Madame Bovary Essay

1. Madame Bovary Essay
The confinement of females under mental and physical distress is the central theme in Gustave
Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Wilkie Collins The Woman in White. Flaubert's Emma Bovary is a
narcissist whose self–induced obsession with literature restricts her from having a happy fulfilling
life, as nothing compares to the excitement and adventures she reads in her novels. While the plot of
Wilkie Collins The Woman in White depicts two women incarcerated against their will in a private
mental institution. These private asylums proliferated in the mid nineteenth–century as alternatives
to the established large–scale public hospitals/asylums. This assignment will compare and contrast
the methods used by both authors to define confinement, including...show more content...
Indeed, Emma is a narcissist who is dying in her own solitary world. Her father takes the earliest
opportunity to marry her off to a doctor for his own pecuniary measures, as the narrative states,
'Pere Rouault would not have been vexed to have his daughter off his hands, for she was hardly any
use to him in the house' (p, 23). Emma's long process of dying endures throughout her life, but
nothing she does matches the 'felicity, passion and rapture' (33) she reads about in her novels.
Emma's disappointments arise from her frustration to aspire to a more refined and sophisticated class
than the one she actually is. Furthermore, the fairy–tale ending she thought would come through her
marriage does not transpire, instead, all sense of her own individuality disappeared and society
expected her to act in a certain way. Emma does not appreciate the love she has around her and she
is constantly discontented, 'Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him'
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