Madame Bovary

they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives”(English Standard Version, Peter. 3:1). This excerpt illustrates wives being subjected to a patriarchal society in which they must be obedient towards their husbands. In contrast, Gaustauv Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary challenges this very notion through his brilliant description of Emma Bovary’s desire to explore life through lust. Her dull marriage with Charles Bovary had driven her to pursue other men in search of “fictional” love, which she considers to be true due to her passion of novels. In reasoning, the protagonist is seen to be entrapped in a fantasy in such that lust and materialism is equivalent to love. Her…

Three characters fall in love with Emma in the novel Madame Bovary. However, not all of them were jealous lovers. For this paper, I will consider the term jealousy to refer to intense lust driven by the impatient and aggressive sexual desire to have another person be yours. Out of all these characters, the most jealous one is Rodolphe. The least jealous is the naïve and foolish Charles, Emma’s husband. However, it seems that Charles, the least jealous lover, is most in love with Emma. Charles…

one such person in his novel Madame Bovary, which details the life of its eponymous protagonist, Emma Bovary. Emma has dreams of an exciting, romantic life, but is quickly disappointed by her marriage to an unambitious man and immovable place in the middle class. Throughout the novel, Emma’s idealistic outlook on life, also called romanticism, is undermined by the stark reality of the realistic situations she finds herself in and by other characters whose beliefs directly clash with hers. One…

demonstrates Emma’s downward spiral through her posture and movements along with those imposed on her by others. Throughout Madame Bovary, Flaubert chooses and employs Emma’s specific positioning to serve as a lucid expression of the descending entrapment of her life’s decisions. Emma’s positioning refers to any bodily movement, expression or posture. These positionings reveal her various feelings of fear, desperation, seduction, and insecurity. These feelings appear through decisions she makes,…

There are many characters that fall in love with Emma in the novel Madame Bovary. Out of all these characters, the most jealous one is Rodolphe. The least jealous is the naïve and foolish Charles, Emma’s husband. However, it seems that Charles, who happens to be the least jealous one is also most in love with Emma. This is shown by the fact that he goes to great lengths to please Emma and make her happy at his own expense, regardless of Emma’s cold and destructive demeanor towards Charles.…

Who Should I be Why pink is for girls and blue for boys? Why women have to stay at home and become housewives while men have to work outside? Why female is viewed as the weak and more evil side of the two? Throughout the human histories, women are often required to fulfill certain gender roles the society set up upon them. In the novel of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, the female protagonists Tita and Emma use fervor of the youth to conform…

Both Don Quixote and Madame Bovary demonstrate how two characters’ lives are ruined by literature. Don Quixote has trouble distinguishing his reality from the chivalrous characters found in his fictional books. (Should there be a transition here?) From a young age, Madame Bovary had high expectations for her love life, buoyed by her idealistic novels, which ruined her relationships as an adult. Don Quixote and Emma Bovary both develop delusional views of the world through their readings of…

Winders, J. (1991, p.74), 'Madame Bovary is the first great modern novel. Flaubert realized his objective of writing a book about nothing,…

a subject that was intended to be agreed upon and never fought against: the right for a woman to choose her own life path. Throughout the novel Madam Bovary,…

The term “ennui” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a lack of spirit, enthusiasm, or interest” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ennui). Ennui is typically associated with boredom, general annoyance with the mundane of daily life, and in the case of literature, the eventual need to significantly improve said situation. Ennui, in many variations, is found in works such as Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy, and the poem “To the Reader” by Charles…