Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Summary
Emma Bovary marries Charles, a plain, kind, unambitious medical officer in provincial Normandy, expecting the romantic transport she has absorbed from novels, and finds instead a life of dull evenings and a husband whose devotion embarrasses her. The Bovarys move to Yonville, a market town Flaubert invented in careful, exhaustive detail, complete with its own pharmacist, Monsieur Homais, whose vanity and pseudoscience run through the book as a kind of counterpoint to Emma's romantic delusions. Emma drifts first into an unspoken attachment to the young law clerk Leon Dupuis, who leaves for Paris before either admits anything; the landowner Rodolphe Boulanger then makes her his mistress, and when Leon reenters her life in Rouen she takes him as a lover too, chasing in each affair the intensity she cannot find at home, while running up debts with the merchant Monsieur Lheureux that neither lover will cover when the bills finally come due. Rodolphe abandons her rather than fund an elopement; Leon tires of her demands; and Emma, cornered by debt with nowhere left to turn, swallows arsenic and dies over the course of an agonising, closely described chapter that refuses to soften what poison actually does to a body. Charles, still uncomprehending, discovers her letters after her death and dies himself not long after, ruined and alone with their daughter Berthe.
Flaubert wrote the book to be, in his own words, about nothing external, held together purely by the discipline of its style, and the prose earns that claim: every sentence is weighed, and the free indirect style that lets Emma's inflated interior voice bleed into the narration without warning is one of the most influential technical inventions in the history of the novel. It is not a warm book, and Flaubert keeps a cold, exact distance from Emma even at her most sympathetic, but the control is extraordinary, and it repays close, patient reading more than fast reading.
Flaubert spent nearly five years writing it, testing sentences aloud in what he called his gueuloir, his shouting room, before letting them stand.
Historical Context & Significance
Madame Bovary ran in the Revue de Paris from October to December 1856, and the journal's editors cut passages they feared would draw prosecution before it even appeared. It did not help: French prosecutors charged Flaubert with offending public morality and religion, and the trial opened in January 1857. Flaubert was acquitted on 7 February 1857, and the publicity turned the book into a bestseller within weeks of its full publication that April.
The novel is now regarded as a founding work of literary realism, and later writers made large claims for it: Henry James wrote that it "has a perfection that... makes it stand almost alone," and Julian Barnes called it the best novel ever written. Milan Kundera credited Flaubert with lifting the novel's prose out of what he called its old stigma of aesthetic inferiority. Its technique shaped Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, and it has been filmed repeatedly, from 1934 through a 2014 adaptation.