Madame Bovary and The Awakening: Two Women Searching for Something More Essay

Madame Bovary and The Awakening: Two Women Searching for Something More

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and The Awakening by Kate Chopin both show 18th century woman in a bored stupor, overzealously running around looking for something but not knowing what it is they are looking for. They feel immensely dissatisfied with the lives they are stuck with and find suicide to be the only alternative. The two books, Madame Bovary, written in 1857 and The Awakening, written in 1899, both contain themes of confinement and free-will. Edna and Emma are faced with a conflict between external oppression and their own free will, which eventually leads them to take their lives. Yet the works differ vastly with respect to the yearnings of the protagonists. In addition, Edna and Emma have vastly different yearnings yet similar reasons for suicide.

Ednas and Emmas yearnings are extremely dissimilar, if not opposite. Edna yearns for an uncontrolled lifestyle because her current lifestyle leaves her feeling like a possession. She desires to find something beyond the life of a housewife; and she fights to do as she wishes. Her moving into the Pigeon house, shedding her layers of binding clothing, and having affairs with Robert and Arobin are Ednas attempts at struggling against this confinement. Emma, on the other hand, wants to indulge in what Edna fights against: she wants to be owned and attempts to achieve self-fulfillment through romantic attachments, whereas Edna wants to break away from all attachment, particularly from men.

References to "fate" are found throughout both works. In The Awakening, Chopin uses fate to represent the expectations of Edna Pontellier's aristocratic society: a woman in that society is destined to live the life of a society woman until she dies. Flaubert uses "fate" to portray Emmas methods of dealing with their guilt and rejection of their responsibility. Both authors seem to believe that it is fate that oppresses these women. Chopin and Flaubert view their protagonists subjectively, as if they were products of their environments. Chopin portrays Edna as an object, and she receives only the same respect as a possession. Edna's husband sees her as and looks, "...at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage." (P 2 : The Awakening) Edna sees her position as a possession as an inevitable by-product of marriage, and at one point declares that, "...a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth." (P 66 : The Awakening). She sees their lifetime pledge to fidelity and love as merely a social trap; and it is these forces that bind and oppress her. Similarly, Emma is horrified to find that her marriage does not bring her the amorous bliss she anticipated, and soon finds herself wondering Why did I ever get married? (P 34: Madame Bovary)

Edna finds "A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, - the light which, showing the way, forbids it." (P 13 : The Awakening) As she explores her world, swimming, and her other romantic pursuits, she experiences her epiphany; she finds that the world has much too offer and kills herself in the lamentation of that which she cannot have. Edna finds herself filled with "an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness...She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken." (P 6 : The Awakening) Edna takes an active part in finding happiness within her world. She abandons her home in New Orleans relocates to a new apartment. Edna takes up swimming and painting in assertion of her independence, unlike Emma Bovary, who seeks self-validation by finding a man who can live up to her unrealistic ideals.

Contrastingly, Emma Bovary experiences her epiphany before she resigns herself to suicide. When Emmas moral turpitude has spun a web of affairs from which she cannot disentangle herself, she realizes the futility of her position and she takes the arsenic. Her light of discovery is found only in the darkness of her death. She does not lament her lack of freedom and independence (as Edna does), but what happiness her world does not give her. Hers is a story of emptiness and foolish idealism. "...Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words bliss, passion, ecstasy, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books." (P 24 : Madame Bovary) Unable to find these fairy-tale ideals in her own life, Emma is at times unable to cope with the monotony of reality. Emma takes Charles for granted as "she would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock." (P 44: Madame Bovary). Flaubert allows her to see Charles as an object just as Mr. Pontellier sees Edna as an object.

Edna and Emma both use people when needed, and are discarded when they have outlived their usefulness: "Charles was someone to talk to, an ever-open ear, an ever-ready approbation." Perhaps it is because of her antagonistic nature that, "She would open his letters, spy on his whereabouts, and listen behind the partition when there were women in his consulting room." (P 35 : Madame Bovary) It is ironic that she would do these things, as she is the adulterer, searching to assure herself that he is not doing the same harm to her which she is doing to him. Both women indulge in new findings on their paths to self-discovery, and subjectively fall into their desires. Though Edna never consummated her affair with Robert, it is notable that both Chopin and Flaubert seem to make the point that once a woman has married, the choice to commit adultery is their only means of exercising power over her destiny. While men have access to wealth and property, the only currency women in those times possessed to influence others is her body. Emma finally discovers that her feelings are as empty as her desires and that her desires are as empty as her relationships, which are based on her use of this sexual currency.

The Awakening and Madame Bovary have protagonist dealing with similar circumstances in similar times, but differ distinctly in the authors' tones and how the female protagonists reject these circumstances. Two 18th century women are subjected to situations where they feel oppressed and constrained. They explore extramarital affairs and abandon their duties as society women. At the ends, they die at their own hands. Chopin sees her protagonist in the in a sympathetic light. Flaubert is arguably less sympathetic to his protagonist: by the end of Madame Bovary Emma has been used and abused by too many men to name, and finds suicide to be the only escape from her s his tone is apparent in his commentary.

Word Count: 1,150