Comparing A Simple Heart And Nelly Dean Of Bronte

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Comparing Felicite of Flaubert's A Simple Heart and Nelly Dean of Bronte's Wuthering Heights

Nelly Dean and Felicite are both characters that are in stark contrast to the characters that surround them. They are both good Christian women in there own way who are serving those who have no real interest in godliness and place no real emphasis on it. Nelly Dean is a realistic character in a romantic novel, while Felicite is a romanticized character in a realistic story.

Nelly Dean is a servant in a household that is filled with people that are difficult to get along with. They are in constant turmoil with each other, and they almost seem to enjoy the conflict they cause. Nelly Dean is the one character that does not usually allow …show more content…

While Nelly Dean stays with the same family, she has to move and get accustomed to new bosses every time some one dies. Felicite just seems to have plain bad luck in her choice of employers at the beginning of her career. In spite of this, both women seem quite satisfied with their lives, while the people who are in charge of them seem a lot less happy with their own lives. The characters in ‚"Wuthering Heights‚" frequently have severe fits of negative emotion, while Nelly quietly looks …show more content…

At the very beginning of her story, we are given a list of the chores she is responsible for. Her pay of “a hundred francs a year” (1019) seems like a very good bargain for her “unamiable” (1019) mistress. While both women had to put up with less than admirable mistresses, Nelly didn’t seem to work quite as hard as Felicite, and Nelly commanded much more respect around the house. At least Nelly was appreciated, while it doesn’t seem that Mme. Aubain knew how lucky she was to have Felicite around.

Religion is an important factor in both of these works. It is brought up again and again and looked at from many different angles in both books. Felicite and Nelly are both portrayed as religious women, but they are religious in very different ways.

Nelly is portrayed as a sensible, Christian woman who has read her Bible and thought in depth about such things, while religion was just another way in which Flaubert proved that Felicite was an ignorant human being. She knew nothing about the catholic religion except for what she had gathered from her charge’s catechism classes. She didn’t seem to get a very good grasp on the subject, and the townsfolk poked fun at her because of her strange interpretations of the church doctrine.

This train of thought just seems to be beyond her, but she is a better woman than those who do understand the doctrine, but choose to use it to their advantage at the

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