Literature and Boredom

Emma Bovary, the main character in Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, shocked many when the novel was first published in 1857. She was a woman who lived in a society that was repressive and particularly so toward women. Emma did not fit easily into such a society because she had a romantic nature, one which was nurtured by her daydreams and her desire for excitement and change. In her world, a woman is expected to marry and then to subsume herself to the life of her husband, in essence disappearing into marriage and no longer being thought of as an individual even to the slight extent that she may have been before marriage. Emma, however, has been spoiled by the romantic notions she has acquired from romance novels she first read to escape the boredom of the

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e character in "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville is fascinating because he is so unformed as a character. Bartleby is a man who withdraws from life. He does not do so as a protect, and indeed a protest would have to be an overt act of the sort quite out of character for him. His prison is entirely internalized. He creates his own prison, though the fear on the part of his boss is that perhaps Bartleby sees more than the rest of us and has lost hope because he knows that we are all in some sort of prison. The story of Bartleby is ambiguous because we see his life entirely from the outside, never hearing anything in Bartleby's own voice except the repeated, "I would prefer not to." Our view of Bartleby is through the eyes of his puzzled employer, a man who wants desperately to understand but who ultimately is left as uncertain as we. The narrator of the story is a lawyer on Wall Street in New York City. He stands as an important contrast to Bartleby and as the average man working in the business world of the day who is confronted with a puzzle in the form of an employee whose strange behavior is disconcerting precisely because it does not fit the image of his position as clerk. It is most unusual for a clerk to re
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Approximate Word count = 2784
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)