In every society there is a middle class. They don"t have the luxuries that the elite few have, but they are far from living on the streets. They are stuck in the middle. Now, maybe it"s a case of Jan Brady syndrome, but very often, the middle class would like to be at the top. You get to have an exciting, romantic life, much like that of . well . Marcia. There has to be some sort of influence that makes the middle class people think that way. One such influence was the period of Romanticism. It gave ordinary Jans a glimpse into exciting life. But the only way they could realize this kind of life was through a dream. Some people tried to make this dream a reality, and they wound up worse than they started. Such was the case of Emma, in Gustave Flaubert"s Madame Bovary. However, her results were tragic as she could not achieve that lifestyle she was looking for. In the 19th century, bourgeois women in France wanted to live a romantic life, as characterized by the influence of society.

             Emma Bovary had a dream of living in the high society. This dream came from her love of novels, especially romance novels. During the nineteenth century, Romanticism was alive in literature and art. It displayed exciting and emotional lifestyles, as opposed to ordinary life. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel defined Romanticism as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form." For part of Emma"s youth, she lived in a Catholic convent. She was essentially shut off from the exciting world that she yearned for, so she had to find ways of amusing herself. One of these ways was through reading romance novels. Once a week at the convent, a spinster came to mend the linens. She let the girls read the books she brought with her, and Emma took an instant liking to them. She found herself lost in a dream world of romance. Emma read books by authors like Sir Walter Scott, and she identified with the girl in the castle who watched from a window as her lover came galloping on a horse.