Free Essays on Madame Bovary

A Critical Analysis of the Character â€Å"Madame Bovary† Of the Novel Madame Bovary By Gustave Flaubert The character of Madame Bovary consists of many different components. At first Emma Bovary seems content and unassuming. She doesn’t question anything done, and is very easy to please. As the first nine chapters progress, Emma grows uneasy and upset. She stops taking care of her house and home, leaving her husband to wonder what the problem is. After she witnesses the lavish lifestyle that is completely different from her own, in anger, Madame Bovary loses all love and respect for herself, her husband, her home, and slowly descends into a deep depression. When Monsieur Bovary first met Emma Rouault she was living and taking care of her sick father in Les Bertaux. She loved her father and worked hard to take care of him and their house. Emma Rouault also had a confidence about herself, â€Å" . . . she had an open gaze that met yours with fearless candor† (Flaubert, 858). This openness attracted the then married Monsieur Bovary. He had never encountered a woman like her before, and he spent time with her even after he was done taking care of her father, â€Å" . . . he went back the very next day, then twice a week regularly, not to mention unscheduled calls he made from time to time, as though by chance† (859). After Monsieur Bovary’ wife dies, he takes Emma as his wife and she moves with him to Tostes. After the couple is married, Madame Bovary finds happiness in her home, but slowly she grows discontent, â€Å"But even as they were brought closer by the details of daily life, she was separated from by a growing sense of inward detachment† (874). Madame Bovary felt Charles was very boring and very plain and the married life was nothing like what she expected. Charles didn’t understand his wife’s feelings and that separated them even more â€Å"He took it for granted that she was content; and she res... Free Essays on Madame Bovary Free Essays on Madame Bovary A Critical Analysis of the Character â€Å"Madame Bovary† Of the Novel Madame Bovary By Gustave Flaubert The character of Madame Bovary consists of many different components. At first Emma Bovary seems content and unassuming. She doesn’t question anything done, and is very easy to please. As the first nine chapters progress, Emma grows uneasy and upset. She stops taking care of her house and home, leaving her husband to wonder what the problem is. After she witnesses the lavish lifestyle that is completely different from her own, in anger, Madame Bovary loses all love and respect for herself, her husband, her home, and slowly descends into a deep depression. When Monsieur Bovary first met Emma Rouault she was living and taking care of her sick father in Les Bertaux. She loved her father and worked hard to take care of him and their house. Emma Rouault also had a confidence about herself, â€Å" . . . she had an open gaze that met yours with fearless candor† (Flaubert, 858). This openness attracted the then married Monsieur Bovary. He had never encountered a woman like her before, and he spent time with her even after he was done taking care of her father, â€Å" . . . he went back the very next day, then twice a week regularly, not to mention unscheduled calls he made from time to time, as though by chance† (859). After Monsieur Bovary’ wife dies, he takes Emma as his wife and she moves with him to Tostes. After the couple is married, Madame Bovary finds happiness in her home, but slowly she grows discontent, â€Å"But even as they were brought closer by the details of daily life, she was separated from by a growing sense of inward detachment† (874). Madame Bovary felt Charles was very boring and very plain and the married life was nothing like what she expected. Charles didn’t understand his wife’s feelings and that separated them even more â€Å"He took it for granted that she was content; and she res... Free Essays on Madame Bovary Let’s be Real According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term realism can be defined as, â€Å"an inclination or attachment to what is real; tendency to regard things as they really are; any view or system contrasted with idealism.† In literature, realism is an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity. It is most often associated with the literary movement arising in France during the nineteenth century; primarily, it is a reaction against Romanticism’s idealism and subjectivity. The French writer Gustave Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy from Russia are examples of Realist writers. Realists wanted a true representation in literature of reality of contemporary life and manners (Lawall 837). In order for Realist writers to be objective, â€Å"the personality of the author was to be suppressed or was at least to recede into the background, since reality was to be seen ‘as is’†(Lawall 837). For that reason, realism has been ch iefly preoccupied with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle classes. Characters were no longer represented as heroes or mythological figures; instead, they had the traits of ordinary, middle class people. In addition, themes in realist literature are mundane and ugly such as prostitution, political corruption, and poverty. Written by Gustave Flaubert during the 1850s, the novel Madame Bovary is an example of realist literature. Through character, plot and style, Flaubert emphasizes several realist values and sensibilities. In the novel, the protagonist, Charles Bovary’s wife, Emma Bovary, is trapped inside the life that she lives along her husband because she is obsessed with the idealized vision of romantic love. In the end of the novel, Emma Bovary’s stress led her to commit suicide. Eckardt 2 One way that Flaubert asserts Realist values in Madame Bovary is through Charles Bovary’s character. Charles is a real character with simple desi... Free Essays on Madame Bovary Madame Bovary â€Å"The tragic flaws of Madame Bovary† Bovarysme is a psychological condition in which one deludes themselves into what they are, and to what is life’s potential for them. And bovaryistic is an appropriate adjective to use when discussing Emma Bovary, the main character in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Emma’s story is one of a woman, dissatisfied with her marriage that turns to other men for affairs, goes into debt, and eventually commits suicide. On the surface, this novel appears very simple yet ceases to be when one considers exactly why Emma behaved the way she did in Madame Bovary. Her tragic flaw was bovarysme but Emma behaved the way she did for several separate but connecting issues: she was a victim of her own romantic ideals, she lived during the ‘bourgeois century’, and her simply being a women. Emma fell victim to her own romanticism at a very young age. She was raised in a convent and her only ideas of love and marriage were from what she learned while reading her romantic novels. The problem with her reading these romantic novels is that because she had led a very sheltered existence up to this point, she had no idea how false those ideals where. Those novels, to Emma, brought about a basic false understanding of the world. Her expectations for life were too high and she did not know her own feelings, but merely those that she had read about in her stories. The first example of this is Emma’s marriage to Charles Bovary. Emma goes into the marriage with very high expectations, but is soon disappointed in her marriage from the very beginning. Emma shows her dramatic and romantic flair when deciding on how the marriage ceremony should go. â€Å"Emma would, on the contrary, have preferred to have a midnight wedding with torches, but old Rouault could not unde rstand such an idea† (17). This begins the pattern of what would continue for the rest of the novel. Emma dre... Free Essays on Madame Bovary As a young man, Flaubert was well aware of incompetence in the medical profession, and the middle class ‘lip service’, which her portrayed through Homais in Madame Bovary, and began to despise the mendacity of middle class all the more as he embraced the writings the likes of Rousseau, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. In Madame Bovary, Emma has a certain romantic aspect similar to Flaubert that is a longing for things to be perfect. This perfectionism was arguably an obsession for Flaubert as evidenced by the meticulous care and time he took to write this work. In college, Flaubert fell victim to excessive romantic ideals, such as those portrayed in Emma and had a failed marriage with an older woman. His personal attitudes about love are portrayed though Emma. After his divorce, he engaged in a relationship with the poetess Louise Colet that was mainly based on letter writing, just as Emma’s affairs with Rodolphe and Leon rely very much on written correspond ence. This relationship with Miss Colet, in which the two saw each other only six times in the first two years, illustrates clearly the fact that Flaubert, like Emma Bovary, liked the idea of having a lover more than actually having one. In 1844, after developing a nervous disorder that required him to retire to his family estate, Through the isolation and boredom of this provincial life that Emma Bovary was created not only as a representation of Flaubert’s romantic longings, but as a universal example of a woman bored with a mediocre life. He created a type of character, not a specific individual. He claimed that Emma Bovary was â€Å"suffering and weeping at this very moment in twenty villages in France†. Flaubert is quoted as having said â€Å"Madame Bovary c’est moi†, â€Å"I am Madame Bovary†, meaning that he, himself was possessed the same romantic traits as Emma. Part of the character Emma Bovary, is also based off the true story of Eu gene Delemare, who was ...