Choices in Madam Bovary and Jane Eyre

During the 19th Century, women had many more limitations on their lives than they do now. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert and Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, both illustrate the types of choices that women made in response to those limitations. This paper will compare the actions and strategies adopted by Emma Bovary and Jane Eyre as they both endeavored to reach their goals within the structure of the patriarchal societies in which they lived. Specifically this paper will demonstrate how Bronte uses a woman of a basically good and optimistic nature (if a bit romantic) as an example of how much a woman may achieve within those limitations. Flaubert, on the other hand, uses a woman with much ambition, too much romanticism and not enough sense to illustrate the tragedy caused by thwarted dreams and ambitions. In other words, this comparison will be a case of sense versus (too much) sensibility.

In 1846, the year that Charlotte Bronte began Jane Eyre, she wrote to a friend of hers that

there is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman who makes her own way through life quietly, perseveringly without support of husband or brother. . .[who] retains . . . a well-regulated mind - a disposition to enjoy simple pleasures - fortitude to support inevitable pains, sympathy with the sufferings of others, and willingness to relieve want as far as her means extend (quoted in Murray, 1982, p. 160).

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l terms does she feel free to marry him. Bronte shows Jane achieving all of this within the confines and despite the limitations of a patriarchal society. Emma Bovary Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary approximately ten years later, in 1857 (Liukkonen & Pesonen, 2000, p. 1). His depiction of the choices left to an ambitious sensitive young woman is much more pessimistic. Flaubert was a perfectionist who believed in the form and the beauty and the style of the form. There was no judgement or distinction between beautiful, ugly, or worthy subject. "The Idea exists only by virtue of its form" (quoted in Liukkonen & Pesonen, 2000, p. 1). Because he was so dedicated to staying true to form and to his philosophy of realism his "nonjudgmental representation of life" (Liukkonen & Pesonen, 2000, p. 1), his story is not so optimistic. He uses Emma Bovary's character and decisions to depict the limitations of society. He does this by creating a woman who does not inspire sympathy, is a bit too sensitive and sentimental, and weak in character. Although the story is entitled, Madame Bovary, Flaubert immediately distances the reader from Emma by beginning story not with Emma, but with Charles Bovary, her husband. Additionally, he uses th

Category: Literature - C