Madame Bovary Vs. The Awakening Essay -- Madame bovary Awakening Compa

Madame Bovary Vs. The change Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and The Awakening by Kate Chopin both show the life of a woman in a half-dreamy stupor, overzealously running virtuallywhat looking for something but not discriminating 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 2 books, Madame Bovary, written in 1857 and The Awakening, written in 1899, both have the theme of confinement and free-will, moreover differ vastly with respect to the yearnings of the main characters. In addition, Edna and Emma, the protagonists of Madame Bovary and The Awakening respectively, are faced with a conflict between external oppression and their own free will, which eventually leads them to take their lives. Edna and Emma have vastly different yearnings yet similar reasons for suicide. Ednas and Emmas yearnings are vastly different, if not opposite. Edna yearns for an uncontrolled lifestyle because her current lifestyle leaves her feeling like a possession. She yearns to break that commemorate she fights to do as she wishes. Her moving into the Pigeon house, shedding of layers of restrictive clothing, and having affairs with Robert and Arobin show this feeling of confinement. Emma, on the other hand, wants to indulge in what Edna fights against she wants to be owned and attempts to give self-fulfillment through romantic attachments, whereas Edna wants to break away from all attachment, especially family and society. Emmas yearnings are shown through her affairs with Leonce and Rudolphe, her unrestricted spending of money, and through her thoughts and feelings of discontent. Emma yearned to burst forth the monotony of her life she coveted sophistication, sensuality, and passion, and lapsed into extreme boredom when her life did not fit the model of what she believed it should be. Emma merged her dream world with reality without knowing it in order to survive the mon otony of her existence, while ultimately destroying her. It is not her intellect, but her capacity to dream and to wish to transform the world to fit her dreams, which sets her by from Edna. For instance, at the scene where Emma and Charles go to the La Vanbyessards chteau, Emma is awestruck by a fat, uncouth, upperclassman. At the head of the table, alone among the ladies, an old man sat round-shouldered over hi... ... never really loved her. Even the moneylender played her weakness and took advantage of her. Emma realized also that her romantic idealisms could never be fill that though a man like that may exist, she could never find him. But if somewhere there existed a strong, handsome man with valorous, passionate and milled nature, a poets soul in the form of an angel, a lyre with strings of bronze intoning elegiac nuptial songs to the heavens, why was it not possible that she might meet him some day? No, it would never happen (Flaubert 245). Emma loses all hope, and falls into a deep state of depression. Besides, nothing was worth seeking-everything was a lie Each smile hid a yawn of boredom, each joy a curse each pleasure its own disgust and the sweetest kisses only left on ones lips a hopeless appetency for a higher ecstasy (Flaubert 245). This loss of hope due to the crumbling of the foundations of her dream world and her inability to emulate the model she set for herself led to her suicide. This is similar to Edna in that Ednas inability to achieve total independence forced her to commit suicide rather than be forced to live in such a world of tyranny and repression.