Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary

Women in the early Victorian Era were very limited in their individualism as they were expected to conform to societal norms. The narrator craves freedom from the society she lives in, dreaming of having a room "downstairs that opened on the piazza and [has] roses all over the window." (Gilman 3) The narrator wants nothing more than to be able to express herself, yet she is held back as she reveals that "John would not hear of it." (Gilman 3) She knows her place is not to question her husband, so she finds other creative outlets that she keeps secret. She knows that these outlets of creativity are found, she risks her husband’s reputation as she would disrespect him. Throughout the narrative, the heroine acknowledges the importance of status in society. Even when her madness drives her to contemplate committing suicide, she says, “I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.” (Gilman 15) Even in the most stressful times, it is the fear of ruining her husband’s reputation that keeps her from obtaining what she wants. Finally, the narrator breaks free of her confinement by tearing off the wallpaper, saying, "I've got out at

In a novel overflowing with misconstrued romance, “Emma” by Jane Austen succeeds in misleading the readers, as well as the actual characters on the matter of who is really in love with whom. Although it is teeming with romantic dialogue, the characters have a tendency to misunderstand confessions of love, as well as comments made in passing concerning the secret feelings of others. Through forms of narration and dialogue, Jane Austen forces the reader to interpret these subtexts and draw conclusions concerning the actual romantic intensions of her complex characters, while also deceiving readers on an adventure of romantic deception.

Flaubert depicts Emma as having subtle masculine characteristics emphasizing her masculinity not only mentally but physically as well. In some cases, Flaubert uses irony to characterize Emma’s masculine features. “Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles; besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines” (Flaubert 28) the narrator describes Emma as lacking the soft subtle femininity that high-class women have. The contrast of her beauty lessens her femininity in this case making her appear more tusk and masculine. Emma’s femininity gets challenged on the pivotal day of the Victorian women’s life. When the narrator describes her on her wedding day, “Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistledown” (Flaubert 18-19). On her wedding day, Emma’s description walking down the aisle diffidently wearing a dirty unfitted dress metaphorically portrays Emma

The female characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Zenobia and Priscilla, differ in their representations of womanhood. Zenobia begins as an independent character, whom later surrenders to Hollingsworth's control, whereas Priscilla is ever submissive to his desires. This determines how the male characters, Coverdale and Hollingsworth, view both women. Coverdale and Hollingsworth are first enamored by Zenobia's charm, but both fall for Priscilla's docility. Zenobia represents female independence and Priscilla embodies feminine subservience; the triumph of Priscilla casts the male vote in this novel unanimously

Emma, a novel by Jane Austen, is the story of a young woman, Emma, who is rich, stubborn, conniving, and occupies her time meddling into others' business. There are several recurring themes throughout the novel; the ideas of marriage, social class, women's confinement, and the power of imagination to blind the one from the truth, which all become delineated and reach a climax during the trip to Box Hill. The scene at Box Hill exposes many underlying emotions that have been built up throughout the novel, and sets the stage for the events that conclude it.

Though at first glance, Emma appears to be a generic romantic novel about virtue and ladyhood, Austen actually challenges what the meaning of “ladyhood” is to the reader. We view Emma’s follies, trials, and triumphs through the eyes of the omnipotent narrator who first describes Emma as a stereotypical, wealthy young lady who is “handsome, clever…with…a happy disposition” (1). Through the use of irony, Austen employs a series of situations in which Emma, a “lady” of high standing within her community, challenges conventional thinking of what it means to be a young woman in the early nineteenth century, particularly her ideas concerning marriage and

In this one sentence Flaubert not only gives example of how the works are repetitive, with similar plots, and dying horses "on every page," but he also manages to capture the clichéd, melodramatic style of romance novels that makes them all seem the same. The repetitiveness extends into real life as well, as Emma’s love affairs constantly lose their fire and begin to become routine, or, as Rodolphe notes, "the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, expose[s] only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language (154).

With each letter in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos advances a great many games of chess being played simultaneously. In each, the pieces—women of the eighteenth-century Parisian aristocracy—are tossed about mercilessly but with great precision on the part of the author. One is a pawn: a convent girl pulled out of a world of simplicity and offered as an entree to a public impossible to sate; another is a queen: a calculating monument to debauchery with fissures from a struggle with true love. By examining their similarities and differences, Laclos explores women’s constitutions in a world that promises ruin for even the most formidable among them. Presenting the reader glimpses of femininity from a young innocent’s daunting debut to a faithful woman’s conflicted quest for heavenly virtue to another’s ruthless pursuit of vengeance and earthly pleasures, he insinuates the harrowing journey undertaken by every girl as she is forced to make a name for herself as a woman amongst the tumult of a community that machinates at every turn her downfall at the hands of the opposite sex. In his careful presentation of the novel’s female characters, Laclos condemns this unrelenting subjugation of women by making clear that every woman’s fate in such a society is a definitive and resounding checkmate.

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,

Of all Emma's reasons to wish for death, disappointment in life and marriage was probably the strongest contributor. She had expected her life to be like a romance novel, where everyone was happy and rich; she grew frustrated and angry when her life was ordinary. Emma wanted Charles to be her Prince Charming, not a toad. Although Charles doted on Emma, almost to the point of smothering her, she wanted more. She

(Flaubert 78), she begins her little quest to find the right man through a binge

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

the wedding. Throughout the novel Emma Bovary, Charles' wife, is trapped inside a life that

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.