Striving for higher social status has been the downfall of 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, and aristocrats. In the story, "Madame Bovary," we see a number of individuals striving to move themselves up to the bourgeois, a status that is higher than the working class but not as high as nobility. The bourgeois are characterized by being educated and wealthy but unlike the aristocracy, they earned their money through hard work and kept it through frugality (Britannica).
Our bourgeois strivers in "Madame Bovary" kept up
appearances but they would never quite make it to the full rank
of bourgeois. Because the level of one's social class status is
determined so much by appearances, an individual can keep up a
good front and be accepted into the circle when they are out of
town where no-one knows the truth. Both Emma and Homais followed
this practice in 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 (Nadiau 136).
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 second wife,
Emma Bovary becomes obsessed with becoming part of the bourgeois
and is sorely disappointed when she finds she has married a man
that might have the potential to do so but lacks the ambition
Charles, at the urging of his mother, an upper-middle class
woman, attends medical school, which will give him the means by
which to move into the bourgeois, but it takes him two attempts
to pass. Undaunted, his mother, the elder Madame Bovary, who
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