Examines the gender related quest of the character Emma in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
This paper considers the ways in which Emma of Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” is a tragic feminist figure because she vainly strives to be a man. The paper goes on to explain how Emma is a woman in a patriarchal community where women’s roles were restricted and any offense against the prevailing order is disciplined so that only female offenders are punished, while male offenders are free. The paper shows how Emma attempts to overcome the constrictions patriarchy has placed upon her by attempting to embrace the male world and enter into it herself.
Like Emma, women of nineteenth_century France were, under the Napoleonic Code Civil, considered minors and were relegated to the protection and authority of their male kin. The Code Civil indicated that marriage was not a spiritual union, but a legal contract in which the husband’s authority was privileged. No divorce was allowed women between 1816 and 1884, and women were not given opportunities for secondary education before 1880. Since women’s roles were seen primarily in terms of motherhood and marriage, the education which was allowed women often stressed morals rather than critical thinking or analysis. Women were taught that they were less than men and thus not suited for the public life or professional opportunities from which they were excluded (Gans, 1989). Emma, for example, attends convent school where she is taught to look to fiction ideals and to marriage as means of self-fulfillment. Of course, exclusion from the outside world rendered women economically dependant. Women were thus seen primarily as decorative and as possessions (Gans, 1989).