Female morality in A Doll House and Madame Bovary

In Madame Bovary, Flaubert uses mockery to condemn romanticism and look into the relation of attractiveness to dishonesty, mainly with Emma, as she progressively wreck her moral and ruin her life throughout of the novel. She is very beautiful, but she is ethically fraudulent and incapable of accommodating and valuing the veracities of her life. She read romantic fictions that provide her with dissatisfaction of her commonplace life, and they leads her to dreams of the extreme perfection of love and wealth, ignoring the beauties that are present in the world around her. Her corruption can be witnessed easily through her dealings with Rodolphe. First, she blindly fell in love and engaged in adultery acts with him, knowing that he’s a man of many women, but still making herself believe in his “ideal” love. Then, she devastated her health and wrecked her family’s property in order to please him while he hurriedly try to dispose of her, regarding her as a clingy child (ironically, that’s how Emma feels about her husband). Finally, at the end when she was in desolation, she came to Rodolphe again as a last resort for money, using her seduction to obtain it. Here, Emma turned from a fatuous aspirant lover who is willing to undergo infidelity, the biggest taboo of nineteenth-century France, into an opportunist who’s willing to exploit her supposedly “true love” for her own selfish needs. Another instance is her business with Lheureux. First, when she was purchasing extravagant goods from him, she deliberately squandered what little money she had, and went into debt trying to acquire all luxurious commodities she could find, all with the attempt to look sophisticated and superior to her class and no consideration towards her husband and her family. Then, once again, at the edge of her anguish, she came to Lheureux and tried to seduce him as well in order to get the money she needs. For a second time, Emma is not afraid to use the most sacred feature of the feminine world to procure her desires and needs, displaying her utter disregard to human integrity.

Readers often lightly look upon Nora’s acts of corruption, since they were committed for the service of saving Krogstad, and thus, giving them a higher, more morally acceptable purpose. Keeping in mind that nineteenth-century Norway was a male-dominated society that demands women to be pliant, docile, and helpless “songbirds”, as Torvald degradingly regards Nora, and that it corrupts intelligent independent women, Nora has a justifiable excuse for what she did. Maybe it’s the culture of lies that she has to adopt to keep a secret that’s corrupt, not Nora herself. Emma Bovary, on the other hand, performed tarnished acts that arise out of her own romantic illusions and a false sense of self-entitlement, and injured the people around her in the process. Contrasting to Nora, Emma feels no intimacy towards her husband; indeed, her degraded acts were those that despite him, had Charles Bovary the intelligent to notice them. Nonetheless, Emma, out of her own wills and desires, stringed together a web of fabrication and mendacity to maintain her selfish outrageous belief that she is sanctioned to some other kind of life rather than the one she already has. However,

For Emma Bovary, the false she committed was significantly more scandalous that Nora’s forgery, showing the extent of moral decay that Emma is willing to extend to achieve what she wants. Moreover, Nora commended her deeds in order to save her husband life, and later she feels extremely guilty about it. Emma, on the other hand, despite her family and all the people that care for her, and all she thinks about is herself and her egocentric desires. Perhaps one should look at each author’s philosophy and who they blame for their characters’ corruption. Emma never recognizes that her desires are unreasonable, and thus she rails emotionally against the society that, from her perspective, makes them impossible for her to achieve. Similarly, Nora fells that society has placed an iron grip of limitations on her future, and she must strive to break away from it. Nonetheless, in the end, the two women’s paths distinguished themselves. Emma died a dreadful death, much contrasted with the life on top of the clouds she always longed for, while Nora successfully escaped from her restrictions, clear her name, and is able to start a new life, one that’s she has always wished for, one of independence and honesty.