Flowers as a Symbol of Social Systems That Work Against the Protagonists in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room Brennan Saul College

Across all cultures flowers are a deeply embedded and collectively recognized symbol for important occasions relating to life, death, love, and gender. Correspondingly, each culture assigns respective meanings to specific types of flowers, which develop a language of floriography where members of a culture understand and communicate through a use of flowers. For instance, in the Arab world, white flowers usually symbolize birth or marriage, while in countries such as Germany, Brazil, and South Korea, white flowers, in particular chrysanthemums, are an indication of death and presented at funerals. The symbol of flowers manifests itself in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, as Woolf chronicles the bildungsroman of Jacob Flanders, who is characterized in vagueness and absentia. As Jacob moves around from place to place – from home in Scarborough, to Cambridge University, to his career in London, and to Greece, a place which he idealized through his love for Greek literature and art – Woolf surrounds him with flowers until his death. Flowers are also discernable throughout Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary, which details the story of Emma Bovary who marries into a middle-class family, however marriage does not live up to her...