Victim of Greed Anonymous College

Victim of Greed

Flaubert, a novelist with a seething disdain for the Bourgeois lifestyle, uses his works to illustrate the flaws he sees in society, and more specifically the flaws he sees in this new, materialistic middle class. In his novel, Madame Bovary, Flaubert follows the life of the namesake character, Madame Emma Bovary, in her pursuit of romantic and passionate love- with her endeavors being halted and eventually made deadly due to an unfulfilling marriage, societally dictated female subservience, and the destructive habits of the Bourgeois lifestyle. Understanding these troubling topics to be immensely important to the author, many readers assume that Emma herself is the most subjugated character in the text; representing a woman oppressed by society, and destroyed by the greed that this new middle class perpetuates. This is largely true. In observing the narrator perspectives and character interactions, however, it becomes starkly clear that another figure bears the heaviest weight of manipulation and subjugation: Charles Bovary. Husband to Emma, Charles is a life-long victim of greed (both for wealth and flesh) from those around him; becoming a means for Flaubert to illustrate how the ills of the Bourgeois harm...