Beginning of Essay
. Striving for higher social status has been the downfall of many, many people just as it was the destruction of Emma Bovary. In Nineteenth Century France, several class existed: peasant or working class, middle class, upper-middle class, bourgeois, gentry and ari ....

Middle of Essay
.... their pursuits to really belong. “Madame Bovary” is about a sense of self, a search for personal identity and reality versus illusion. The symbolism throughout the story is clearly indicative of this fact (Barron’s 5). To what social class did the characters belong, in reality, in appearance? Did they move from one class to another during the story? In the following pages I will respond to these questions. Charles Bovary moves between two classes: working and middle. He comes from a middle class home but he does not seem to care what his social status is. Both his mother and his wife, on the other hand, want to move up in class status. His s ....