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Madame BovaryMadame Bovary Reading Order
Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert is one of the most formally perfect novels ever written and the founding text of modern literary realism. Emma Bovary, the wife of a provincial French doctor, has filled her mind with romantic novels and dreams of a passionate life she has never had; her successive affairs with Rodolphe and Léon are attempts to make her life match the novels she has read; her accumulation of debts to pay for the trappings of the romantic life she craves ends in bankruptcy and suicide. Flaubert's novel is both a devastating portrait of romantic self-delusion and a work of extraordinary stylistic precision — the 'mot juste' (the exact right word) was Flaubert's obsession, and the prose of Madame Bovary represents the highest degree of finish that the French prose tradition has achieved. The novel was prosecuted for immorality on its publication, and Flaubert's successful defense (that Emma's delusions are destroyed, not celebrated) helped establish the idea that literary realism was a morally serious enterprise rather than an incitement to vice.
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Madame Bovary (1857)
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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert·1857
Madame Bovary — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Flaubert sympathetic to Emma Bovary?
Flaubert's relationship to Emma is one of the most debated questions in the novel's critical history, partly because of his famous statement 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' — the suggestion that Emma's romanticism and disappointment were his own. The novel is both merciless in its analysis of Emma's self-delusion (her romantic fantasies are clearly identified as fantasies, and their origin in trashy romantic fiction is clearly shown) and deeply compassionate about the situation that makes those fantasies necessary. Emma's boredom is real, her intelligence is real, and the provincial society that cannot use her intelligence and offers her nothing better than Charles Bovary is also an object of Flaubert's contempt. The most honest reading is probably that Flaubert simultaneously identified with Emma (the romantic temperament) and was horrified by her (what romanticism does to people).
What does 'bovarysme' mean?
Bovarysme is a term coined from the novel (by the critic Jules de Gaultier in 1892) meaning the tendency to imagine oneself as something other and better than one is — the gap between one's romanticized self-image and actual reality. In the philosophical literature, it has been extended to describe any human tendency toward self-romanticization. Emma Bovary is its type case: she imagines herself as the heroine of the romantic novels she has read, and every encounter with actual reality — the actual Charles Bovary, the actual Rodolphe, the actual Léon — is eventually a disappointment because no actual person can be what a fictional character is.
What is Flaubert's style, and why does it matter?
Flaubert's style is characterized by the subordination of everything to the search for the mot juste — the exact right word — and by an extreme discipline of free indirect discourse (style indirect libre), in which the narrator's voice merges with the character's consciousness without quotation marks or 'she thought' attributions. This technique allows Flaubert to report Emma's romantic fantasies in language that mirrors the quality of those fantasies while simultaneously maintaining an ironic distance that shows them for what they are. The formal influence of Madame Bovary on subsequent European fiction is enormous: James, Joyce, Proust, and virtually every serious writer of the twentieth century worked in the shadow of the technical innovations that Flaubert developed in this novel.
How does Madame Bovary end?
Emma, unable to repay the debts she has accumulated, swallows arsenic and dies a slow, agonizing death that is described with clinical precision — one of the most deliberately unromantic death scenes in fiction, making it impossible to read Emma's end as the romantic self-destruction she might have imagined for herself. Charles Bovary discovers her infidelities after her death, is destroyed by the revelation, and dies shortly after. Their daughter Berthe is sent to a factory, which is the novel's final image of what romantic self-delusion costs the people around the romantic as well as the romantic herself.
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