Emma Bovary had a dream of living in the high society. This dream came from her love of novels, especially romance novels. During the nineteenth century, Romanticism was alive in literature and art. It displayed exciting and em

Emma Bovary's death was originally derived from her need for excitement. At the convent where she grew up, she was excluded from much of the world, and this desire of hers only intensified. When she read the novels of the Romantic period, she found a way of how to satisfy her needs. She rejected the ordered life she lived, just as Romantic authors had rejected the strict and rigid life created by the Enlightenment. However, the only way she could do this was to put herself into a dream world, filled with chivalry, excitement, and romance. When even her dreams could not please her, she looked at her own life, and wanted to make changes. However, Emma Bovary still could not find happiness, and looked for a way out. Suicide seemed to be the only logical way to please herself, because it was again a Romantic idea, and something she could actually do and no just hope for. It could be said that Emma Bovary's downfall came from the pressures from the Romantic literature she read. But it's not right to blame Emma's death on a novel. While they gave Emma the method to satisfy her desires, and a way to end it all, they did not cause her desires to begin with. Emma had a yearning for excitement, something that she was born with, not influenced by. So the fact is, she probably could have found another method to calm this hunger. But it was the ideas of Romanticism that influenced her to kill herself. So this fantasy world, created by Romanticism had a large influence on the bourgeois class. It created desires to be at the top, to live differently, and to be exciting. But in most societies, there must be a middle class, which will always seem rather dull. They can't all be exciting and different, because then they would essentially all be the same once again. So the middle class is basically stuck being...well...the middle class.

With these romantic ideas, Emma, as well as other bourgeois women of her time, was extremely unhappy with her life. There was a monotony about middle-class life that people wanted to escape. Emma found unhappiness in every thing that should have made her happy. It was clear even on her honeymoon, which should have been the nicest time of her life. Tostes did nothing to satisfy her desires for luxury and expense. "Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills?" (24) This just shows a little of her annoyance with her husband, Charles. She thought he was extremely dull, and usually she didn't even see him as her husband. "Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and every one's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion , laughter, or thought." (25) As an ultimate showing of Emma's dislike of her life, she even showed resentment towards

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Approximate Word count = 1941
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)