Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

by Gustave Flaubert (Author), Margaret Mauldon (Translator), Malcolm Bowie (Introduction), Mark Overstall (Contributor) "We were studying when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy, not yet wearing a school uniform, and a monitor carrying a large..." (more)
Key Phrases: detest anew, imperial attorney, benign mercy, Madame Bovary, Monsieur Flaubert, Monsieur Homais (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post
It still astonishes.

If one were to ask, "World, which is the most perfect novel ever written?," the world would immediately answer: Madame Bovary. There are novels of greater structural complexity, such as Lord Jim and The Good Soldier, or of a broader social canvas, like Anna Karenina and In Search of Lost Time, or of more stylistic dash -- Ulysses, Lolita -- and many far more beloved (Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Leopard), but Madame Bovary still stands as the most controlled and beautifully articulated formal masterpiece in the history of fiction.

Flaubert's artistic sensibility veered most naturally to gaudy excess, not to say a voyeuristic passion for the fleshy, sanguinary and transgressive. A little too much was hardly enough for him. In The Temptation of St. Anthony (three versions, 1849, 1856, 1874), the Queen of Sheba offers herself to the austere saint as a sexual paradise, which she sums up in the quite believable assertion, "I am not a woman, I am a world." Similarly, Salammbo (1862) -- an utterly static novel about ancient Carthage -- presents painterly tableaux of orgy, battle and torture. (I like its overripe sickly-sweetness, but am nearly alone in this taste -- it should have been illustrated by the Delacroix of "The Death of Sardanapalus.") By contrast, Flaubert's most ambitious completed novel, A Sentimental Education (1869) -- a vast social portrait of Paris in the 1840s -- errs in being too dry, too slow-moving, too programmatic. Yet its final pages -- in which the callow Frederic again meets the once-adored but now white-haired Madame Arnoux -- remain among the most honest and disillusioning in all fiction. Only in Madame Bovary (1857) -- and the story "A Simple Heart" (1877) -- did the novelist find just the right style, serene in tone, mildly ironic, tightly organized (partly through the use of unobtrusive symbolism), concise, exact and virtually without stylistic grand-standing. You can shake Madame Bovary and nothing will fall out.

Like certain other classics (The Scarlet Letter, for instance), Flaubert's tale of adultery in the provinces suffers from being a staple of the school curriculum. Generations of French-language students have parsed their way through its paragraphs, noting Emma's future ruination because of her romantic reading and brief glimpse of aristocratic life, speculating about the horse or butterfly symbolism, dissecting the stichomythia of the scene at the country fair where the announcement of agricultural prizes alternates with Rodolphe's honeyed words of seduction. Such linguistic close analysis, which Flaubert invites and rewards, may nonetheless displace attention from an equally important aspect of the novel: its narrative economy and speed. Here is one advantage to reading a translation, particularly a fine one like Margaret Mauldon's: You don't need to pause to look up all those mots justes in a dictionary. Too often students merely work their way through the text with the same grim determination that its author relied on to compose it.

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). Returning from their wedding, the newlyweds and the bridal party must cross a farmer's field:

"Emma's dress was rather long and the hem trailed a bit; from time to time she would stop and lift it up, then, with gloved fingers, delicately remove the wild grasses and tiny thistle burrs, while Charles stood empty-handed, waiting for her to finish."

As in Jane Austen, there's pervasive irony throughout Flaubert, some of it verging on the heavy-handed: Charles, unaware as usual, announces to the lecherous Rodolphe "that his wife was at his disposal." But what struck me most in rereading the book this time are its tiny, almost casual, naturalistic details:

Describing the houses in Yonville, we learn that "here and there the plastered walls, crossed diagonally by black beams, support a straggly pear tree, and at the doors of the houses are miniature swinging gates, to keep out the baby chicks that cluster round the step to peck at crumbs of brown bread soaked in cider."

Leon, a young lawyer who has begun to fall in love with Emma, accompanies the young mother on a visit to the wet-nurse: "Madame Bovary blushed, and he turned away, fearful lest his glance might perhaps have been too bold. The baby had just vomited on the collar of her dress, and she put her down again in the cradle. The wet-nurse quickly came over to wipe up the mess, assuring Emma that it wouldn't show."

At the agricultural fair, "to one side, about a hundred yards beyond the enclosure, motionless as a statue of bronze, stood a great black bull wearing a muzzle, with an iron ring in its nostril. A child dressed in rags held it by a rope."

Finally, what could be more true to life than this? Leon is trying to seduce Emma inside the Rouen Cathedral, but "she seemed determined to let him talk without interrupting him. She sat with her arms crossed, looking down at the rosettes on her slippers, occasionally wriggling her toes slightly inside the satin."

Though Madame Bovary escapes Flaubert's predilection for overblown, histrionic description, his heroine is primarily a woman of gestures, a mime of the grandly operatic emotions she yearns to feel. In her love-talk Emma can be as saccharine as a P.G. Wodehouse female lyricizing over the stars as "God's daisy chain." Because she comes to fear any diminution in passion, Emma inevitably takes to growing more brazen, more desperately fantastic, with each sexual encounter. Fundamentally, she is an empty vessel, a pretty B-movie actress trying out new roles which she then overplays.

And yet it's hard not to sympathize with this doomed young woman. Flaubert may have wanted us to regard her as essentially kitsch, a creature formed by impossible reveries of blissful self-fulfillment, whether in marriage, passion or religious observance. But Emma nonetheless tries, and tries hard, to live her dreams and in this sense is hardly different from, say, Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Or any of the rest of us. Don't we all ache with unabashed hopes, unassuaged desires? For Emma, the ball at La Vaubyessard shines as a golden interlude in her drab life, a glimpse of paradise. Nonetheless, "little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained." The yearning always remains.

For the modern reader, familiar with adultery through magazine articles, television soap operas or personal experience, Madame Bovary shows how surprisingly common, how standardized, is the blueprint for such illicit affairs: The soft-focused imaginings, the touch of a hand, a suggestive phrase or smile, the search for seclusion, the breathless rush to the lover's arms, the fear of exposure, the financial outlay (and the need to hide it), the ever-growing recklessness, and then, more and more often, the violent arguments and impossible demands, the violation of promises, mutual recrimination and, finally, inevitably, the tearful break-up, leading to further heartache or embitterment and, sometimes, relief. As Flaubert writes about the last days of the affair with Leon, "They knew one another too well to experience that wonderment of mutual possession that increases its joy a hundredfold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma was discovering, in adultery, all the banality of marriage."

When Emma tells her first lover, Rodolphe -- cad, bounder, scoundrel, rake -- how much she adores him, how she will be his servant, submit to his every desire as his concubine, Flaubert observes:

"He had heard these things said to him so many times that they no longer held any surprises for him. Emma was just like all his mistresses, and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, which never varies in its forms and its expression."

Such world-weary, Gallic cynicism. But Emma truly loves Rodolphe (or thinks she does). Still "he could not see -- this man of such broad experience -- the difference of feeling, beneath the similarity of expression. Because wanton or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he only half believed in the sincerity of those he was hearing now; to a large extent they should be disregarded, he believed, because such exaggerated language must surely mask commonplace feelings: as if the soul in its fullness did not sometimes overflow into the most barren metaphors, since no one can ever tell the precise measure of his own needs, of his own ideas, of his own pain . . ." That is movingly true in itself -- how often do words fail us when we wish to express our deepest feelings -- but Flaubert, in his genius, caps even this with one of his most imaginative and disheartening similes:

" . . . and human language is like a cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity."

In his excellent introduction to this new edition, Malcolm Bowie further analyzes this passage to demonstrate how Flaubert is actively arguing with his own characters, thus enhancing the narrative dynamic of the novel. That's certainly true, but ordinary readers can think about it later. What truly matters is this: Madame Bovary is available in a superb new translation, in a handsome hardback volume, and if you've never read it, or if you've only worked through it in first-year college French, you need to sit down with this book as soon as possible. This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life. Some early critics complained that Emma's story was a sordid and commonplace one, yet that is, paradoxically, its glory. The novelist once famously proclaimed that he himself was Madame Bovary -- but failed to add that so are you, so am I. We are all the victims of unrealized or unrealizable dreams. They somehow slip from our grasp or glitter before our eyes, only a little beyond our reach. "I admire tinsel as much as gold," Flaubert once wrote in a letter. "Indeed, the poetry of tinsel is even greater, because it is sadder."

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
Novel by Gustave Flaubert, published in two volumes in 1857. The novel, with the subtitle Moeurs de province ("Provincial Customs"), first appeared in installments in the Revue from October 1 to December 15, 1856. It ushered in a new age of realism in literature. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert took a commonplace story of adultery and made of it a book that has continued to be read because of its profound humanity. Emma Bovary is a bored and unhappy middle-class wife whose general dissatisfaction with life leads her to act out her romantic fantasies and embark on an ultimately disastrous love affair. She destroys her life by embracing abstractions--passion, happiness--as concrete realities. She ignores material reality itself, as symbolized by money, and is inexorably drawn to financial ruin and suicide. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 358 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (June 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192840398
• ISBN-13: 978-0192840394
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (200 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #460,907 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #27 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( F ) > Flaubert, Gustave

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hope Diamond of Novels, August 17, 2000

By	Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Madame Bovary (Paperback)

Making a statement like Madame Bovary is the "greatest" novel ever written would be superfluous. It could be argued that it is the most perfectly written novel in the history of letters and that in creating it, Flaubert mastered the genre. What can't be argued is that it is one of the most influential novels ever written. It changed the face of literature as no other novel has, and has been appreciated and acknowledged by virtually every important novelist who was either Flaubert's contemporary or who came after him.

It's interesting to see the range in opinion that still surrounds this novel. Some of the Readers here at Amazon are morally affronted by the novel's central character, viewing her as something sinister and "unlikeable," and panning the novel for this reason. Such a reaction recalls the negative reviews Bovary engendered soon after its initial publication. It was attacked by many of the authorities of French literature at the time for being ugly and perverse, and for the impression that the novel presented no properly moral frame. These readers didn't "like" Emma much either, and they took their dislike out on her creator.

But this is one of the factors making Madame Bovary "modern". One of the hallmarks of modern novels is that they often portray unsympathetic characters, and Emma certainly falls into this category. How can we as readers "like" a woman who elbows her toddler daughter away from her so forcefully that the child "fell against the chest of drawers, and cut her cheek on the brass curtain-holder." After this pernicious behavior, Emma has a few brief moments of self-castigation and maybe even remorse, but very soon is struck by "what an ugly child" Berthe is. Emma's self-centeredness borders on solipsism. For readers looking for maternal instincts in their female characters or for a depiction of a devoted wife, they had better turn to Pearl S. Buck and The Good Earth, perhaps, rather than to Flaubert.

Much has been made of Flaubert's attempts to remove himself from the narrative, that he was searching for some sort of ultimate objectivity. His narrative technique is much more complex than that, however. It is his employment of a shifting narrative, sometimes objective, sometimes subjective, that again is an indicator of the novel's modernity. At times the narrator is merely reporting events or is involved in providing descriptive details. Yet often the authorial voice makes rather plain how the reader is to look at Emma and her plebeian persona. When she finally succumbs to Rodolphe and thinks she is truly in love, Flaubert becomes downright cynical: " `I've a lover, a lover,' she said to herself again and again, revelling in the thought as if she had attained a second puberty. At last she would know the delights of love, the feverish joys of which she had despaired. She was entering a marvelous world where all was passion, ecstasy, delirium."

Emma is a neurasthenic, in the modern sense, but in the 19th century she would have been said to suffer from hysteria, a mental condition diagnosed primarily in women. When her lovers leave her, she has what amounts to nervous breakdowns. After Rodolphe leaves her she makes herself so sick that she comes near death. Her imagination is much too powerful and too impressionable for her own good. This is part of the reason for Flaubert's oft-repeated quote, "Bovary, c'est moi." Flaubert was a neurasthenic as well and could easily work himself into a swoon as a result of his imaginative flights. There is even conjecture that he may have been, like Dostoevsky, an epileptic, and it is further intimated that this disorder was brought on by nerves, though this may be dubious, medically speaking.

Madame Bovary is not flawless, but it comes awfully close. It is one of the great controlled experiments in the fiction of any era. It even anticipates cinematic technique in many instances, but particularly in the scene at the Agricultural Fair. Note how Flaubert juxtaposes the utterly mundane activities and speeches occurring in the town square with Rodolphe's equally inane seduction of Emma in the empty Council Chamber above the square:

"He took her hand and she did not withdraw it."

"`General Prize!' cried the Chairman.'"

"`Just now, for instance, when I came to call on you...'"

"Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix."

"`...how could I know that I should escort you here?'"

"Seventy francs!"

"`And I've stayed with you, because I couldn't tear myself away, though I've tried a hundred times.'"

"Manure!"

This is representative Flaubert. With a few deft strokes, he lays the whole absurdity of both the seduction and the provincial's activities bare.

If you have read this book previously and have come away feeling demoralized and even angered, please try reading it again, this time concentrating on the richness of its metaphors, Flaubert's mastery of foreshadowing, symbolism and description. Maybe you will come away with your viewpoint changed. For those who have not yet read this classic of classics, I know that if your mind remains open, you will come away with an appreciation for this master-novelist and for this monumental work.

59 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For my money, the preferred translation of Flaubert's novel, April 8, 2001

By	Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Madame Bovary (Bantam Classics) (Paperback)

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.

51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Love With Love and Doomed From the Start, August 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Madame Bovary (Bantam Classics) (Paperback)

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.