Individual Female Rebellion in Madame Bovary and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Emma tries in the beginning of the novel to rebel against her simplistic lifestyle and get closer to her ideal reality by buying very luxurious and expensive items, making her feel fashionable and up to date. Emma's financial ruin is foreshadowed in the novel's first chapter, when Flaubert projects the danger of badly handled finances by describing Charles father and how he lives his ideal life by spending his wife’s money and is led directly into unhappiness, “after the marriage he (Charles’s father) lived on his wife’s fortune for two or three years… he shut himself away at the age of forty-five, disgusted with mankind he claimed, and determined to live in peace.”  This shows how the society, which Flaubert is so critical of, creates individuals who are bound to fall through their ambitions, foreshadowing Emma’s inevitable economic crisis.

A key factor in Emma’s rebellion against her lifestyle is characterized by the search of true passion and love, leading her to depend on external love affairs as a way of fulfilling this need. By having these affairs, she feels her life is more adventurous and exciting, finding her situation similar to what she had read in books. This similarity blinds her and leads her into placing all her hopes on these men, who eventually turn these relationships into sordid affairs.

Emma embarks directly upon a path of moral and financial ruin during the novel. Since she’s very beautiful, illustrated by several men falling in love with her. She has moral corruption that means she cannot accept and appreciate the realities of her life, never recognizing that her desires are unreasonable. These moral errors can be reflected on Emma's inabilities to accept her situation and her attempt to escape it through her infidelities. These mistakes bring her to total ruin and, in the process, affecting innocent figures, such as her daughter. Berthe is an innocent child in need of her mother's care and love, but Emma is cold to her, and Berthe ends up working in a cotton mill due to Emma’s selfish decisions. Near the end as she searches desperately for money, she has to ask men for it, and the only thing she can use to persuade them is sex. Emma's prostitution is the result of her self-destructive search for recognition through moral rebellion, and above all, her inability of accepting life as it is.

On the other hand, Tereza from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tries to rebel against the feeling of not taking certain things with too much lightness. This lighthearted way of looking at life makes her fear the loss of uniqueness of one’s essence. For this reason, the naked body revolts her, considering nakedness and sexuality potential horrors, “since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation”.  This passion for uniqueness comes from Tereza’s desire to de-contextualize herself from her mother and the world she was brought up in. Tereza’s mother lived “to proclaim that youth and beauty were overrated and worthless.” Tereza’s reaction to this was to set on a search for anything that would recognize her based on the exclusivity of her nature and her body.

The heavy character of Tereza is marked by sexual guilt. Due to Tereza’s hatred towards the generalized naked body, Tomas's extramarital affairs destroy her, acting like an enormous obstacle in her search for uniqueness: “her jealousy thus tamed by day, burst forth all the more savagely in her dreams, each of which ended in a wall he could silence only by waking her”.  

Tereza rebels against this situation by cheating on Tomas, due to her lack of lightness involved in short sexual affairs, she eventually regrets her actions. Although, (unlike Tomas and Emma) she doesn’t really take the initiative, she is led into infidelity, perhaps as a way of understanding Tomas reasons for committing these affairs. Throughout the process of cheating, she feels that her body is the one involved and not her soul, which is essential for Tereza’s well being, believing that uniqueness of true love comes from the soul: “her soul was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone, the body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies”. Like Emma Bovary, Tereza’s rebellion led her into what she feared the most: making of her body only a sexual and physical tool.

Overall, it can be seen that these two female characters rebel against their limiting surroundings by exploiting their sexuality and using their bodies as sexual tools. Their worlds fail to make them unique and special, creating an image of themselves, which, according to them, is plain, boring and at times prejudicial. Their desperate search for an idealized life where they stand out above the rest, leads them to blind rebellion against their surroundings. The consequences for these actions force them to take the need of recognition to a self-destructing extreme.

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