РефератыИностранный языкAnAn Education In Escape Madame Bovary And

An Education In Escape Madame Bovary And

An Education In Escape: Madame Bovary And Reading Essay, Research Paper


An Education in Escape: Madame Bovary and Reading


A theme throughout Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is escape versus


confinement. In the novel Emma Bovary attempts again and again to escape the


ordinariness of her life by reading novels, having affairs, day dreaming, moving


from town to town, and buying luxuries items. It is Emma’s early education


described for an entire chapter by Flaubert that awakens in Emma a struggle


against what she perceives as confinement. Emma’s education at the convent is


perhaps the most significant development of the dichotomy in the novel between


confinement and escape. The convent is Emma’s earliest confinement, and it is


the few solicitations from the outside world that intrigue Emma, the books


smuggled in to the convent or the sound of a far away cab rolling along


boulevards.


The chapter mirrors the structure of the book it starts as we see a


satisfied women content with her confinement and conformity at the convent.


At first far from being boredom the convent, she enjoyed the company of


the nuns, who, to amuse her, would take her into the chapel by way of a long


corridor leading from the dining hall. She played very little during the


recreation period and knew her catechism well. (Flaubert 30.)Footnote1


The chapter is also filled with images of girls living with in the


protective walls of the convent, the girls sing happily together, assemble to


study, and pray. But as the chapter progresses images of escape start to


dominate. But these are merely visual images and even these images are either


religious in nature or of similarly confined people.


She wished she could have lived in some old manor house, like those


chatelaines in low wasted gowns who spent their days with their elbows on the


stone sill of a gothic window surmounted by trefoil, chin in hand watching a


white plumed rider on a black horse galloping them from far across the country.


(Flaubert 32.)


As the chapter progresses and Emma continues dreaming while in the


convent the images she conjures up are of exotic and foreign lands. No longer


are the images of precise people or event but instead they become more fuzzy and


chaotic. The escape technique that she

used to conjure up images of heroines in


castles seems to lead inevitably to chaos and disintegration.


And there were sultans with long pipes swooning on the arbors on the


arms of dancing girls; there were Giaours, Turkish sabers and fezzes; and above


all there were wan landscapes of fantastic countries: palm trees and pines were


often combined in one picture with tigers on the right a lion on the left.


(Flaubert 33.)


Emma’s dreams by this point are chaotic with both palms and pines mixed


together with lions and tigers. These dreams continue and change themselves into


a death wish as swans transform themselves into dying swans, and singing into


funeral music. But Emma although bored with her fantasy refuses to admit it and


she starts to revolt against the confines of the convent until the Mother


Superior was glad to see her go.


The chapter about Emma Bovary’s education at the convent is significant


not only because it provides the basis for Emma’s character, but also because


the progression of images in this chapter is indicative of the entirety of the


novel. The images progress from confinement to escape to chaos and


disintegration. In Madame Bovary Emma changes from a women content with her


marriage, to a women who escapes from the ordinariness of her everyday life


through affairs and novels, to a women whose life is so chaotic that she


disintegrates and kills herself. Indeed, Madame Bovary is like a poem comprised


of a progression of repeating images.


Emma Bovary found interest in the things around her which prevent her


boredom in her early education it was the novels she read, “They were filled


with love affairs, lovers, mistresses, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely


country houses.” She also found interest in the sea but only because it was


stormy. But all the things that Emma found interest in she soon became board of


from Charles to Leon. This cycle of boredom and the progression of images of


confinement, escape, and chaos, parallel both in the Chapter on Emma’s education


and the novel as a whole the entire mural of the novel as Emma’s journey from


boredom in reality to self-destruction in fantasy.


Footnote1


Flaubert, Gustave. MADAME BOVARY. trans. Lowell Bair. New York: Bantam Books,


1972

Сохранить в соц. сетях:
Обсуждение:
comments powered by Disqus

Название реферата: An Education In Escape Madame Bovary And

Слов:824
Символов:5409
Размер:10.56 Кб.