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Madame Bovary (Bantam Classics)

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When I was teaching World Literature we began class each year reading Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." Unfortunately, this is the one novel that most needs to be read in its original language since Flaubert constructed each sentence of his book with the precision of a poet. As an example of the inherent problems of translation I would prepare a handout with four different versions of the opening paragraphs of "Madame Bovary." Each year my students would come to the same conclusion that I had already reached in selecting which version of the book they were to read: Lowell Bair's translation is the best of the lot. It is eminently readable, flowing much better than most of its competitors. Consequently, if you are reading "Madame Bovary" for pleasure or class, this is the translation you want to track down.

Flaubert's controversial novel is the first of the great "fallen women" novels that were written during the Realism period ("Anna Karenina" and "The Awakening" being two other classic examples). It is hard to appreciate that this was one of the first novels to offer an unadorned, unromantic portrayal of everyday life and people. For some people it is difficult to enjoy a novel in which they find the "heroine" to be such an unsympathetic figure; certainly the events in Emma Bovary's life have been done to death in soap operas. Still, along with Scarlett O'Hara, you have to consider Emma Bovary one of the archetypal female characters created in the last 200 years of literature. "Madame Bovary" is one of the greatest and most important novels, right up there with "Don Quixote" and "Ulysses." I just wish I was able to read in it French.

In this masterpiece of French literature, Gustave Flaubert tells the tale of Emma Bovary, née Roualt, an incurably romantic woman who finds herself trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage in a prosaic bourgeois French village, Yonville-l'Abbaye.

Her attempts to escape the tedium of her life through a series of adulterous affairs are thwarted by the reality that the men she chooses to love are shallow and self-centered and thus are unable to love anyone but themselves.

In love with a love that can never be and dreadfully overstretched financially, Emma finds herself caught in a downward spiral that can only end in tragedy.

Part of the difficulty, and the pleasure, of reading Madame Bovary comes from the fact the Flaubert refuses to embed his narrative with a moral matrix; he refuses, at least explicitly, to tell the reader, what, if any, moral lesson he should draw from the text.

It is this lack of moral viewpoint that made Madame Bovary shocking to Flaubert's contemporaries, so much so that Flaubert found himself taken to court for the novel's offenses to public and religious decency. Although today's readers will find no such apparent scandals in the book, they will still be challenged to make sense of both Emma and her story.

It is quite common to see Emma Bovary as silly, extravagant and much too romantically inclined. An avid consumer of romantic literature (a habit into which the heroine was indoctrinated in her convent school upbringing), Emma has made the morbid mistake of buying into the notion of romantic love in its fullest sense, and the mortal mistake of believing she can reach its fulfillment in her own life.

As such, Emma Bovary becomes a tragic figure of almost mythic proportion. Far from being foolish and self-indulgent, Emma is the victim of her own fecund imagination. A lesser woman would have been satisfied in the constrained world Emma inhabits, a world of sewing and teas and parties. But Emma is possessed of both splendid passions and tremendous energy; an artist and a rebel in her challenge to the priorities and ideals of her age.

Madame Bovary is an unusual novel in the sense that it has given its name to its own psychological condition: bovarysme, the condition in which we delude ourselves as to who and what we really are and as to life's potential to fulfill.

In this sense, Madame Bovary becomes the story of one woman's faulty perception of reality. In an early version of the novel, Flaubert included a scene at the ball at La Vaubyessard in which Emma is seen looking out at the landscape surrounding the house through colored panes of glass, a scene clearly meant as a representation of Emma's projection onto the world of an illusory and faulty model of reality.

Emma cannot, or will not, see the world as it is, since she is constantly imposing onto it, and herself, the criteria of romantic literature. Flaubert has thus written a supremely romantic novel about the dangers of reading supremely romantic novels!

Romantics, Flaubert seems to be saying, have no reasonable hope of ever seeing their fondest dreams come to fruition.

This is, indeed, a recurrent pattern in the novel: Emma dreams of one thing but gets something else entirely. Marriage, motherhood, and ultimately, adultery, all fall short of Emma's expectations and she appears to be a woman doomed to one disappointment after another.

Although Emma believes her marriage will fulfill her romantic expectations, Charles certainly fails to live up to Emma's hopes, and even Rodolphe, with his expensive riding boots, gloves and substantial income is eventually considered coarse and vulgar by Emma. Léon, the very essence of the young, romantic artist, leaves Emma when he is made premier clerc, and Emma finds she much come to the realization that even adultery contains "toutes les platitudes du mariage."

The foregoing certainly begs the question: are Emma's expectations too high or is life fundamentally deficient?

The society portrayed in Madame Bovary is one stratified in terms of class, and this is a book about the bourgeoisie, a portrait of class in the process of finding and defining itself and its role in society.

The novel is filled with scenes of buying and selling and even personal relationships fall under the sway of financial considerations.

What is particularly notable about Emma is her extravagance: she spares no thought for expense and consumes far beyond her means. Rejecting good economic management, thrift and hard work, Emma dedicates herself to style extraordinaire and lavishes expensive presents on her "man of the moment."

The world described in Madame Bovary is an extremely enclosed and restricted one and images of entrapment are abundant throughout the book. Emma's first marital home is described as "trop étroite;" her marriage to Charles is likened to "l'ardillon pointu de cette courroie complexe qui la bouclait de tous les côtes."

These restrictive images clearly demonstrate how confining Emma finds her world. Trapped in the dusty and damp home with its "éternel jardin," the highly imaginative Emma sees no escape.

It is interesting to note that when Emma does attempt to escape the confines of femininity, society and marriage through adultery, many of the scenes take place al fresco. (The first act of adultery with Rodolphe takes place in a forest and her later relationship with Léon contains a scene on a river.)

Later scenes, however, reveal the degradation inherent in Emma's acts and she finds herself confined to bedrooms that are sorely reminiscent of the restrictions of her married life. The fiacre ride with Léon in Rouen, in particular, is anticipatory of entrapment. For Emma, adultery eventually becomes as much of a prison as is marriage and family life.

Another recurrent image is that of the window. This can be interpreted as Emma's desire for escape or as a reaffirmation of her entrapment and powerlessness. The window opens onto a space of which poor Emma can only sit and dream; it serves as a frame for both her dissatisfaction and her fantasies.

In order to enjoy Madame Bovary to the fullest extent, it must be read in the original French. This is an absolute for Flaubert was an author who made full use of the potential offered by his native tongue. Although many translations are superb, nothing can match the original French in its poetic prose and lush descriptions.

Many interpretations of this wonderful and timeless novel are possible and all, no doubt, hold some validity. Therein lies the book's genius. Of one thing, though, we have no doubt: luscious Emma Bovary was, indeed, a victim. Whether of herself or of a repressive society matters little.

...that is to say : this is one the books that can't be translated, becauses it uses all potentialities of french language. Those who admire in this book the cruelty and truth of the psychological portraits mustn't forget that Flaubert's dream was to write a "book about nothing, that would be held only by the force of the style". The story didn't interest him and in his correspondance you see how he got bored while writing it. Personnaly I don't like this kind of "feminine life in the country and loss of illusions that is to entail" but the style is just amazing. Proust said that Flaubert had "a grammatical genius". That's why anyone who can read french might throw his english version. Also, don't be obsessed by the famous "Madame Bovary, c'est moi". Flaubert wrote this book to get rid of his romantic tendancies : hence this mix of sympathy and deep cruelty about the stupidity of his heroin. This cruelty is reinforced by the use of the "focalisation interne" (when the writer writes from the point of view of the character) and the perfect neutrality : we live from the inside Emma's dreams and feel how ridiculous they are, and then, from the outside, we see them being slowly destructed. Read this masterpiece, and focus your attention on the style, and the construction (otherwise the book has little interest!)

I was required to read this book a little more than ten years ago in my AP English class in highschool but was immediately drawn into the story. I think that one of the most enduringly appealing aspects of this book is not just its imagery and perfectly crafted story but the fact that although Flaubert mocks his subjects (with much wit and humor), he also identifies with them.

Much has been made of his comment "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", but I think we all have a little Madame Bovary in us, no matter how much contempt we have for her hurtful and selfish actions. Her passionate nature and inability to accept the banality of a middle-class life filled with hypocrites is certainly as current now as it was then. We don't just identify with Madame Bovary, however-I think Flaubert also creates a sympathetic character in the pathetic Charles, who despite his buffoonery is loyal and loving. This is a classic as exciting and well-written as they get!

"Madame Bovary" is considered a masterpiece by historical context, but it's easy to see why it holds up well today. As much a social comedy as a personal tragedy, it taps into the same kinds of emotions and desires that have shaped Western society for the past 150 years -- ambition, lust, escapism. It is a depressing novel whose heroine is so thoroughly unsympathetic that you read it to find out if she gets what she deserves.

Emma Rouault's misfortune is that she grew up with unrealistic expectations about life. As a girl, she indulged herself in romantic novels and developed maudlin and almost fantastical notions of what love and marriage must be like. She accepts the proposal of a socially awkward widower and doctor named Charles Bovary, even though she does not seem to have much genuine love for him. In accordance with her fantasies, their wedding is straight out of a fairy tale.

The fairy tale doesn't last long. Emma soon finds herself bored by her husband's spartan lifestyle and annoyed by his occasional professional ineptitude. Shameful of what she perceives to be her low social status as a country doctor's wife, she is attracted by the glamor of big cities and high society she reads about in the fashionable magazines. She dutifully takes care of her household, but she is selfish, temperamental, and mean to her servants and her baby daughter. What's pathetic about her is that she wants to experience the kind of love she's read about in her books, but her personality is so antithetical to what love is that she will never be able to understand or appreciate it in its purest form.

After the Bovarys move to a small rural town called Yonville, Emma's beauty and charm attract the flirtatious attentions of several men in town, including two with whom she succumbs to adultery: Leon, a young law clerk, with whom she carries on an affair in the nearby city of Rouen under the guise of taking piano lessons; and the suave but sleazy Rodolphe who, impudently (and correctly) calculating her husband to be a naive dullard, uses her and throws her away like the tramp that she is. In the course of her webs of deceipt and her taste for expensive, fashionable things, she drives herself and her husband into irreparable debt with morbidly tragic conclusions.

The characterization of the Yonville townsfolk is so rich that whole other novels could be written about them. In particular there is the garrulous pharmacist Monsieur Homais, a neo-Voltaire type of character who disdains the clergy and has faith in science and a morality based on common sense. Such characterization provides a comic counterbalance to Emma's majestically tragic figure; I've seen the same kind of thing in novels by Balzac and Thomas Hardy, where the unwashed masses are always there in the background, reassuring us that the world, on average, goes on the way it always has even while the main characters are front and center playing out their little dramas.

Madame Bovary is a wonderfully tragic and passionate novel. Emma's passion for romance is portrayed candidly, realistically, with no sloppy sentimentalism. Her disillusionment and downfall are brought about by her own actions, fired by her own flaws. Flaubert is very frank in his portrayal of her affairs. He is truthful about their emptiness and their consequences. This is the quality that elevates the book from a supermarket romance novel to a classic. Flaubert is quite avant garde in his sympathy for the plight of women in Emma's time period. He recognizes their lack of freedom and the social restrictions placed on women that are not placed on men. Yet he does not excuse Emma because of this injustice. She is still held accountable for her actions. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good tragedy. It is easy to relate to Emma Bovary, for everyone knows what it is to have high ideals dashed. I found the story rather slow in the beginning, but as the pace of Emma's life quickens, so does that of the novel. If you enjoy action packed plots, you may not enjoy this book. Those who enjoy satire and dark humor would also like Madame Bovary. Flaubert has a wonderful dry, cynical wit. One notices this in his descriptions of characters, especially the minor ones. He is a dark Jane Austen. I am a student at Mercy High School in CT, and I read this novel as part of the Advanced Placement curriculum. I would recommend this book to other AP students; it is entertaining, and a valuable novel to be familiar with.

Emma is a very vivid character. She is somebody desperately looking to elevate herself above her petit bourgeois environment. She craves riches and refinement. She craves excitement. She is dreadfully capricious and deceitful in her quest to rise above. She has poetic dreams of living life in castles and on beautiful islands with dashing lovers. The most realistic part to her is that she is not particularly tinged with any nobility but is greedy and brutal.

Her husband Charles is somebody who seems not as well done as Emma at least in the first parts of the book, but he becomes more clear towards the end, particularly after the denouement of the story. He is a timid man with not much confidence, easily dominated by women. He is perfectly content with being a husband and father. The limited intellectual, social and material opportunities available in the village of Yonville and surrounding areas appear to suit him just fine.

Among authors of the first rank, Flaubert's ability to tell a story, to set a scene is perhaps towards the lower end of the spectrum and he not uncommonly seems to try too hard to strive for effects on the reader. But the book overall is an enjoyable read, particularly after the Bovarys move to Yonville. The story takes off after that.

When they move to Yonville, we are introduced to the character of Monsieur Homais, my favorite character of the book by far. Homais is the village pharmacist. He fancies himself a very important scientific authority and intellectual in general, enjoys pestering people with his conversation and company, is obsequious before social superiors and bullying towards his inferiors. He is a very cocksure middlebrow. Homais seems to be a figure on which Flaubert puts all the ridiculous and irritating personal characteristics of human beings. Flaubert pours out a great deal of amusing irony in describing his actions. Indeed there is an irony underlying much of the novel in describing the petit-bourgeois characters that compose this book. But Flaubert does not seem to be without compassion in the novel, interestingly, especially when considering that he had a very violent dislike for the rural bourgeoisie in all its forms.

The last quarter of the book is really superb stuff. I really enjoyed it.It is very well done, with simplicity. The reader gets a strong feeling from Flaubert of the dreadful insoluble tragedy of the situation and a stark feeling for the dark side of life.

Also I must say I was impressed with Flaubert's rendering of the speech at the village agricultural fair by the provincial politician. Flaubert seems to have had an excellent ear for the sort of platitudes that such a politician in 1840's France might have given, for the speech is very realistic. The scene at that fair with the old peasant woman winning the prize is brilliantly done.

A beautifully written book full of loathsome characters - whoever said "women should be beaten regularly, like gongs," must surely have been thinking of someone like Emma Bovary. I failed to grasp what exactly about her made her husband so tolerant of her. His stoicism was mystifying to me, I couldn't decide if he was terribly stupid, or was complacent in his certainty of her affection for him, or that he loved her so much he turned a blind eye to all her goings on.

As I turned each page I got a feeling that this writer must be a misogynist, to invent such a woman; the reader isn't spared - he describes her awful character with such meticulous detail.

I was also puzzled by the depth of my animosity towards Emma. Surely there are many like her. And why do we find it easier to deal with an adulterous male than a female?

In short I spent an awful two days reading this book, and can't shake off the feeling that I'm in the throes of a nightmare. Crime and Punishment which also moved me deeply, is a light breeze when compared to this book.

Because I was so angry about the character, I couldn't enjoy his prose.

This is not among my few favorite novels, but no one who is sensitive to great literature can fail to see the brilliance of this work. In doing a bit of background work, I made the following discoveries:

Virtually every French writer of the late 19th acknowledged Flaubert as their model. In England, Thomas Hardy essentially tried to write Flaubertian novels in an English rural context. Later in England, D. H. Lawrence explicitly wrote novels that were polemical to Flaubert, so that he wrote in reaction against MADAME BOVARY. In Russia, Tolstoy decided to write his own version of the story of Emma Bovary, ANNA KARENINA. In the 20th century, James Joyce--who was proud of how few writers he had studied--confessed that he had read virtually every line of Flaubert and himself tried to carry to the furthest extreme the Flaubertian dictum of art for arts sake. And this is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Is this the most influential novel ever written? I honestly don't know, but if one wanted to construct a case for that assertion, a very, very powerful one could be made.

And the short answer to the question above, is "Nothing." So many great reviewers and critics agree that this is one of the greatest masterpieces of literature that I finally had to see for myself. I was definitely not disappointed.

Even in translation, it is easy to notice the extreme care that Flaubert put into his choices of mood and tone, metaphors, analogies, descriptions, dialogue, his characters' interior monologue, even the length of sentences, paragraphs and chapters. And his plot is not only perfectly paced, but keeps giving you interesting tidbits right till the very end.

I don't even begin to compare it with "Anna Karenina" or "The Scarlet Letter." In terms of sheer entertainment value, "Madame Bovary" wins hands down. While it doesn't provide the scope or the psychological analysis of Tolstoy's masterpiece, I found it less demanding and far more enjoyable. No, the characters aren't as three-dimensional as Tolstoy's, but neither are there reams of pages full of farming, hunting and local politics with which to get bored.

If you're looking for the first real modern novel, look no further. Not only is it the first, but it is also one of the very best.