Student Essay on Comparison of Passages from Great Expectations and Madame Bovary

In comparing the two funeral passages in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, one sees the characters' strength of feeling towards their lost loved ones. Such a comparison also reveals the extent to which the characters are compelled to manipulate or conceal their true feelings in order to conform to their societies' dogmatic customs and expectations of decorum.

The two passages, taken from early sections of Great Expectations and Madame Bovary, deal predominantly with the subject of death and the spectrum of approaches applied by their characters to deal with such circumstances. Both Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert draw particular attention to the binary codes of public and private life and the extent to which the characters are compelled to manipulate or conceal their true feelings in order to conform to their societies' dogmatic customs and expectations of decorum. In these passages Dickens and Flaubert also highlight the strength of feeling towards their lost love one of their characters, Joe and Charles, basking in what Lafayette calls "the innocence of early youth." However, Dickens and Flaubert both despondently show how Joe and Charles' love for their recently-lost wives cannot even find sanctity at the.....