Madame Bovary Social Criticism

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Krishna Singh Jamie Blount IB English 2 HL 6 September 2013 Social Criticism in Madame Bovary As the second half of the nineteenth century approached, a shift in literature from romanticism arose and a new age began. What the new school of thought, realism, brought to novelists from Europe and America was the attention to true detail, setting, and emotion as they would exactly appear or be in everyday life. Authors were starting to break away from the popular idyllic novels and discuss issues of society that had never been touched on before. However, since there was much controversy on these particular topics in the beginning, many of the author’s chose to express their thoughts and opinions through free indirect discourse. The employment of irony in a novel sometimes functions as a comical relief but also bring light to the overlooked misconstructions of life. Gustave Flaubert uses realism, free indirect discourse and irony through out his well renowned novel, Madame Bovary, to create a social commentary of life and middle-class of France during the mid 1800s. Probably one of the more obvious instances of realism seen in the novel is with in the first couple chapters when Flaubert describes the Bovary’s, a typical French family that is struggling to rise on the social hierarchy scale. The narrator introduces young Charles Bovary with the actions and emotions of any child in a new school; he is described from an unknown first point of view to be nervous and a student who, for the majority, kept to himself. The author does not exaggerate or understate the situation of any of the characters. For example, when describing the parents of Charles, along with their accomplishments, the narrator is quick to point out their flaws as well. The father who was “a fine man, a great talker…[and] had the dash of a military man with the easy go of a commercial traveler”
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