Comparison of Passages from Great Expectations and Madame Bovary

The two passages, taken from early sections of Great Expectations and Madame Bovary, deal predominantly with the subject of death and the spectrum of approaches applied by their characters to deal with such circumstances. Both Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert draw particular attention to the binary codes of public and private life and the extent to which the characters are compelled to manipulate or conceal their true feelings in order to conform to their societies' dogmatic customs and expectations of decorum. In these passages Dickens and Flaubert also highlight the strength of feeling towards their lost love one of their characters, Joe and Charles, basking in what Lafayette calls "the innocence of early youth." However, Dickens and Flaubert both despondently show how Joe and Charles' love for their recently-lost wives cannot even find sanctity at the occasion of death, as both the funerals painfully become mockeries which worsen, rather than alleviate, the wounds of grief suffered by Joe and Charles.

The most notable difference between Dickens's and Flaubert's narration style is that although both Dickens and Flaubert move away from employing a omniscient and omnipotent narrator figure, one such as Fielding so dearly cherished, in Pip Dickens created a personal, informative and sensitive first person voice, whereas Flaubert refused both these alternatives. Pip's narration of his experiences and emotions throughout the novel is a considerable factor in the formation of the readers' own opinions of Pip himself and the characters that surround him. For example, there is an exaggerated poignancy when Pip refers to how `my poor sister' (257) had been carried through the house, and when Pip describes how `I was much an...

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...ng feelings). Indeed, in the passage from Great Expectations the readers are presented with Mr Trabb speaking with a `depressed business-like voice' (257), suggesting that his area of expertise and interest lay solely in dealing with the physical funeral with no plan to give support on any other emotional level. Furthermore, the picture of group holding their pocket-handkerchiefs to their faces makes Pip think of several simultaneous nosebleeds, rather disrupting the air of dignified serenity which Mr Trabb tried so hard to create. Indeed, Pip's description of how `my poor sister had been brought round by the kitchen door' (257) has even an element of the comic; and this, combined with the description of the six bearers and coffin as a `shuffling and blundering' `blind monster with twelve human legs' (258) perhaps displays Dicken's wariness of pointless ceremony.