. Striving for higher social status has been the downfall of many, many people just as it was the destruction of Emma Bovary. In Nineteenth Century France, several class existed: peasant or working class, middle class, upper-middle class, bourgeois, gentry and aristocratic. In the story, Madame Bovary, we see a number of individuals striving to move themselves “ up” to the bourgeois, a status that is higher than the working class but not as high as nobility. The bourgeois are characterized by being educated and wealthy but unlike the arist ....