Bovary vs. Tess Women/ Class

The way that both authors portray women in these two novels are somewhat similar, however on the other hand they happen in a different perspective. Tess seems to be doomed for life, having her fate already set. Emma, on the other hand, sets up her fate. Tess has moral integrity, which is her main internal conflict in the novel; if she helps her family with money when they most needed it, or if she kept her moral integrity because of her rape. Emma marry Charles because of her fanticism of romantic novels, however she is the one that contributes most to her downfall. She makes her debt larger, and gets involved with many affairs.

Yet, both of them (Tess and Emma) seem to be born in a different era. They are both independent. Looking for an upgrade in society, Emma makes alone the decision of having affairs and doing everything in order to fulfill her dream. Together, Tess is the only independent member of her family. She is the one who is in charge of everything. Tess does everything possible to take her family out of the misery and help them both.

In both novels, Flaubert and Hardy makes use of these characters in order to show discontemptment. Flaubert uses Emma to criticize the social classes, but also because he wanted to show what was happening in that time, and what would probably happen years later. Hardy, also portrays Tess as a woman that was born in wrong era, because she had personnality, she is independent, which are the characteristics that women now-a-days have. And also Flaubert in one sense was correct, because a considerable portion of women betray their husbands and gets huge amount of debts, te only difference is that men now-a-days are not that stupid and figure it out.

Class: The social class in these books are not the same. Tess and her family belong to the working class. They depend on their labor to have food on the table. The greatest problem that they encounter in the book is when their horse dies, because Tess rapidly notices that their ability to produce was much reduced, and this meant no money. Emma on the other hand was member of the middle class, which is so criticized by Flaubert. She is consistently trying to have an upgrade, and does everything in order to achieve this, even her own death.

It seems that both books kind of complement each other because Flaubert barely give his opinion towards the lower class, so the reader is not able to really identify his thoughts on it. Hardy also focuses on a lower class family, which we can easily understand how hard it was to belong to a lower class. Besides this, both women in their way are corrupted, and both of them die in a similar type of way, where there downfall are much because of them, surrendering themselves to death.