Comparing And Summary: Hester Prynne And Emma Bovary

Hester Prynne and Emma Bovary were created equal by Hawthorne and Flaubert respectively. They were painted by the same brush. They were coming from two different parts of the globe and lived at times with a gap of two centuries. Hester lived in the 17th Century Puritan Boston and Emma Bovary came from the 19th Century French bourgeois society. Still they were akin in many respects. They were similar in their physical beauty and they both possessed romantic hearts. These adulteresses were perfect beauties. Hester’s tall figure, rich

2 black hair and her glowing white skin recalled oriental queens. Flaubert endowed Emma with pale skin, black curls and large black eyes. Imagination, dreams and fancy held them above their societies. Hester had a “wild and picturesque peculiarity” (Hawthorne 82). Emma was in the perpetual search for the intoxicating joys of love. They were also alike in their hatred for their husbands and their mediocre married life. Hester could not love her old hunchback husband who valued scholarship over his

The same was true of his adulteress Emma. For Emma adultery was a poetry or a marvelously sweet existence in the supernal realm. She contemplated it an ethereal state of being that elevated her above the petty bourgeois existence. Her act of adultery was part of her desperate effort to fly into the immense space from her mediocre married life. She relished its “Passion, ecstasy and delirium” (Flaubert 124). Embracing her personal moral codes, she reveled in adultery without any prick of conscience. Moreover, she made an all out effort to cling to adultery and never repented her action. She sought the celestial lover of her dreams in two males--the Clerk Leon and the land owner Rodolphe. Love letters, tears and kisses touched sweetness in her. She never believed that adultery was a sin and her suicide at the end of the novel was not an act of