Society in ‘The Lady of the Camellias’

Balla Sherwan
Diyar Mahdi
Rwa Hamadamin
Hiwa Sadradin

This study’s focus is on Duma’s work ‘The lady of Camellias’, a semi-autobiographical novel first published in 1848 in France by Alexander Dumas fils who is Alexander Dumas's son, his father Alexander Dumas was also a writer. The title of the novel embraces a great historical background which is based on real events. The novel tells the tragic story of a young, beautiful Parisian lady ‘Marguerite Gautier’ who is known as ‘Camellia’ because of her love for the camellia flower and also a young bourgeois ‘Armand Duval’ who was madly in love with Marguerite. The author's inspiration for this novel came from the sincerity and purity of this love story that he had found between these two lovers. The methods of collecting the data is theoretical and secondary data collected from books, papers, researches, and articles. Here the aims of the study is to highlight three themes of society. The first one How Armand's father tried to convince Marguerite to leave Armand, since Marguerite had become a source of doom for his family. And that Marguerite’s close friend ‘Prudence’, whom she lived with when she had a happy life, and when her royal life disappeared mysteriously. The final topic highlights the most important aspect of the study: how society treated women, using them as tools and then throwing them as a garbage. The conflicts on this work has shown that distrust can be the worst destroyer of any strong bond, as it started first from Armand’s side. Although Marguerite had great readiness to prove her love with rarest sacrifice anyone could imagine, it turned out it had a sickening influence on her and ended her life tragically, instead of rewarding her.