posted December 19, 2006 05:18 PM
My Research book for World Lit 1 (a junior class) is Madame Bovary, by Flaubert, a french classic. The 2 questions I answered with quotes are questions I had to choose myself, i didn't make them up, but rather choose them from the research syllibus(however you spell that world), they related the best in my mind to Bovary.I. The Author Identification
A. Name: Flaubert, Gustave
B. Biography:
1. Year of Birth: 1821, December 12th
2. Place of Birth: Rouen, Seine-Maritime, Haute-Normandie – France
3. Childhood: Flaubert lived in the residential wing of the hospital his father was director & chief surgeon of. He frequently played in the garden next to his father’s dissection room and publicly professed in his adolescence that he was “disgusted with life”.
4. Education: In 1839 (at age 18), Flaubert went to study law in Paris, which was the family requirement of the youngest son. He achieved no degree because of lack of interest and consistent nervous attacks that abruptly ended the threshold of his career.
5. Career:
a) Writings – Madame Bovary – The Candidates – Sentimental Education
b) Occupation Trade – A novelist being supported by a private income.
6. Family Life: His domestic circle consisted of a Father, Mother, & Sister named Caroline. His father and sibling died in premature deaths.
7. Year of Death: 1880, May 8th
8. Place of Death: (town unknown) - France
II. The Setting of the Novel
A. Time and Place – This novel is set in 19th Century Provincial Rouen. Also taken place in the towns of Tostes and Yonville particularly in bourgeois communities.
B. The Importance to Understand the Novel – This realistic fiction novel is undoubtedly significant because of the immorality of self-deprivation in place of sacrificing the needs of your loved ones, which ultimately leads to societal failure. An adequate symbol used to describe the protagonist is “The Blind Beggar”. This powerful symbolism is used to exchange the idea that Emma wantonly pursues a golden lifestyle that is impossible to achieve in respects to her cultural and environmental circumstances. As a blind beggar would, Emma continues on her relentless search for life beyond the mundane, but once she “sees” her self-destroyed reality, she in due course suffers for her own faults.
III. Question D: What is the motivation of the protagonist?
1) “It seemed as though all the bitterness of life was being served up on to her plate, and there came swirling up from the depths of her soul a kind of rancid staleness” (Flaubert 51). This primary quote indicates why Emma retained the motives she did. Her central motivation was the escape the burden of bourgeois (middle-class) stereotypes through tissues of lies, her only option possible. She gained this motivation through the illusions she received from the social upper-class receptions she witnessed and the fantasies she immersed herself in.
2) “For Emma, the next day was a day of mourning. Everything seemed to be wrapped in a confusion of shadows drifting over their surfaces, and sorrow plunged into her soul like a muffled howling, in resemblance to the sound of the winter wind in some abandoned castle” (Flaubert 98). This quote verbally illustrates why Miss Bovary has a continuing inability to accept her situation which she wholeheartedly attempts to escape through adultery and deception that finally constitute of continuous moral errors.
3) Gustave Flaubert writes, “And at this word, which brought back the memory of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary, turned her head away, as if at the sharp taste of a different and a stranger poison seeping into her mouth” (260). This final quote details Emma’s tragic end. The “stranger” poison was her own realization that she was the cause of her death. Through outlandish temptations and self-destructive spending, and tireless hope for a better life, her last motivation was to end her life, by committing suicide by swallowing arsenic.
Question H: What themes do the Novel address?
1) “With her other ear Emma was listening to a conversation full of words she didn’t understand” (Flaubert 40). This quote reiterates the primary issue of the inadequacy of language so rooted in Emma’s communication style which creates a barrier that produces her dishonest future.
2) “Leon was tired of loving Emma for nothing; and he was beginning to feel the weary burden of repetition in a life with no interests to guide and no hopes to sustain it” (Flaubert 94). This quote tells of a secondary issue within the themes of this novel as the emotional annihilation of ones own social status. Moreover it is a classic quotation that expresses a citizen’s need for lifestyle beyond their own social and financial brocade.
3) Gustave Flaubert writes, “She eventually realized that she had probably slandered him, but the denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree” (229). This final quote illustrates the private and undermining theme of love and sacrifice initializing the usage of adultery in the place of marital confinement.
Name: Jacquelle Blackburne
World Literature I – Research Paper Oral Presentation – Rough Draft
any thoughts...
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posted December 19, 2006 05:18 PM
posted December 21, 2006 02:32 AM
