoisie, was defined by capitalistic views and business-minded outlooks. However, many people of this era, including author Gustave Flaubert, were highly critical of this middle class. In Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, the character Homais represents the ideas and spirit of the Bourgeoisie. Because of his dissatisfaction with the middle class, the author gives Homais several negative character traits, such as selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy. Flaubert’s criticism of the egotistical and corrupt nature of Homais is evident during the procedure on Hippolyte and the argument between Homais and the priest; Homais’ triumph at the end of the novel suggests that Flaubert is also critical of the outcome of the pharmacist’s actions, not just the actions themselves.

An exploration of Oscar Wilde's presentation of women in 'A Woman of No Importance' in comparison to John Fowles' views of women in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', in light of the view that Oscar Wilde has a more sympathetic view of woman in his time.

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

Madame Bovary is a novel by author Gustave Flaubert in which one woman’s provincial bourgeois life becomes an expansive commentary on class, gender, and social roles in nineteenth-century France. Emma Bovary is the novel’s eponymous antiheroine who uses deviant behavior and willful acts of indiscretion to reject a lifestyle imposed upon her by an oppressive patriarchal society. Madame Bovary’s struggle to circumvent and overthrow social roles reflects both a cultural and an existential critique of gender and class boundaries, and her unwillingness to tolerate the banalities of domestic life in a predetermined caste culminates in several distinct means of defiance. Emma Bovary exploits traditional cultural values such as marriage,

    Often in literature, a character is found that is quite memorable. Never was this more true than in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. To some, Emma Bovary's action at the end of the novel was drastic and unnecessary; others believed her death to be the end of the natural progression of the story. However, Emma's decision to commit suicide was relatively simple, yet came as a last resort. She had exhausted all the other options she felt were available, and in the end made her plan based on finances, lost love, and the sheer boredom of her life.

The food served was not as grand as the dishes that would be present at a high-class banquet; however, it was still sophisticated enough that the food was relatively unavailable for the lower class to be able to afford. This allows for the Bovary’s to have an air of aristocracy that masked their middle class reality. Moreover, although living comfortably, the actions of those in the middle class are still considered very basic; many of the bourgeoisie had lackluster table manners. Frustrated with Charles’ eating habits, Emma describes him “to be getting coarser in his ways;... after meals, he used to suck his teeth; eating his soup, he made a gurgling noise with every mouthful” (58). Such behaviour would be unheard of in the higher class, but to Emma, this was her unfavourable reality. Through this portrayal, she reveals her dissatisfaction with the behaviour of her own middle-class lifestyle. Furthermore, Emma’s constant sophisticated desires are incomprehensible by the rest of the middle class as the elder Madame Bovary “found her style too grand for her situation” (40). Emma views herself more as an aristocrat than a bourgeoisie, hence attempting to boast her seemingly more refined characteristics. Hoping to escape the mundane middle class, the bourgeoisie pine after the luxurious life of an aristocrat.