Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway both novels reveal how restrictive gender roles and rigid class structures confine women’s desires and identities, ultimately leading to profound disillusionment and tragic consequences.

a. I have selected Option 2 (social class and gender).

b. The two texts I have chosen are Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Realism) and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Modernism).

c. My focus will be on comparing and contrasting how social class and gender expectations shape the lives, desires, and downfalls of Emma Bovary and Clarissa Dalloway. I plan to examine how both women struggle against social constraints, how class affects their marriages and social mobility, and how each woman navigates her role as a wife in different time periods and cultures. I will compare key moments where their gender and class status create internal conflicts and societal pressures that influence their decisions and ultimate fates.

Some specific questions I wish to explore are:

• How does Emma’s disillusionment with bourgeois life compare to Clarissa’s sense of emptiness within her upper-class social circle?
• In what ways do gender expectations limit each woman’s ability to find fulfillment?
• How does each author use setting, stream-of-consciousness, or realism to portray the impact of social class on these characters’ inner lives?
• How do the endings of each novel reflect the consequences of the characters’ struggles with social class and gender?My preliminary thesis is: While Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway come from different literary movements, both novels reveal how restrictive gender roles and rigid class structures confine women’s desires and identities, ultimately leading to profound disillusionment and tragic consequences.I will support my thesis by comparing and contrasting key scenes and passages from both novels that illustrate social class constraints and gender expectations. I plan to use two scholarly, peer-reviewed articles to provide critical perspectives on realism, modernism, and gender in literature. My essay will begin with an introduction that provides context and my thesis, then body paragraphs organized by themes such as marriage, social mobility, and identity. I will conclude by discussing how both texts remain relevant in understanding gender and class issues today.please use schloarly resources