Boredom is often the subject of literature as writers try to depict the way certain people may view the world and find it wanting. The trick is to write about boredom without being boring, and both Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary and Herman Melville with "Bartleby the Scrivener" show that this can be done. Each has written a story about a central character who is bored with life, and yet each of these characters is brought to life by the writer in a way that creates a fascinating and even frightening portrait of the consequences boredom may have. Each writer uses his central character and the motif of boredom to comment upon his respective society and how that society stifles those who are most sensitive.
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 convent. She is an example of someone who lives with an illusion about life and is disappointed to find that the illusion is not the same as the reality. For such a character, the social conditions that define her and give her a place in the world also produce boredom. A woman in her time had to define herself and shape her life around men, for a woman on her own is suspect. In Emma's case, her boredom also derives from the fact that she seeks solace in roma...