Madame Bovary

A male author describing the adulterous passions of an unhappy woman, Flaubert tears into Madame Bovary as superficial and ridiculously narcissistic. Yet Flaubert was a terrific writer and also shows how empty and purposeless the restricted life of a middle-class woman was in his time–not poor enough to be preoccupied with surviving, but not rich enough to lead a glamorous life. It’s not like Emma Bovary can go to law school!

Flaubert’s dissection of Emma’s forbidden love life is brilliant. It’s downright painful to see Emma’s hopes and fantasies when the men in her life take what they want… show more.

Madame Bovary is the story of a woman who endlessly struggles to escape the banalities of her provincial life.

This novel makes you feel like you’re in the head of its main characters: first Charles Bovary, then Emma, his second wife and the novel’s eponymous hero. It is so realistic that upon its release, the author was taken to court for public offense against morality.

Still very modern, Emma’s drama is, to me, the discrepancy between illusions and reality. Her quest for happiness outside of her own condition and her inability to be satisfied with what she has are themes… show more.

Of the classics of doomed and tumultuous romance that inspired me—including Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet, and Anna Karenina—Madame Bovary resonates most.

A woman almost infected by the ruinous romances in the novels she reads, she throws her life away for a man entirely unworthy of this kind of sacrifice. What is life for without the threat of ruin?

Emma Bovary doesn’t know, but the reader does know that it will end badly. 

In my reading life, there is a clear before and after Flaubert’s masterpiece, because it challenged everything I thought I knew about reading itself. Although rooted in the realist tradition, Madame Bovary forces us to question everything – about the reliability of language, about tone, about the solidity of what and who is being described, about the very ground beneath our feet. Is Flaubert seducing us, or making fun of us, or both? Are we moved because the book is funny, or sad, or are we, the readers, merely ridiculous? Nothing reads quite the same way after Madame Bovary.… show more.

How very terrible is the overmastering desire that torments Madame Bovary! How large is our sympathy and, at the same time, our disgust for this woman of the provinces who, longing for the gay life of a Parisian, as it was in the first half of the nineteenth century, betrayed everyone she knew, including her doltish, if devoted husband, Charles, a country doctor. Fifty-five years have passed since my first acquaintance with Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 masterwork of psychological and sociological realism, a work that does not pass judgment on human folly but only presents it, although the absurdities of society… show more.

No account of French women since the Revolution of 1789 would be complete without reference to this classic tale of a listless housewife turned adulterous thrill-seeker then suicide victim. Through his narrator and his characters, Flaubert offers a male perspective on the female condition in mid-19th-century France, exploring the way women were viewed, judged, pressured, and tempted. Even today, Madame Bovary remains a sobering lesson in the potentially devastating effects when expectation and reality diverge. In Emma’s case, the dreary monotony of everyday life fosters a ‘grass is always greener’ mentality which ultimately proves fatal. With her… show more.