Reading Order
Madame Bovary Reading Order
Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert is the novel that invented modern literary realism — not just as a subject (the bored provincial doctor's wife who reads romantic novels and has adulterous affairs) but as a technique (free indirect discourse so controlled that the narrator never directly criticizes Emma Bovary, leaving the reader to do the work). The novel was prosecuted for immorality when it was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856 and Flaubert was acquitted, which made his reputation and launched a genuine debate about the relationship between literature and morality that has never entirely ended. Emma Bovary is simultaneously the victim of romantic fiction (she reads too many novels and believes them) and the only character in the novel who wants a life that is not merely adequate; her defeat at the hands of provincial mediocrity is the novel's tragedy, even though Flaubert refuses to say so. The famous 'Bovary, c'est moi' attributed to Flaubert captures the essential paradox: the most mercilessly ironic portrait of female romanticism in the history of the novel was written by someone who identified completely with his subject.
Where to start
Madame Bovary
Complete Madame Bovary Book List
- 1Buy
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert·1857·The complete novel; the critical edition prepared by Claudine Gothot-Mersch is definitive; Lydia Davis's English translation (Viking, 2010) is the most precise modern version - 2Buy
L'Éducation sentimentale
Gustave Flaubert·1869·The Parisian companion: where Madame Bovary presents a woman destroyed by romantic literature in the provinces, L'Éducation sentimentale presents a man destroyed by romantic love in Paris; the two together give Flaubert's complete vision of desire and disappointment - 3Buy
Salammbô
Gustave Flaubert·1862·The archaeological counter-novel: the historical novel of Carthage that Flaubert wrote between Bovary and L'Éducation; the same Flaubertian style applied to a subject whose distance from modern life is total - 4Buy
Trois Contes
Gustave Flaubert·1877·The late masterpiece: three tales (Un Cœur simple, La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, Hérodias) that distill the Flaubertian method into the short form; Un Cœur simple is the finest thing Flaubert wrote - 5Buy
Bouvard et Pécuchet
Gustave Flaubert·1881·The posthumous final novel: the comedy of two retired clerks who try to master every branch of knowledge in turn and fail at all of them; the most radical experiment in Flaubert's work and the least read
Madame Bovary — Frequently Asked Questions
What is free indirect discourse in Madame Bovary?
Free indirect discourse is the technique by which the narrative voice merges with the character's consciousness without announcing the shift — 'How wonderful it was! How stupid the world was! How mediocre was their life!' are phrases the narrator produces but that carry Emma's consciousness, her idiom, her habitual exclamations. Flaubert perfected and systematized this technique, making it the foundation of 20th-century literary fiction.
Is Emma Bovary sympathetic?
Flaubert forces the reader to decide. He never directly criticizes Emma, but he shows with absolute precision how she substitutes romantic clichés for genuine perception, how her infidelities repeat the same structure rather than producing something new, how her romanticism is a form of self-deception. But he also shows that she is the only character who wants a life worth wanting, and her defeat at the hands of provincial adequacy is genuinely tragic.
What was the scandal of the original publication?
The 1856 serialization in the Revue de Paris was prosecuted by the imperial government for 'outraging public morals' — the specific charges concerned the description of Emma's adulteries and the last rites scene. Flaubert was acquitted, partly because his lawyer demonstrated that the novel's ironic distance from Emma's romanticism constituted a moral judgment, and partly because the government case was poorly argued.
What does 'Bovaryisme' mean?
Jules de Gaultier coined the term to describe the capacity to conceive of oneself as other than one is — the specifically Emmaesque self-deception of substituting a romantic ideal for a real person, a real place, a real experience. Bovaryisme is now used more generally for the state of desiring something other than what one has without the capacity to see what one has clearly.
Is Madame Bovary based on a real person?
Partly — Flaubert used the case of Delphine Delamare, the wife of a country doctor in Normandy who died of poison in 1848 after debts accumulated by her extravagances, as the starting point. But Emma Bovary is entirely transformed from the historical Delphine: Flaubert's Emma is more intelligent, more self-conscious about her own romanticism, and more tragic than any historical source.
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