MADAME BOVARY

Feminism in Madame Bovary

Table of Contents

Introduction1

Discussion1

Feminism in Madame Bovary2

Conclusion5

References7

Feminism in Madame Bovary

Introduction

Madame Bovary contains realistic aspects and romantic aspects which oscillates the novel constantly to the gray color, which is the dull reality to the splendor of imagination. We can say that the novel has gained an in-depth personality and universality in the world of literature. Attaching great importance to aesthetics, particularly in Madame Bovary, Flaubert remains a loner, an independent artist whose work will act as a leaven literature.

Discussion

In writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert simultaneously created his best-known character, Emma Bovary. Anna Lambros praised her as a woman judged by many to be the best drawn female character in all of French literature. That Flaubert's most popular character is a woman is important since Flaubert's stance on women is questionable at best. Concerning Flaubert's attitudes toward women, critics are presented with a paradox. Flaubert held many of the same views regarding women that other men of his time did: he, like Balzac, described women as highly aesthetic objects, the property of men that sought expression as wife and mistress.

In many of his letters, Flaubert often sounds like a typical nineteenth-century misogynist, slipping into what sounds like mindless denigration of the opposite sex. He makes condescending and vulgar references in his letters to women and to sex; however, despite his stereotypical male attitudes, perhaps even because of them, Flaubert became deeply interested with questions of gender difference as they related to literature. Flaubert's concern with gender led him to create in Emma Bovary a woman who crossed typical nineteenth-century French gender distinctions. She is masculine and feminine at the same time, and there is little doubt that Flaubert mixed these traits.

Feminism in Madame Bovary

Flaubert, like his contemporary, John Stuart Mill, believed that what was then called the nature of woman was an eminently artificial thing-the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. Flaubert clearly recognized that what was commonly regarded as the principal of the opposite sex was in fact the result of a process of cultural conditioning. Flaubert realized that society had a profound effect on the nature of women, and could seemingly tell through observation that women's behavior was a result of society's conceptions of women. However, Flaubert was not necessarily a feminist or an advocate of social change for women. On the contrary, Madame Bovary aligns with many typical French beliefs of the time.

Madame Bovary fits French culture. For instance, French literary culture contained within it the novel of adultery. According to Priscilla Meyer, The novel of adultery was widespread in European literature of the nineteenth century, and its representatives naturally shared many features: notably, it is the fate of the adulteresses either to go mad or, more often, to die by disease, or in childbirth, or they are murdered. Emma certainly meets a fate that could fit into the preceding list. She commits suicide, which is messy and unpleasant, and she does not die romantically as she had ...