middle class

Nora, resenting her life as a pampered wife, forges a signature in order to obtain money for her ailing husband, and the results of this act lead her to personal growth and to her resentment of being treated like a doll in her own home.

"Flaubert's tragic novel stands as a brilliant portrayal of infidelity, an incisive psychological portrait of a woman town between duty and desire. Written with acute attention to telling detail, Madame Bovary exposes the emptiness of one woman's bourgeois existence and her failure to fill that void with fantasies, sex, and material objects. Emma's thirst for life mirrors the universal human impulse for idealized fulfillment."--back cover.

Traces the transformation of American economic life, social structure, political behavior, and patterns of ideas which took place in the four decades between the end of Reconstruction and the close of World War I, and allowed the nation to cope with the challenges of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration.

Presents Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel about a young woman of the bourgeois class whose unhappiness in her marriage leads her to several affairs and a tragic fate. Includes a scholarly introduction and documents from the trial in which Flaubert was accused of offending public morality.

The story of Emma Bovary, the bored wife of a provincial doctor whose desires and illusions are shattered when reality catches up with her.

Presents the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor's wife who becomes bored with marriage and motherhood, and embarks upon a series of affairs in search of passion and excitement, and then finds herself in a downward spiral to destruction.