Kindly read a book called "Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert" then choose one of the five questions provided then write an essay about it.
Please select one of the five essay questions:
1. In devising a narrative that explores social and cultural formations of characters, deftly portrayed in the early childhoods of both Charles and Emma, Flaubert's novel is an intriguing fictional case study about human mutability, or perhaps immutability, and behavior. Please take either one of the two characters, and develop an analytical essay examining how the selected character follows a pattern of behavior, suggesting that Flaubert perhaps asserts, via lampooning the provincial people of his Normandy town, that humans, after all, are creatures of habit.
2. Flaubert's genius in Madame Bovary is his ability to leave the reader juggling conflicting judgments about the major characters, in the process of following their lives. For all his obliviousness and naïve disposition, and at times professional incompetence, Charles Bovary is a decent husband trying to maintain a harmonious household by hoping to appease the women in his life. For all her melodramatic attacks of self-pity and juvenile affection for romantic ideals, alongside her little habit of infidelity, Emma Rouault can easily be viewed as a circumstantial
victim of her times, where a loveless marriage acts as a strait jacket confining her to move beyond the miserable life framed by the simple and artless Charles. Please select one character, either Charles or Emma, and develop an argumentative essay examining if whether the chosen character is supposed to have our sympathy, or on the contrary, our revulsion.
3. Much like Romanticism was an antithetical outcry to the rationalization of nature and thought espoused by Enlightenment movement, literary realism was equally a spirituous response to Romanticism. In a reactionary impulse to undermine and excoriate flighty sentimental stories of forlorn and listless lovers, Flaubert not only surgically spins an intricate tale of a desperate housewife embodying the self-indulgent, irrational and improvident dark-side of romantic idealism, but also does so by dispelling mythologized yearnings about the rustic and provincial life. Please write an essay analyzing how Flaubert's book chides ideals espoused by Romanticism by caricaturing a staunch zealot adherent to its principles (Emma), while starkly portraying the bucolic as anything but the idyllic setting sung by poets earlier.
4. While after the serialized edition faced the scrutiny of the censor, Flaubert, himself faced the scrutiny of the law, when in 1857 he was charged by the state for producing a piece of work that was an "outrage to public and religious morals and to morality." For sure, Flaubert unflatteringly depicts religion through the caricatured discourse of post-Enlightenment and post-French Revolutionary thinking. Moreover, perhaps it isn't too surprising that a book that openly examined human sexuality, more specifically female sexuality, was, in the eyes of a mid-nineteenth-century moral legislator (the prosecutor) the "the poetry of adultery." Perhaps his will to represent such taboo topics derived from his early days avidly consuming the works of Michel de Montaigne, adhering to some of the principles espoused by his sixteenth century predecessor. If you remember, Montaigne's nascent voice of reason urged us to openly express the more indecorous elements of human nature. Please take a position, and by taking examples from the text, as well as your interpretation of the novel, argue whether Madam Bovary is a proper work of art for which Flaubert should never have been indicted, or contrarily, Flaubert and his novel was rightly charged by the state.
5. Sentimental tales about aristocratic heroes rescuing damsels in distress set in exotic locations, those consumed by Emma Bovary, still exist today, though usually found in the isles of your local neighborhood supermarket. These tawdry supermarket romance novels are not just diversionary fodder for the soccer-mom next door, but they actually boast a long historical linage or a literary tradition as exposed by the references made of Emma's reading list. In the same spirit of Emma's undying love for this particular genre, please rewrite the ending of Flaubert's classic that realizes a romanticized closure to the plotline.