In a way, we might argue that Charles himself is responsible for his wife's deviations. His own mother suspects that he is not keeping his new wife in line, when she comments that she appears to be neglecting her duties around the house: "The elder Madame Bovary reproaches Charles for not forbidding his wife's novel reading" (Amann 228)
He is not the dashing, Byronic hero of whom she has read so much in her romantic novels. As Emma begins her escapades outside the marriage contract, Charles fails to notice, "since as we are told, in a rare authorial intervention, he is not the jealous type" (Anderson 126)
To the end, he loves her. But if he loves, why is not jealous? We may find the answer from Flaubert himself, when he remarks on the scene in which Leon and Madame Bovary form a bond of "constant commerce of books and of romances" while Charles, "little given to jealousy, did not trouble himself about it" (Flaubert 108)
In his only moment of romanticist fantasy, poor Charles makes the following plan for her funeral: 'He shut himself up in his consulting room, took a pen, and after a spell of sobbing, wrote: 'I want her to be buried in her wedding dress, with white shoes, and a wreath. (Nabokov 132) He is, at heart, a soul suffering under the yoke of a provincial outlook -- a worldview that sees no further than what it must: it is susceptible to outward intrusions, just as Emma intrudes upon the vision of Charles when he is already married
Katherine Kearns admits that realist fiction is an oxymoron, but she points out that although objectivity is the main concern of the writer who chooses realism for his work, there are no identical two accounts on reality since it depends on each accountant's point-of-view. Historically and geographically, realism can be traced as having originated in France, in the mid-nineteenth century (Villanueva, Theories of literary realism, p
"However, a great many of her expensive ideas she kept to herself. For example, she never said anything about her longing to have a smart blue tilbury to take her to Rouen, with an English horse and a groom in top-boots" (Flaubert)
¶ … Gulliver's Travels," "Tartuffe," "Madame Bovary," "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," & "Things Fall Apart" The purpose of this paper is to introduce, discuss, and compare how the theme(s) of "Things Fall Apart" by Achebe relate to the theme and/or storylines of "Gulliver's Travels," by Swift, "Tartuffe," by Moliere, "Madame Bovary," by Flaubert, and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by Tolstoy. All these authors use their works to "expose and alter the fundamental moral codes that determine political systems and social mores" (Levine 136)
"Yes, brother, I am wicked, I am guilty, / A miserable sinner, steeped in evil, / The greatest criminal that ever lived. Each moment of my life is stained with soilures;" (Moliere)
"Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,' it suddenly occurred to him. 'But how could that be, when I did everything properly?' he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible" (Tolstoy)
The silver dish covers reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays; bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table."(Flaubert, 42) Emma is thus certainly idealistic, a lover of the aesthetic beauty
As Lawrence Thornton explains, Emma is extremely narcissistic, and her poses in front of the mirror speak of her delight with her own image: "As Emma confronts her transfigured image in the mirror, Rodolphe becomes another of the disappearing men, his essence subsumed by Emma's vision of herself."(Thornton, 989) What Emma actually loves is not her lover, but her own image sublimated by the passion and excitement of love
. Flaubert's novel is an extraordinarily subtle dialectic between literature and sensation; the movement between the two crests a rhythm less immediately obvious but more profound that the alternation between exalted fantasies and flat realities (Bersani 24)
The obscure and distant nature of God, it seems, is really a way to handle problems of narrative situation, authority, and determinacy" (Lee 203). Pierre Bourdieu writes of this issue, "It is here, in this narrative with no beyond, in the irreconciliable diversity of its perspectives, in the universe from which the author has deleted himself but remains, like Spinoza's god, immanent and co-extensive with his creation -- it is here that we find Flaubert's point-of-view" (Bourdieu 211)
He cites Michael Riffaterre that it is a bitter laugh coming from a sudden knowledge of her fall, while Stephen Heath sees it expressing "the atrocious farce of existence" (Heath 84-85). Victor Brombert calls it a "sinister laugh" which "does not bespeak the peace of a soul about to be released from human bondage" but a laugh that "sounds much rather like a Satanic expression of scorn in the face of life's ultimate absurdity, death" (Brombert 75)
Money becomes a metaphor of forbidden sexual desire, seen later in Emma's consumerism. (Burchell 181-182) Again, two of the seven sins are thus linked, sexual desire and the love of money
Emma laughs when she senses herself suddenly outside the small world which holds her imprisoned. (Caldwell para
. Flaubert's blague superieure should have a thoroughly demoralizing effect which men would take as a correlate of their objective condition" (Culler 79)
Ideological differences have also been stark and firmly held in a nation suffused with utopian philosophical idealism. Throughout the post-Revolution era, the country has been bitterly divided between those on the Left who have favored the transfer of power to a democratic, representative, and republican legislature and who have tried to foster effective local government, individual and press freedom, and secularism, and those on the Right who have sought order, stability, and unity through a strong, autocratic, and centralized executive form of administration supported by a respected Catholic Church (Derbyshire 1-2)
Blue is used as a sign of happiness or promised happiness, such as those moments when Emma dreams of escape to rare and idealized places where love is eternal. Green is used "to reinforce the dreary social ambiance or, more generously, in other contexts as a sexual and/or Satanic allusion" (Duncan para
her voice would be clear, shrill, or, suddenly sinking into languor, linger in modulations which ended almost in a whisper, as if she were speaking to herself?-now joyfully, with wide-open, innocent eyes, now with lids half-closed, and a look of boredom, as her thoughts wandered aimlessly. (Flaubert 39) When Emma comments on the need to observe the laws of society, Rodolphe points out ways of getting around that: Yes, but one must observe the laws of society more or less, and obey its moral code