Social Class Distinction In Madame Bovary: A Way Of Categorizing People
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Striving for higher social status has been the downfall of many, many
people just as it was the destruction of Emma Bovary. In Nineteenth
Century France, several class existed: peasant or working class, middle
class, upper-middle class, bourgeois, gentry and aristocratic. In the story,
Madame Bovary, we see a number of individuals striving to move themselves “
up” to the bourgeois, a status that is higher than the working class but
not as high as nobility. The bourgeois are characterized by being educated
and wealthy but unlike the aristocracy, they earned their money through
hard work and kept it through frugality (Cody 24 - 28). Our bourgeois
strivers in “Madame Bovary” kept up ...
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clearly indicative of this fact (Barron’s
5).
To what social class did the characters belong, in reality, in appearance?
Did they move from one class to another during the story? In the following
pages I will respond to these questions. Charles Bovary moves between two
classes: working and middle. He comes from a middle class home but he does
not seem to care what his social status is. Both his mother and his wife,
on the other hand, want to move up in class status. His second wife, Emma
Bovary becomes obsessed with becoming part of the bourgeois and is sorely
disappointed when she finds she has married a man that might have the
potential to do so but lacks the ambition (Gibbons 3).
Charles, at the urging of his mother, an upper-middle class woman, attends
medical school, which will give him the means by which to move into the
bourgeois, but it takes him two attempts to pass. Undaunted, his mother,
the elder Madame Bovary, who believes she can change her own class status
thorough ...
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the
bourgeois life she wants and believes she deserves. She becomes so unhappy
with her life, she becomes ill. Charles moves them to Yonville, a city, but
her life is still not transformed as she wants it (Gibbons 7). Emma’s
obsession with the bourgeois and her realization that her husband is never
going to move up, sends her in search of a pseudo-bourgeois life by
borrowing money to buy the latest fashions, hiring a “ladies” maid and
having affairs with men who are of the higher social class (Ringrose 7).
After Emma’s suicide, Charles is so distraught nothing matters, he becomes
even less ambitious, if that were possible, he becomes impoverished and he
slips into the working class ...
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Social Class Distinction In Madame Bovary: A Way Of Categorizing People. (2008, November 6). Retrieved April 26, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Social-Class-Distinction-Madame-Bovary-Way/92643
"Social Class Distinction In Madame Bovary: A Way Of Categorizing People." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 6 Nov. 2008. Web. 26 Apr. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Social-Class-Distinction-Madame-Bovary-Way/92643>
"Social Class Distinction In Madame Bovary: A Way Of Categorizing People." Essayworld.com. November 6, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Social-Class-Distinction-Madame-Bovary-Way/92643.
"Social Class Distinction In Madame Bovary: A Way Of Categorizing People." Essayworld.com. November 6, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Social-Class-Distinction-Madame-Bovary-Way/92643.
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