Analysis Of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary

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In the audacious nineteenth-century novel Madame Bovary, author Gustave Flaubert shamelessly challenges the social expectations of 1800’s France through the experiences of the fiery protagonist Emma Bovary and her acquaintances. Emma’s actions and thoughts, viewed as immoral and unbecoming for a woman in her time, express Flaubert’s opinions concerning wealth, love, social class, morality, and the role of women in society. Additionally, Flaubert’s intricate writing style, consisting of painstaking detail and well-developed themes and symbols, places Madame Bovary in a class of its own in the world of classic literature. Flaubert’s character the blind beggar develops as one of the most complex symbols in the novel, as he represents most prominently …show more content…

His appearance truly demonstrates to the reader the ugly corruption taking place in Emma’s soul, as Flaubert illustrates, “He [the blind man] revealed two gaping bloody orbits where the eyelids should have been. His skin was peeling away in red strips; liquid matter flowed from it, hardening into green scabs as far as his nose, the black nostrils of which sniffed convulsively.” Flaubert’s use of vivid detail to describe the blind beggar ironically resembles his equally vivid descriptions of Emma’s unmatched beauty, such as when Flaubert wrote, “Her real beauty was in her eyes; although they were brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and she would look at you frankly, with bold candor,” thus creating a link between Emma and the beggar. Quite understandably, Emma hated looking at his disgusting appearance, just as she also feared facing her moral corruption and the possibility that her actions lacked justness that the blind man represents. His very presence terrified Emma whenever he harassed the carriage traveling to and from her meetings with Léon, which occurred more and more frequently as the novel progressed and Emma fell wholeheartedly into her financial struggles and forbidden romantic

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