Madame bovary symbolism essay

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Download this Thesis in word format. In service to this " religion ," she is expected to offer her entire self.

Ultimately, although unintentionally, she quite literally gives her life in this servitude. In The Awakening, religion also plays an important role in the female self-concept.

Adele for example specifically refers to the Bible when attempting to convince Edna of the merits of self-sacrifice for husband and children. However, it is also true that Adele has no concept of the inner self and therefore experiences no sense of sacrifice when denying her own desires in favor of those her family may have.

In this way, the religious force, and particularly Christianity, serves as an oppressive power, in contrast to the force of freedom it claims to be. Religion can also be seen from a wider point-of-view when considered in terms of the authors' intention in both respective cases.

Jason Hartford for example consider Madame bovary symbolism essay in terms of Flaubert's views on Christianity. While he notes that critics have tended to use Madam Bovary as indicative of Flaubert's derision of organized Christianity at the time, Hartford also indicates that the novel was far more than simply a denial of the Christian God in favor of the author as deity.

Instead, the author holds that Flaubert addresses the realities of life for womenas imposed by the social constructs of family and religion or church as representative of faith. For women of the time, faith represented the ultimate oppressive construct.

The authority behind religion was not something that could be overthrown, which could be seen as one of the reasons why death was seen as the ultimate escape from the oppression that Edna and Emma respectively suffered. Holder-Salmon and Chopin offer a further possibility for religion in terms of Edna's development in The Awakening.

The authors note that both organized religion and the social construct of family was based on the patriarchal paradigm. Hence, for a woman to escape these constructs was to develop not only personally, but also spiritually.

For Edna, this was symbolized as descent from her material well-being to live in a cottage rather than her husband's lavish home. Here, she had the sense of spiritual development even as she obtained some freedom from the oppression of her class.

This dual oppression of class and religion is also symbolized by the construct of slavery; en element that was by exclusion part of high-class living. According to Holder-Salmon and Chopinthe domestic work provided by nursemaids, cooks, launderers and other servants were the basis of life in the Creole landscape, of which Edna could never quite be part.

The servant women then symbolize not only the oppression of the internal self, but also of the external self in terms of racial oppression. In subtle terms, Chopin then uses racism as symbolic of the invisible female self.

This self is as important to Edna as racial servitude was to the Creole lifestyle; the need to oppress it led inevitably to the destruction of the physical self in the interest of a moment of freedom prior to physical death.

Clothing is also particularly symbolic of the oppression of the female self during the time of the respective novels.

Thesis: Madame Bovary the Awakening … | 10 Pages, MLA Style

Emma's wedding gown has been mentioned above as the final irony of her oppression. Even in death, she suffered the oppression of clothing and the symbolism attached to it. The wedding gown was symbolic of premarital virginity and marital devotion to family and children. Emma was unable to escape this, despite the attempts throughout her life, and at the end of it.

The Awakening includes very detailed descriptions of the restrictive clothing of the time. According to Holder-Salmon and Chopinthe clothing were closely connected to the idea of the cage as restricting the female spirit, even as the clothing restricts the female body.

Indeed, according to the authors, the clothing was not only uncomfortable, making natural movement difficult, but could also result in severe health problems such as childbirth complications and lung disease. This relates to the symbolism of the wedding gown in Madame Bovary.

The physical form of the dress related to the destruction of spiritual oppression throughout the novel.

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Another multi-dimensional symbol of oppression in Flaubert's novel is the garden Dauner 3. As Madame Bovary, tending the garden was one of the duties expected of Emma, but for which she also had no passion.

Like the slave women in The Awakening, the garden serves as symbolic in the oppression of living entities.

The garden served to manipulate nature for the service of upper-class life. Like Edna's use of servants to help her with her household chores, Emma tended the garden only because it was expected of her by society. According to Dauner 4the image of the garden in Flaubert's novel is constructed in terms of the Indo-European meaning -- an enclosure to cultivate useful plants.

It is both fertile and productive, as a marriage is meant to be, but entirely without the freedom to grow as it pleases.Symbolism in ”Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert Essay Sample In the novel Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert displays through the use of symbolism .

In many forms of literature, authors use symbols as a representation of interpretive meaning. In Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary (), one of the major .

Flaubert Madame Bovary Realism came as a counter balance for romanticism. It came up "against all formalized and aestheticized images of things" ((Nineteenth-century . The most important modern art artworks from to Throughout Hedda Gabler and Madame Bovary death is a common motif. The use of unnatural death by Henrik Ibsen and Gustave Flaubert allows the authors to breakdown the main characters and reveal their true personalities.

Symbolism in Madame Bovary. By: Gustave Flaubert.

In the novel Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert displays through the use of symbolism the moral corruption that eventually consumes Emma’s being.