Female Gender Progression - Term Paper Example

Nevertheless, these women experienced numerous hardships and men treated them like hollow shells or stupid objects, which they used for satisfaction of their physical needs. No one knows, whether it is easier to suffer from moral or physical derisions. This question is even more challenging in the modern context, when no one knows whether modern women suffer from different types of oppression or not. They are liberal, independent, successful and happy, but very often they feel depressed and are not happy at all.

The novel by Flaubert is devoted to the French middle class of the nineteenth century. Flaubert discussed a place of a woman showing a ‘sarcastic jest about the bourgeois’ (Boyd, 2008). Madam Bovary suffers from a constant inner excitement and she does not know whether to belong to dramatic heroines or to aristocratic women. Madam Bovary is striving for tragedy experiences. She is lacking of adrenaline buzz and invents barriers in her destiny and cannot reach her self-satisfaction. This heroine experienced nothing more than artificial sufferings and emotional turmoil.

She was striving for drama and finally death reached her (Berlatsky, 2009). In the narrative “The life of an American Slave” Douglass showed a different depiction of a fatal destiny of women. Female slaves were tortured and raped by their masters. They did not invent sufferings. Their lives were full of daily tragic and destroying events. Douglass describes a horrible manner of torturing of young women in the following way: “I have seen him [master] tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip; and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture--"He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes" (Douglass online).

Douglass underlines that masters for slave women were perceived as unavoidable embodiments of death. They were horrible, intimidating and oppressing their slaves. There was no a serious resistance to power of masters: “Indeed, it is not uncommon for slaves even to fall out and quarrel among themselves about the relative goodness of their masters, each contending for the superior goodness of his own over that of the others” (Douglass online). It was easier for the slaves to fall under control of their masters and listen to their directions; to turn into victims for physical and moral scorns and to live in a cage of oppression, hate and violence.

There were two types of choice for women of Madam Bovary times: either to listen to a husband and follow him blindly or to get a lover and be satisfied. A power of a woman was in her body. Emma had nothing more than her body, when she wanted to prove her power. Emma is a perfect example of a woman, who can assert herself by using her body. She sleeps with other men; she earns money to pay her debts. She wants to commit a suicide in order to leave this world, she wants to gain power over the world and over her body–she wants to decide when to leave it…Powerful men of the nineteenth century ruled everywhere.

Flaubert is concerned about psychological and emotional dependence of women on their husbands and those “wounds” were the most drastic and horrible for women from bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact, women slaves experienced dreadful rapes and beating from their masters. Their children were taken away from them. They had