Bovary vs. Buchanan

The book that I am reading currently is "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert. The book is about a doctors wife, Emma, or Madame Bovary, who weds Monsieur Bovary, a young doctor at the time. When she first marries him after Monsieur Bovary becoming a widower, she is extremely happy to be wed and have an opportunity to escape her country life.
As we continue on in the book, we learn that Madame Bovary begins to feel depressed, and the life of being a mother and housewife is not satisfying her the way she thought that it would, so she begins to get sidetracked with other men.
When I first started reading this book, it reminded me of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I saw similar forms of mockery between the two books on how Emma Bovary and Daisy Buchanan both appear to have the ideal life, but have love problems that to the outside reader seem very minute problems compared to their own. Emma is a country girl who marries a doctor, and Daisy Buchanan marries Tom Buchanan, who comes from an extremely wealthy family. Both Emma and Daisy have daughters and recognize that being a woman is a disadvantage. "But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, help by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains," (Flaubert 86). "I'm glad its a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool," (Fitzgerald 118). In Emma's thoughts she knew that she wanted a son because men have so much more access and freedom than girls do, and even though Daisy says that she is happy to have a girl, she knows that being a girl in this world is difficult and unfair compared to the lives of men. Then the two of them embark on affairs. Even though Daisy was with Jay Gatsby, her past lover, while Emma was with two men who filled the emptiness in her marriage where Charles couldn't.
What I also found was that both books mocked the lives of the rich. And how they appeared to have everything anyone could ever hope for in life, when to an outsider had such miniscule problems in their life. Emma even mocks a fellow man of her own class complaining of his depression, "'Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! If I had some aim in life, if I had met some love, if I had found some one! Oh, how I would have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything, overcome everything!' 'Yet it seems to me,' said Emma, 'that you are not to be pitied.' 'Ah! you think so?' said Rodolphe. 'For, after all,' she went on, 'you are free----' she hesitated, 'rich---' 'Do not mock me,' he replied." (Flaubert 131).  She even notices in other people when their complaints seem ridiculous, when she has similar feelings of depression but she sees nothing wrong with them. The comparison between the two books, for me, has been hard to ignore and pass over.