Morality In Virginia Woolf's Emma Bovary

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The values and morals set by the society must be influential to the social norms. Emma Bovary’s society is dominated by the ethics established by males. In reliving their expectations, the pressure is for women to believe they must be wrong, that they are to blame and that there must be something wrong with them. Thus, Emma has no image to seek a basis for her self-esteem. The expectations of men to women are that they must have,
The successful integration of love with marriage, of sensitivity and cultivated emotions with the banality of housework, of an active sensory pathology with mystical yearnings, of superiority in mind and body with inferiority of social circumstance, of moral integrity with monotony, of esthetic taste with practical budgeting are the masculine ideal of what women should be in Emma’s society. (Danahy, 204)
Through this prospect, she has internalized the standards in fulfilling the norms. If she does not fulfill it, she creates a sense of futility, an accurate, unvarnished replication of the guilt feelings that she suffers. Emma lives out its real, logical, and bitter conclusion of the emptiness in the traditions of marriage and the masculine customs that go with it. By marriage, a woman, specifically Emma, losses their liberty in all its physical, social, moral and even spiritual consequences. She envies the advantages of a man saying, “...at least is free; he can explore each …show more content…

‘Your coat’s a little shabby, but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop – and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.” (Wharton,

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