The Awakening vs. Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, written in 1857 and The Awakening by Kate Chopin, written in 1899, both show the life of two women who unconsciously look forward to accomplishing their dreams but not knowing what it is they are seeking. Edna and Emma, the protagonists of Madame Bovary and The Awakening respectively, are faced with a conflict between external domination and their own free will, which eventually leads them to take their lives. They feel immensely …

…at that same time period, he shows Emma as an unstable person who wants illusions to become real. This novel could appear as a response to Kate Chopin’s novel, Flaubert implying that finding freedom can only be read in a novel and that women’s dreams of a world without being a man’s possession would never come true. In other sense, the freedom women seek is not real, and women should stop dreaming.