Morality In Virginia Woolf's Emma Bovary

The values and morals set by the society must be influential to the social norms. Emma Bovary’s society is dominated by the ethics established by males. In reliving their expectations, the pressure is for women to believe they must be wrong, that they are to blame and that there must be something wrong with them. Thus, Emma has no image to seek a basis for her self-esteem. The expectations of men to women are that they must have,

The successful integration of love with marriage, of sensitivity and cultivated emotions with the banality of housework, of an active sensory pathology with mystical yearnings, of superiority in mind and body with inferiority of social circumstance, of moral integrity with monotony, of esthetic taste with practical budgeting are the masculine ideal of what women should be in Emma’s society. (Danahy, 204)

Through this prospect, she has internalized the standards in fulfilling the norms. If she does not fulfill it, she creates a sense of futility, an accurate, unvarnished replication of the guilt feelings that she suffers. Emma lives out its real, logical, and bitter conclusion of the emptiness in the traditions of marriage and the masculine customs that go with it. By marriage, a woman, specifically Emma, losses their liberty in all its physical, social, moral and even spiritual consequences. She envies the advantages of a man saying, “...at least is free; he can explore each

passion and every kingdom, conquer obstacles, and feast upon the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is thwarted, against her have ranged the weakness of the flesh and inequity of the law.” (Flaubert, 82) A woman must listen at what they say to her, what they say about her, and what it is said that contains her own performance, her ideas, and feelings. Thus, when she knows that she is pregnant, “she wanted a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him George and this idea of having a male child was like an anticipated revenge for the powerlessness of her past.” (Flaubert, 82) She wants a son because it will enable her to experience vicariously the freedom given to them in the real world rather than the women that are de-potentiated. Her death is a perfect dramatization of this process of swallowing, for it symbolizes both the norms ingested with the morbid self-esteem that results from them. She ingests failure as her fate of her own failure.

On the other hand, Lily Bart’s society is formed by the high-maintenance elites from the New York. The social norms viewed women as an artistic creation, worthy representation, and have an appropriate behavior. The standards have a direct effect on the woman of their clothing, the manner which they wore their hair, and in the numerous trappings of their private life. Hence, Lily’s family exerted effort in the making and sustaining her aesthetic nature to have a limitless responsiveness to beauty itself. This practice was brought till she grows up as she thinks, “she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background, she required, the only climate she could breathe in.” (Wharton, 39-40) Because she is accustomed to the life of an elite, her sensitivity has left her absolutely dependent upon finding an environment that will support such enhancement in which her exquisite femininity can succeed. Through the eyes of the society, woman’s capacity to be decorative is her chief attention. She was even more zealously patronized as a fragile, helpless object, used in the decorative and literal sense to adorn the household: a man’s wealth and position were judged by the style in which he kept his wife. (Wolff, 19) She must marry to keep the way that she is used to and also, by keeping the wealth where she needs to live up to the public’s anticipations of women. It is built in her mind that the man who marries her will select her as a final prize in his collection. Thus, she said to Selden,
“A girl must marry to get out of dingy routine, a man may if he chooses.’ She surveyed [Selden] critically.

‘Your coat’s a little shabby, but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop – and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.” (Wharton,

10)
She must practice the art of making herself an exquisite decorative object to adopting the society’s images narrowly and literally to the elite men to disregard the distortions that offer limitations of women’s role.