SOURCE: "Emma Bovary's Masculinization: Convention of Clothes and Morality of Conventions," in Gender and Literary Voice, edited by Janet Todd, Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1980, pp. 223-35.

In the following essay, Festa-McCormick examines how the motif of clothing illustrates Emma Bovary's conflicted experience of her feminine gender role. She notes that "the encroachment of masculinity on [Emma 's personality stands as a betrayal of her social role, progressively mirrored in the masculinization of her attire. "]

Emma Bovary has long been a favorite character for critics of fiction, analyzed from all angles, praised and vilified in turn, held as a type or treated as an individual, as a free spirit or a product of circumstances, the essence of femininity or the portrait of a man within a woman. We shall study here the problematic aspect of her womanhood in order to show how the encroachment of masculinity on her personality...