Recommendations
Books Like Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Works that make the reader do the moral work the narrator refuses to do
Flaubert's great refusal is to judge Emma directly — the prose maintains its ironic distance and the reader is left to decide whether Emma's romanticism is ridiculous or tragic. These works share that same technique of withholding judgment and making the reader supply it from the materials the narrative provides.
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Buy on AmazonL'Éducation sentimentale
by Gustave Flaubert
The Parisian counterpart from the same author — where Emma Bovary is a woman destroyed by provincial romanticism, Frédéric Moreau is a man destroyed by Parisian sentiment; both are anti-Bildungsromane in which Flaubert refuses to allow any development or wisdom
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Russian counterpart — Tolstoy's adulterous wife who leaves her husband for Vronsky and is destroyed by the consequences is the same situation as Emma Bovary; the comparison reveals what Flaubert's irony removes from the subject that Tolstoy's sympathetic omniscience provides
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Buy on AmazonEffi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
The German provincial adultery novel — Fontane's 1895 novel of the young wife who has an affair and is destroyed by the honor code of Prussian society is the German Madame Bovary: the same provincial trap, the same social machinery of destruction, different national psychology
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Buy on AmazonThe Awakening
by Kate Chopin
The American continuation — Edna Pontellier's discovery that the freedom she desires is incompatible with the world she inhabits is Emma Bovary in 1899 New Orleans, with the Creole setting and the Gulf of Mexico replacing the Norman countryside and the Seine
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Buy on AmazonTrois Contes
by Gustave Flaubert
The Flaubertian contrast — Un Cœur simple's Félicité is the anti-Emma: the same Norman domestic world, the same Flaubertian style, but a protagonist who lives genuinely rather than romantically; reading both defines the range of Flaubert's sympathy and irony
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Buy on AmazonMiddlemarch
by George Eliot
The English humanitarian contrast — Dorothea Brooke's exceptional nature is the same quality as Emma Bovary's desire for a life worth wanting; Eliot says that the social blockage of that quality is tragic; Flaubert says it is ironic; the comparison defines the moral difference between English meliorism and French pessimism
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Buy on AmazonThe House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
The American gilded-age equivalent — Lily Bart's inability to commit to either financial security or genuine feeling is the Emma Bovary problem in a New York social world; both women are destroyed by the gap between what they want and what is available
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Buy on AmazonCousin Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
The Balzacian contrast from the same milieu — where Flaubert presents Emma's romanticism with cold precision, Balzac presents Bette's resentment with fascinated admiration; comparing the two shows the full range of French Realism's relationship to its female characters
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