‘Madame Bovary’, written by Gustave Flaubert (1857), and ‘Crime and Punishment’, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)‘The women in these novels only come to life through loving the men’. Discuss, making reference to your course texts.

Both ‘Madame Bovary’, written by Gustave Flaubert (1857), and ‘Crime and Punishment’, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) are products of western culture of the nineteenth century. Both authors are men writing from within a fiercely patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a social system of rule that ensures the dominance of men and the subsequent subservience of women. In this society relationships between men and women are built on inequality. However, patriarchy goes much further than this; not only does it involve the subordination of women, but it is also a social process or conditioning whereby women come to accept in their own thinking the idea of male superiority. From this position it is easy to see how ‘women in these novels only come to life through loving the men’. Both these authors appear to consider this concept in different ways. Flaubert seems to accept that women aspire to be their idealised images penned by men and creates an environment of reality whe...