Questions About Women and Femininity

1. Emma’s concept of the ideal woman (which she strives to be) differs from that of the society around her. What do each of
these images of womanhood look like?
2. Emma is continuously frustrated by her powerless position as a married woman, and wishes for a son. Do you think she
would have loved a son more than she loves her daughter? Why?
3. How does Emma’s view of womanhood and femininity relate to her upbringing? Do you think her ideas would be different if
she had grown up with a mother?
4. How do the other women in the novel (Madame Homais, the elder Madame Bovary, etc.) reflect upon Flaubert’s view of
women in general?

Flaubert parallels Emma Bovary off himself: “The novel relates dispassionately the story of a young
provincial girl whose incurably romantic notions about life and passion lead her to adultery,
financial ruin, and suicide. Her yearnings are of a kind with which Flaubert himself had been all
too familiar, as is evidenced in his famous remark, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (Madame
Bovary is myself)” (Tyler).
Flaubert writes to French poet and his alleged lover, Louise Colet, when writing Madame
Bovary, “The reader will not notice, I hope, all the psychological work hidden under the form,
but he will sense its effect,” (Paris 193).
She believes she is destined for a more grandiose place in life, but because of her female, middle
class status in life, she can never achieve this

Women and Femininity

Madame Bovary deconstructs the prim, idealized vision of the perfect nineteenth century woman, simply by giving her thoughts, feelings,

and desires. Our protagonist is simultaneously the perfect woman and the nightmare woman of this period. She’s beautiful, a good

housekeeper, and on the outside seems like an obedient wife, but she’s actually an adulteress, a spendthrift, and, to be honest, frivolous.

Through the life of Emma Bovary, Flaubert attempts to show us an objective, intimate perspective on the difficulties of womanhood

during a restrictive and judgmental time period.

Chew on This
Madame Bovary deconstructs the nineteenth century notion that women should have fewer desires and ambitions than men, and suggests

instead that women’s subordinate role in society creates greater tensions between their internal and external lives.

Instead of focusing on differences between the sexes, Flaubert comments upon the ways in which women and men are similar.

In Madame Bovary, the beginning of Emma’s powerlessness began with her union to
Charles. Because of this, she resorted to other men including Rodolphe and Leon.
Charles’ mediocre existence was an embarrassment that Emma wasn’t legally able to
break free from. During the nineteenth century, the wife was expected to look after
the family and household. This feeling of emptiness and lack of power led to her
affairs with Leon and Rodolphe. She wanted to have control over people’s emotions
and desires. Her romantic involvement with Rodolphe and Leon satisfied her desire to
have influence over their decisions. With Leon, Emma felt that she has found a
kindred spirit. He served to illustrate the divergence between Emma’s dreams and her
reality. Both Leon and Emma wanted to flee to bigger and better things. However,
since Leon is a man, he was unable to actually flee to the city to fulfill his dream,
while Emma had to remain in Yonville, chained to her child and her husband. It
showed her the concept of a perfect husband unlike Charles, who made her feel
unworthy. She forces Leon to conform to her idealized concept of a lover. Emma
refuses for a long time to face reality, and the contrast between Flaubert’s objective
description of the weak, fluctuating Leon and Emma’s idealized conception of him
underlines Emma’s predicament. Rodolphe is a wealthy man with much financial
power and was able to take Emma from her current life into one she strongly desires,
but he leaves her. Being a woman, she is not capable of leaving on her own. He would
seduce her, and Emma without a clue went with it. His attraction toward Emma was
founded only on her good looks and her sensuous appeal. Thus, he had no qualms
about seducing her and later abandoning her. I was almost as if he didn’t have any
emotion, only concerned only with his own pleasures.
Emma knew that when she grew up she wanted to be wealthy and apart of the
bourgeois upper class. Charles was a doctor who earned a reasonable amount of
money, but this wasn’t enough for Emma’s desires. Emma Bovary was a middle-class
woman who could not stand the middle-class life. She spent her entire life in an
attempt to escape from this middle-class existence by dreams, love affairs, and false
pretensions. The concept of being wealthy was always appealing to Emma, so she
would spend money on things that she knew she couldn’t afford. She was bored with
her life, and because of this, she resorted to spending money; not only for herself but
for her secret lovers Rodolphe and Leon. She constantly felt the need for excitement
and could not endure the dull routine of everyday living. She dreamed of a life that
that would allow her to look for ideals and feelings greater than she was. Even though
these ideals might’ve been superficial, she was aware that feelings were greater than
those found in her middle-class surroundings. Emma would use money as an escape
route, and Lheureux managed to take advantage of her situation by convincing her to
buy new things that he new she couldn’t afford. This resulted in putting Emma and
Charles in more and more debt every time. She ended up killing herself because she
was in so much debt and she was indebted because of her extramarital love affairs.

In short, her suicide happened to be the last consequence of a chain of causes that
reached back to a first mistake: as she had too much imagination, she had mistaken
literature for life. The feeling of emptiness in Emma made her want to become more
powerful, but it didn’t actually help her in the end. All of her choices somehow
reflected her childhood dreams which negatively impacted her life in the end.
In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert deconstructs the nineteenth-century notion that
women should have fewer desires and ambitions than men and suggests instead that
women’s subordinates role in society creates tensions between their internal and
external lives. Flaubert depicts the frustrations that Emma Bovary might have felt.
Though Emma has her flaws, she is trapped with little recourse in a life that feels
wrong in her social standards. She dreams of something extraordinary that she can be
content with. Emma had always wanted a boy because she knew that men had the
freedom and strength to overcome the constraints that had always frustrated her. She
preferred the dream world rather than the real world and she adapted to the idea of a
“perfect life” by growing up in a convent. One of the biggest starts to Emma feeling
Powerless was her marriage to Charles. Because of this, she resorted to other men
including Rodolphe and Leon.

The concept of being wealthy was always appealing to Emma, and money made her
feel powerful, so she would spend it like it meant nothing. Little did she know that it
would lead to going into debt as well as her eventual death. Women in Flaubert’s day
were far more restricted than their male counterparts who were allowed to pursue
their dreams and experiment. It’s shown that women’s desires can never be fulfilled in
a society that holds them back.