Madame Bovary Essay Research Paper Madame BovaryIn

Madame Bovary Essay, Research Paper

Madame Bovary

In every society there is a middle class. They don t have the luxuries that the elite few have, but they are far from living on the streets. They are stuck in the middle. Now, maybe it s a case of Jan Brady syndrome, but very often, the middle class would like to be at the top. You get to have an exciting, romantic life, much like that of … well … Marcia. There has to be some sort of influence that makes the middle class people think that way. One such influence was the period of Romanticism. It gave ordinary Jans a glimpse into exciting life. But the only way they could realize this kind of life was through a dream. Some people tried to make this dream a reality, and they wound up worse than they started. Such was the case of Emma, in Gustave Flaubert s Madame Bovary. However, her results were tragic as she could not achieve that lifestyle she was looking for. In the 19th century, bourgeois women in France wanted to live a romantic life, as characterized by the influence of society.

Emma Bovary had a dream of living in the high society. This dream came from her love of novels, especially romance novels. During the nineteenth century, Romanticism was alive in literature and art. It displayed exciting and emotional lifestyles, as opposed to ordinary life. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel defined Romanticism as literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form. For part of Emma s youth, she lived in a Catholic convent. She was essentially shut off from the exciting world that she yearned for, so she had to find ways of amusing herself. One of these ways was through reading romance novels. Once a week at the convent, a spinster came to mend the linens. She let the girls read the books she brought with her, and Emma took an instant liking to them. She found herself lost in a dream world of romance. Emma read books by authors like Sir Walter Scott, and she identified with the girl in the castle who watched from a window as her lover came galloping on a horse. They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. (22) It is at the convent where Emma starts to believe that she can be one of them, and escape her monotonous routine. Throughout her life, Emma continued to read novels similar to these, even when she was faced with the problems of not being able to make them reality. In essence, these novels made her depressed, because she could kept indulging in her fantasy world of romance, but she could not find that in her life. She was greatly influenced by her reading, and felt that she did not belong in the middle class; she was meant for an exciting life. She even devised the idea of what her perfect husband would be: strong, handsome man with a valorous, passionate and refined nature, a poet s soul in the form of an angel… Because of Emma s need for excitement, she turned to romantic novels. It was these books that gave her the ideas that she should live an exciting life. It was these ideas that led to her downfall. Romanticism developed as a rejection to the ideas of the Enlightenment. Authors and thinkers went against the strict, rigid, and rather boring world the Enlightenment created, and displayed new interest in the individual, rather than the society. Romantic thinkers put an emphasis on emotion, love, and imagination, as well as the idealization of simpler and nobler times. What Emma did was to reject the basic ideas of the real world she lived in, just as the Romantic authors had with their stories. However, she believed these stories could become her actual life.

With these romantic ideas, Emma, as well as other bourgeois women of her time, was extremely unhappy with her life. There was a monotony about middle-class life that people wanted to escape. Emma found unhappiness in every thing that should have made her happy. It was clear even on her honeymoon, which should have been the nicest time of her life. Tostes did nothing to satisfy her desires for luxury and expense. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills. (24) This just shows a little of her annoyance with her husband, Charles. She thought he was extremely dull, and usually she didn t even see him as her husband. Charles s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and every one s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion , laughter, or thought. (25) As an ultimate showing of Emma s dislike of her life, she even showed resentment towards her daughter. For one thing, at her child s birth, she was disappointed by having a girl. Then later on, she thought, how ugly that child is. She barely makes the connection that Berthe is even hers, considering her that. Emma was not a real mother to Berthe. She abused her daughter, and hardly showed love for this object. All of these examples have been simply her dislike of her life. Women of her time must have been just as tired of the every day routine