Fantasy and Necessity in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Guy De Maupassant’s “The Necklace”

Abstract

Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) and Guy De Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” (1884), both are two French masterpieces of world literature that tell us the stories of two young women who have lived a life full of fantasy and let their fantasy get the best of them. These two stories reveal the economic and societal situation from their time to the time of our own. The protagonists Emma and Mathilde portray the victims of society who face downfalls due to their extreme materialism. The characters’ imagination and fascination of luxury life made them forget about the reality. They could not differentiate between what is fantasy and what is the real necessity of life. Throughout the three chapters I have tried to explain the smallest details of these two characters that correspond with their excessive need for desire, thus losing the essence that really matter in life; and also tried to show a covert picture of psychology, society and economy alongside it. I believe this dissertation will illuminate the unaware people about the deepest facts of psychology and the hidden agendas of society and economy.