Dissatisfaction and Mortality Essay -- Literacy Analysis

In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the protagonists experience multiple conflicts with society as a whole and with their own place in that society. Emma Bovary and Yevgeny Bazarov, respectively, determine that the solution to their struggles is suicide. By revealing their characters’ reasoning, methods, and legacies, Flaubert and Turgenev seek to expose a fundamental human need for a sense of societal belonging through the resultant act of suicide, should that need go unfulfilled. The sense of despair that is linked to both Emma’s and Bazarov’s suicides originates from their stark incompatibility with the societies into which they were born. Each protagonist goes through a life long struggle to reshape his or her own niche in the community, in a manner reminiscent of attempting to force a key into a lock that it does not fit. Emma, who was brought up in a rural peasant family, had aspirations for a different place in life beginning as a young girl in a convent school. She kept a collection of â€Å"portraits of unidentified aristocratic English beauties† (Flaubert 872). By marrying Charles Bovary (a doctor), Emma raises herself up to the comfortable level of middle class; however, she clearly remains unsatisfied, as she obsesses over magazines from Paris, fills her house with luxury items, and pines for any contact with the upper class. Bazarov also has a more desirable relationship with society in mind. However, unlike Emma, he does not crave for changes in his own lifestyle, but instead he wishes for the majority of society to conform to his ideals. Upon meeting Arkady’s aristocratic father and uncle, Bazarov attempts to persuade them into agreeing with his progressive nihilistic views. He la... ...rimarily in the parallel legacies left behind by Emma and Bazarov. By focusing on their respective protagonists’ reasons and means for committing suicide, as well as their lasting impacts, nineteenth-century novelists Flaubert and Turgenev reveal the importance of possessing a sense of belonging in one’s society. These authors employ Emma’s and Bazarov’s preoccupations with advancing themselves in the eyes of society in order to convey the theme that putting forth such efforts is generally unnecessary (or even counterproductive) to lead a fulfilling life. Works Cited Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. 1856. Trans. Francis Steegmuller. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Sarah Lawall. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton & Company, 1999. 850-1063. Print. Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons. Trans. Peter Carson. London: Penguin Classics, 2009. Print.