Every little detail is mentioned with the same eagerness as a kid dobbing in their little brother. He puts together a file of evidence for her complicity, a smoking gun as you'd say, and leaves it up to us to point the finger. What would a child do working in a cotton factory, you ask? Oh, just a little mill-scavenging. They were not allowed to sit, rest, or take a break while the mill ran - which was always except for Sunday when they cleaned the huge, spinning WHEELS OF DEATH that caused these children to live in a constant state of grief and terror Well, doesn't that just cheer you up!
The entire story arc and every unnecessary tidbit condemns Emma like one more nail in the coffin. Society is condemned, men are condemned, romantic idealism is condemned. Really, this novel thinks everyone is to blame. What is this novel's answer to it? It seems to be saying, "Well, that silly woman had so much and she threw it all away and look at her now, kids. She's dead! And poor, which is really much worse.
A safe and comfortable home, a good husband who doted on her and she just couldn't be happy with that. Then it looks at society and says, "Well, you created this and now you've helped destroy her too, you assholes! I wonder what this book would have been like if it displayed a far more realistic approach to a woman having an affair and her reasons. Because, let's face it, this book's depiction of a woman and why she has extra-marital relations is very obtuse.
Emma's life and situation is hardly the common for women who seek more out of life. This book makes her quest for more seem silly, unneccessary and ungrateful. Most of all, I wonder what this novel would have been like if it had dealt with Emma as a real character. One who didn't need to be mostly insane to justify having an affair.
One who wasn't both stupid and entitled and didn't lose all her money through a lack of self-control and ability to take five seconds to do the math. One who was capable of growing and learning from life. Unfortunately all that is lost. Even in the end, Emma learnt nothing. All sound and fury. Signifying nothing. Much like this novel. My final criticism about this book This was a book about people gettin' it on Curse you, Flaubert!
Curse you! View all 47 comments. Madame Bovary is Gustav Flaubert's most famous novel and realistically tells the story and the sinking of a young woman. The subtle language, the characteristic detailed descriptions let you dive into a completely different world. And even if the story comes from a completely different time, there are so many parallels to ours.
There are many possibilities for interpretation and also the psychological aspect is not neglected. Madame Bovary's story, especially when you consider the time the novel Madame Bovary is Gustav Flaubert's most famous novel and realistically tells the story and the sinking of a young woman.
Madame Bovary's story, especially when you consider the time the novel was written. He was a scandal then. There was even a trial. Despite its age, the book is timeless and therefore always up-to-date. If you are interested in French culture, you should have a look at this exciting book.
Gustave Flaubert is one of the most brilliant authors of his time, whose genius and complexity is also reflected in this book. If, however, one takes a deeper look at the novel, one discovers the many parallels and understands the skill of the author, who tries to portray the image of society at that time. Absolutely worth reading.
View all 14 comments. Emma is a rather silly, very passionate too much so bored, uneducated to the reality of the real world young woman, who believes in the romantic novels she reads, moonlight walks, eerie, forbidding castles, dangerous flights into unknown, and strange lands always trying to escape their frightening captors Emma lives on a farm in mid nineteenth century France, the widower, a remote still gentle father, Monsieur Rouault anxious to get rid of his useless daughter, and though he enjoys the work, is not very good at it, farming but a considerably better businessman; being an only child, she wants excitement.
Hating the monotonous country, dreaming about the titillating city, Paris and the fabulous people and things there. Yet meeting and marrying the dull, common , hardworking good doctor, Charles Bovary who fixed her father's broken leg, he adores his pretty wife, life has to be better elsewhere she thinks, so agrees to the marriage proposal. Moving to the small, tedious village of Tostes , Emma regrets soon her hasty marriage.
Even the birth of a daughter, Berthe who she neglects, not a loving mother the maid raises , has no effect on her gloomy moods. She craves romance, her husband is not like the men in her books, ordinary looking, not fearless or intelligent, words do not inspire coming out of his mouth, he lacks the intense feelings she wants.
After moving to another quiet village, Yonville Ry clueless Bovary thinks the change of scenery, will lift his listless wife out of her funk. The local wealthy landowner Rodolphe Boulanger, sees the pretty Emma, senses her unhappiness and seduces , a veteran at this sort of thing, he has had many mistresses in the past.
At first the secret, quite perilous, thrilling rendezvous behind the back of Emma's house, clandestine notes, reckless walks in the predawn mornings to his Chateau, reminds Emma of her novels Rodolphe gets annoyed, unexcited, he also doesn't feel like the beginning, sends a letter breaking off the affair.
The emotional Emma becomes very ill, her husband fears that she may die, puzzled at the sudden sickness. A slow recover ensues, Emma still has the same husband, starts another affair with a clerk, shy Leon Dupuis, younger than she more grateful too not like the previous lover, the erratic Madame Bovary is in control. In the nearby town of Rouen in Normandy they meet every week, until this also becomes uninteresting, the spendthrift woman behind her trusting, loving, naive , husband's back drives them to ruin through her unreasonable buying sprees.
Emma Bovary learns much too late, that the only person who loves her, is the unremarkable man she married. What can I say, love or hate this , it remains a controversial classic , the crowds flock to. View all 26 comments. Wouldn't this novel by Flaubert be out of date today, where adultery no longer exists as such and is never called that? Nevertheless, human passions and impulses have hardly changed; they are born and appear much faster in the era of everything connected.
Thus, Emma could nowadays find all kinds of lovers on the web but would undoubtedly not end up better than in the work of Flaubert. The novel's richness seems to be in the progression, slow but sure, inevitable of the characters' becoming.
Emma Wouldn't this novel by Flaubert be out of date today, where adultery no longer exists as such and is never called that? Emma believes in finding love or in emerging from boredom in Rodolphe's arms, in vain. It looks like she can't stand herself anymore, which makes her go step by step towards her destiny. Flaubert's style maintains this slow rhythm with know-how, descriptions, images, analyzes of feelings.
Moreover, he does not forget to bring the context of the time to the surface: the petty bourgeoisie, religion, abortive discretion. He thus succeeds simultaneously for a romance of love and society perfectly conceived, balanced, developed with great care. View all 6 comments. This is one of my favourite novels of all time As you say, regardless of how distant it appears to be from a contextual viewpoint, it still speaks to us intensely on so many levels.
Flaubert is brilliant at tracing the incongruences of human passions. As you say, regardless of how distant it appears to be from a contextual viewpoint, it still speaks to us intensely on so many Madame Bovary was a real treat.
I'm glad that I chose to read it at this point in my life, and not any younger, as I'm not entirely sure that I would have been appreciative of the story, and the richness of the characters. I now know, why Madame Bovary is such a popular novel. The story centres on Emma, a woman that believes in dreaming, passionate love and adventure, and when she marries Charles Bovary, it is evident to her, that she is not going to get that with him.
So, she seeks her needs els Madame Bovary was a real treat. So, she seeks her needs elsewhere, with two other men. She delves into two affairs, and while her needs are sufficed, she ends up in large amounts of debt, which inevitably, leads to destruction and despair. Flaubert was a wordsmith, and his beautiful, life-like descriptions of everyday life scenes, that were so in depth, such as the club-foot operation, had me racing through this book.
I felt like I was in the room, observing that operation, and I could almost smell the sweat. As for the tragedy itself, I thought it was rather drawn out, and I think in this case, it needed to be.
It was shocking, unthinkable and I felt my heart banging in my chest. It takes something extraordinary to be able to do that, and this book has succeeded. View all 8 comments. Mar 27, Martine rated it really liked it Recommends it for: incurable romantics and those who love nineteenth-century literature in general. Shelves: continental-european , psychological-drama , film , nineteenth-century.
Like every European teenager who takes French at secondary school, I was supposed to read Madame Bovary when I was seventeen or so. I chose not to, and boy, am I glad I did. I couldn't possibly have done justice to the richness of Flaubert's writing as a seventeen-year-old.
Moreover, I probably would have hated the characters so much that I never would have given the book another chance. Which would have been a shame, as it's really quite deserving of the tremendous reputation it has. Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Rouault, a mid-nineteenth-century peasant woman who has read too many sentimental novels for her own good. When the hopeless romantic marries Charles Bovary, a country doctor, she thinks she is going to lead a life full of passion and grandeur, but instead she gets stuck in a provincial town where nothing ever happens.
Hell-bent on some escapism and yearning for someone who understands her romantic needs, Emma embarks on two adulterous affairs, plunges herself into debt and ends up very badly indeed, leaving behind a husband who might not have been the dashing hero of her dreams but who most certainly did care about her. Madame Bovary is most famous for its portrayal of an unfulfilled woman, and indeed it's Emma's ennui and desperate need for romance that the reader will remember.
They are described so convincingly that it's hard to believe the author was a man rather than a woman. However, Madame Bovary isn't all about one woman going through life dreaming and breaking down every time reality catches up with her.
Like other great classics of realism, it's about society — about the social mores and conditions which instil certain kinds of behaviour in people and then punish them for it. Flaubert's depiction of Emma's provincial village a haven of all that is base and mediocre is painstakingly detailed and realistic.
It's a wonderfully vivid and well-observed account of life in mid-nineteenth-century rural France, where people go about doing their jobs, conducting illicit affairs, gossiping behind each other's backs, ruining each other financially and generally leading lives which are far from exalted. Flaubert's portrayal of his characters is unabashedly vicious and misanthropic, but such is the quality of his writing that you forgive him for taking such a dim view of humanity.
There are descriptions in the book the seduction at the market, the club-foot operation, the endlessly prolonged death from arsenic poisoning which rank among the best things nineteenth-century realism has to offer — gloriously life-like scenes which make you feel as if you're right there in the thick of things, watching things happen in front of your horrified eyes.
And if the whole thing has a tragic and deterministic slant to it, well, so be it. That's realism for you. At least Flaubert has the decency to grant his heroine a few sighs of rapture before her inexorable demise. For it may be a realist novel, but it has some genuinely romantic moments of passion and drama cab ride through Rouen, anyone? Ultimately, how you respond to Madame Bovary depends on your own susceptibility to romantic notions.
If, like Emma Bovary, you're prone to dreams of passion, beauty and perfection, and yearn to feel and experience rather than being stuck in a dreary life in a village where nothing ever happens, chances are you'll be able to relate to Emma and thus see the genius of Flaubert's depiction of her.
If, on the other hand, you think that such romantic escapism is a lot of sentimental, self-indulgent claptrap which it is — that's the tragedy of it! As for myself, I'm definitely in the former camp. If I'd been Emma, I probably would have walked into the same traps that she does. I would have fallen in love with the one neighbour who seems to understand my need for intensity, I would have gone through the same mad cycle of repentance, dissatisfaction and making the same mistakes again, and I probably would have spent a bit too much money in my quest for soul-affirming experiences, as well.
My ruin wouldn't have been as complete as Emma's, but it would have been fed by the same dreams and desires. Oh, yes. So don't let anyone tell you Madame Bovary is an old-fashioned creature whose dilemmas are no longer relevant to modern readers. There are plenty of people in modern society who are as much in love with romance itself as she is, and not just women, either.
And how many people today don't rack up huge debts because the magazines they read have led them to believe that they're entitled to more than is within their means? Replace 'sentimental novels' by 'TV', 'movies' and 'magazines', and all of a sudden Emma's cravings won't seem so outdated any more. Quite the contrary; they're as timeless and universal as they ever were. That's the hallmark of a classic — it speaks to us from across a century and a half and shows us ourselves.
We may not much like the picture of ourselves, but it's pretty powerful all the same. I'd give the book four and a half stars if I could, but alas. In the absence of half stars, four stars will have to do, with the assurance that it's well worth another half. View all 13 comments. Splendid, Accessible Prose in Lydia Davis' Translation of Madame Bovary Madame Bovary dreams of the romantic adventures of which she reads and stands out as possibly the most self-centered anti-heroine in the Western canon.
Yet, it could be that some who haven't read it have no idea of the "ending" ending which I won't give away here. If you haven't read this, I recommend this translation, in which Lydia Davis' prose is sublime, e. Little did she know that up on the roof of the house, the rain will form a pool if the gutters are blocked, and there she would have stayed feeling safe inside, until one day she suddenly discovered the crack right down the wall.
The novel was ground-breaking in several ways, not the least of which is the well and range of human emotions that ebb and flow through the reader while marveling at Flaubert's astounding attention to detail. Clunky translations of this novel in the past took away from the experience of the sadness, anger, disgust, contempt and pity that this translation so aesthetically accentuates.
I highly recommend this translation if you haven't read this. You dawdle along, indulging yourself with odd details. And I have to smile at his foresight when he makes Emma Bovary wish that the name Bovary will become famous, that it will be displayed all over bookshops and repeated in the newspapers. But as the quiet pages turn, I find myself longing for a change for Emma and for me as a reader. Her world is too limited. Spare a thought for us. Thoughts on Part II This section starts off with a little more promise.
Emma and Charles are moving to Yonville, a little town in a valley by a meandering river. Four gray walls and four gray towers, overlook a space of flowers, and the silent isle imbowers, the Lady of Shalott.
I remember the descriptions of Emma looking at the world through her window, and I think, Yes! Up to this point, Emma has been exactly like the enchanted Lady of Shalott, looking out at the world as if from a mirror, cut off from real life. Perhaps from her window in Yonville, she will see Sir Lancelot riding by The town provides some interest for the reader in any case.
We are introduced to a colorful set of inhabitants. Leon Dupuis. Lheureux; the Rouen-Yonville stage-coach driver Hivert; a sanctimonious clergyman called M. Bournisien and a free-thinking but rather pedantic pharmacist called Homais. An immediate battle of words between the clergyman and the pharmacist livens up the story nicely. I welcome these new characters, no matter how sanctimonious or pedantic. But while introducing several interesting and comic characters, Flaubert is simultaneously playing with our expectations.
If you turned right at the end, you arrived at the cemetary. Is he Sir Lancelot? In any case, within the space of a few pages, he seems to have cheered Emma up considerably. The pages go by without much happening, and the side door remains unused.
Oh, wait, something is happening. A bunch of characters are going on a day trip! How exciting! In Part II, the character list may have expanded but life in Yonville Yawnville hasn't really become more interesting. Emma is increasingly bored and exasperated by her gentle husband Charles and by her narrow life in the town. Alas, the passage ends with the church bells tolling in peaceful lamentation. Poor me. He leaves without having once made use of that tempting side entrance.
What has Emma to look forward to now? Oh right, an Agricultural Show… But in the meantime, Emma has realised that Leon might have been her best chance at love and she missed it.
Really, it goes from bad to worse. But perhaps shedding a little tear too. Emma has bought herself a prie-dieu, a gothic kneeler. Perhaps something will happen today Why yes! From her window Emma spies a fine Sir Lancelot in yellow gloves. Or is it Mr Bingley? A single man with twenty thousand a year renting a house in the area, he must surely be in want of a His name is not Bingley but Boulanger, Rodolphe Boulanger.
He sounds as romantic as a red-nosed baker. Yes, I was right. This IS a comic novel! Is Flaubert mocking his main character? Yes, he seems to be mocking everyone in the course of this Agricultural Show episode, juxtaposing contrasting scenes to great comic effect. While the local Deputy engages his large audience at a slow pace on the subject of cereal production, Rodolphe engages his tiny audience at a fast pace on the subject of serial seduction.
The deputy is planning a venture involving manufacturing linen, Rodolphe is planning a venture involving bed linen! Is Flaubert trying to turn Homais, the supreme unbeliever, into a Messiah who will make the lame walk and the blind see? In the predictably disappointing aftermath of the miracle procedure, Flaubert gives us some great dialogues between the priest and the pharmacist.
These are definitely my favourite parts. Meantime, Emma dialogues with her conscience on the subject of her affair with Rodolphe. Flaubert is amusing himself again. And even as Emma enters crisis mode, Flaubert makes Homais create a comic diversion. And then he gives Charles serious money troubles just to bring us back into serious mode again. In the next section, Flaubert cooly announces that Emma wants to become a saint! Elle voulut devenir une sainte. Am I the only one who notices this constant lurching between the serious and the farcical?
The two are stock comic characters. But romance prevails in spite of the comedy; Emma, like Lucia in the garden scene, meets her old love Leon at the opera. This more mature Leon turns out to be as calculating in his modest way as Rodolphe was, and he manages to get Charles to agree to Emma staying on an extra day in Rouen by herself. Not just any cab of course. It has to be a cab that has blinds that can be pulled down completely. Flaubert sends the cabby and his two passengers on a crazy journey around and around the city so that people in the streets see the cab go by again and again and are amazed at the apparitions and reapparaitions of a shuttered vehicle in broad daylight.
No, the scene has to open with Homais castigating his apprentice for daring to unlock his medicine cabinet - where he has a bottle of arsenic locked away. The story moves on through many more chapters as Emma and Leon find possibilities for more rendezvous, sometimes described in ridiculous terms, sometimes in sublime ones: for Leon, Emma is the heroine of every novel and drama.
She is the unnamed She of every love poem. This is heady stuff! Each time the story strikes such a serious note, Homais is called in to do another comic turn.
The man who used to spout Latin at every opportunity suddenly starts peppering his conversation with slang terms to great effect: nous ferons sauter ensemble les monacos. Flaubert is serious at last. Emma is left with nothing but debts and broken dreams - described in the most beautiful language needless to say.
And even when things worsen, he still manages to make me laugh. He declares that in cases of poisoning, the most important thing is to carry out a test. Follow the scientific method. Everything will be fine if you follow the scientific method and carry out tests. At the very worst moment after the famous doctors have arrived and given up on curing the poison victim, Homais feels obliged to entertain them at his house, sending out for pigeons and lamb chops, the best cream and eggs, and warning his wife to take out the wineglasses with the stems.
And while the entire town, me included, are waiting for news of the victim, Flaubert allows Homais to continue his farce. Homais and the priest sit by the deathbed arguing about religion until they both fall asleep, when they are shown to be indistinguishable from one another: two fat men nodding in their chairs, their chins resting on their chests.
When they wake up, their differences re-emerge: one sprinkles the room with holy water, the other with chlorine and the story ends on that note. But Homais would no doubt prove me wrong. Using suitably scientific methods, he would prove that the majority of readers consider it a tragedy. So be it. View all 81 comments. My fifth or sixth reading of my favorite novel in my favorite translation, that of Lydia Davis, this time read simultaneously with Nabokov's class lecture on the book which made for a transcendent experience.
I love the Davis translation best, I will never tire of Madame Bovary and once it and Nab's lectures were published my love for Flaubert's masterpiece increased exponentially. Madame Bovary is a triumph of structure and symbolism, in my opinion the best-written novel of all time, each word p My fifth or sixth reading of my favorite novel in my favorite translation, that of Lydia Davis, this time read simultaneously with Nabokov's class lecture on the book which made for a transcendent experience.
Madame Bovary is a triumph of structure and symbolism, in my opinion the best-written novel of all time, each word placed like a gem in a setting, and that these beautiful words and scenes are so spot-on satirical that I often laugh out loud while reading it is, for me, wondrous, amazing.
Just about every character is unlikeable. Emma is not the pitiable victim of circumstances, she's the vain and delusional star of her own soap opera. And the iceberg that sinks her ship every time, sometimes drowning others she's pulled aboard. I'll never understand how people can admire or even feel for this woman who observes that her own young daughter "is ugly. So Emma is a very easy mark for Rodolphe, the player, with his box of souvenirs of all the women he's seduced.
It would be lovely! Yes, but how to get rid of the woman afterward? Flaubert crafted Madame Bovary with the level of talent with which great architects designed the best cathedrals, and he built it with some of the finest symbolism to be found in all of literature. Yet it's funny. Wry, ironic, satiric and yes, funny. We are so used to realism now and so steeped in mediocre stories and melodrama that it sometimes happens that readers miss the fullness of what Flaubert accomplished with Madame Bovary, which influenced Proust, Joyce and arguably almost everyone who came after.
I can't recommend strongly enough reading Nabokov's class lecture from Lectures on Literature along with the book. Though I'd read his lecture at least twice, I'd never read them simultaneously and doing so multiplied the joy I got from this literary fireworks display. Said Nabokov to his classes as he read from his typed notes with their scrawled marginalia semester after semester: "Stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do.
One may not agree with all of his conclusions but it's impossible to ignore the depth of his reading. To read them together is like taking a quality guided tour of an exhibition during which your exceptionally perceptive guide provides a magnificent overview as well as pointing out the smallest superb details and so expanding one's experience, understanding and appreciation of the work.
Flaubert does a very subtle thing. So Homais is a leading character whose presence affects everyone else's stories, who is the most obvious blowhard and so gets many of the best lines. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. Charles is as much a fool as Emma, living in a house increasingly crowded with expensive furniture and Emma's beautiful wardrobe which he knows perfectly well he can't afford.
From the outset Flaubert telegraphs this as, one of my favorite images in the wedding procession Emma lets go of Charles's arm to tend to her wedding gown. Her first crush and second lover Leon is a bore upon whom Emma superimposes her romance-novel sensibility to turn him into something he is not until she is forced to confront his dull, yes here it comes, utterly bougie nature.
Of the scene at the fair -- a groundbreaking scene in many ways, which Flaubert spent three months writing and it is perfection -- where, among other things, Rodolphe rattles off his routine seductive speech that he knows will work on Emma during which the judges below are giving out the award for best manure! It will be the first time, I think, that a novel appears where fun is made of the leading lady and her young man. But irony does not impair pathos—on the contrary Beginning with chapter 4 of the third part, fate, abetted by Flaubert, proceeds to destroy her with beautiful precision.
To visit repeatedly is to notice something else striking each time: the way this area transitions to that, that bit of light shining through a particular part of that stained glass window, that shadow falling so gracefully in that place one hasn't seen a shadow before.
It's familiar but there's always something new, breathtaking to behold. I love this book so dearly, admire Flaubert's art and craft in Madame Bovary as much as that of any other book, and so each reading provides that wonderfully familiar and also new experience. The many people I know or whose reviews I read or those film versions I've watched who misunderstand Madame Bovary aren't misunderstanding it because they're not careful readers.
It's because of that subtlety, the art and the fact that once published it would affect so many major and insignificant works and forever change literature that Flaubert's breathtaking art, the substance and style, are sometimes lost to modern readers whose focus is the perceived drama, the plot, identifying with Emma, a woman so vain that as she lays on her deathbed she asks for a mirror.
Because Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary in a realistic style and satirized everyone so poetically, with delicacy and strength steeped in symbolism, a new form of the novel, magnificent in its focus on the petty and the small. In Flaubert's time there were a number of Emmas who upon publication came forward claiming to be the woman upon whom Flaubert based Madame Bovary. Wanting to be seen as the model for a small-minded, small-town, materialistic, deluded, vain, destructive character whose ridiculous idealized notions of romance come from books, whose attachments are as shallow as her materialism, whose conscious decision to swap sex for spirituality is so over the top the priest distrusts it, who careens through her brief, dissatisfied life bringing more and more harm to herself until she causes the ultimate harm -- that these woman wanted to claim her as themselves: oh the irony!
View all 41 comments. My edition was translated by Geoffrey Wall, who preserved Flaubert's distinctive habits of punctuation, italicisation and paragraphing. Though the overuse of exclamation marks is discouraged by modern-day publishers, Flau "Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far off horizon. Though the overuse of exclamation marks is discouraged by modern-day publishers, Flaubert scatters them like seed.
I read this classic at a leisurely pace, one chapter at a time, in between newfangled reads. I carefully jotted down notes and some well-chosen passages, intending to reproduce them here. Sadly, I unintentionally left my humidity-corrugated notepad by a pool in Thailand! And in that respect, she doesn't disappoint. Defying convention, Flaubert deliberately chose to make his eponymous femme fatale unlikeable, which I see as a good thing: it makes her character believable; it makes her seem modern , and it shows how unfettered by tradition the author was.
Emma "Drama Queen" Bovary, whose untamed heart rules her head, is trapped in a boring, frigid marriage and, without a care in the world, looks for love and lust elsewhere.
Yes, Emma is shallow and selfish and wants what she can't have but , because she is a flawed human being, wholly driven by sentimentality, I sympathised with her. View all 68 comments. Why are all the "great classics" lead by famed female heroines all too often about personal freedom thru means of sexual compromise leading to abject misery and ultimate demise? I realize it's an accurate depiction of culture and times, however why are Bovary and Moll Flanders the memorable matriarchs of classic literature?
See my commentary on the Awakening for similar frustrations. Why aren't there more works about strong women making a difference in their own lives if not those of their famil Why are all the "great classics" lead by famed female heroines all too often about personal freedom thru means of sexual compromise leading to abject misery and ultimate demise? Why aren't there more works about strong women making a difference in their own lives if not those of their families and communities?
Why aren't we having young women read a work or 2 portraying a strong female who doesn't end up having an affair, committing suicided, or otherwise screwing up her own life and the lives of others as she sinks to the bottom where she inevitably belonged? View all 29 comments. Aug 23, Fabian rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites. The first reading of this novel does no justice to its original intended effect.
The plot is carefully-crafted; it is bo The first reading of this novel does no justice to its original intended effect. The plot is carefully-crafted; it is bookmarked by the lives of the secondary characters, as if Mme. Emma Bovary is human because she is not all good nor all evil. She is materialistic but also idealistic.
Wife and lover. Belonging nowhere, like a character born at the most inadequate of times. Like Oedipus with the Oracle, however, she is knowledgeable of the fate that is in store for adulteresses. The plot has plunges and heights, a spectrum that is available to anyone belonging to the human race. The pathos comes from all the chains Bovary must break to become free, and the further entanglement of her emotions complicate matters. Mme Bovary does not commit suicide with arsenic because of monetary problems.
The title is perfect since it is itself a title: Madame Bovary. Who can escape their position in society, their gender, their duties, their fate? Still they try, they beat their wings, they call out to one another. Her too-lofty dreams, her too-narrow house. We meet and greet different sorts of people; we greet and read different sorts of books. Last year, I had the pleasure of meeting Ms.
Jane Eyre. With her modest dreams and dignified living, it was easy to accept and love her. She was far from perfect but there was hardly a thing I would have changed about her.
A fictional character of literature exemplifying the virtuous side of real life but she was not alone. There were some other characters surround Her too-lofty dreams, her too-narrow house. There were some other characters surrounding Jane who certainly struck a chord with me but the music thus created was not a soothing melody.
In one such story this year, I met Emma. Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him.
The Bored and Beautiful, Madame Bovary. We all probably know her. That reckless young woman who jots down a list of inordinate whims which could culminate into a glorious Happily Ever After when time comes. Emma while single had imagination and anticipation; Ms. Bovary while married had perversity and passion. Those pleasures when turned inside out, sometimes take the shape of eternal sufferings too. The difference possibly lies in the vacuum created out of being in love and the idea of being in love.
Both can be fatal but I would like to believe that the latter is something that is bound to make a person delusional about oneself and everyone around. Emma tried to form a derisory bridge from her idea too, in a hope to reach an unknown destination she usually read in her books but eventually she suffered too.
Where could she have learned this depravity, so deep and so dissembled that it was almost incorporeal? Why, from this society only. A society which thrives upon displaying its pretentious happiness and insists on concealing the perpetual sadness. A society which constantly invent ways of piling up the debt upon another person while wearing the sham of welfare. Love goes to hell in such cases. She was the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every drama, the vague she of every volume of poetry.
The irony. View all 62 comments. Perhaps she would have liked to confide in someone about all these things. But how does one express an uneasiness so intangible, one that changes shape like a cloud, that changes direction like the wind? She lacked the words, the occasion, the courage. Some blame it on novels packed with sentimentalist kitsch; some point out her too-lofty dreams, her too-narrow house, so that the higher she raised the bar of happiness the harder it got to climb; some direct their anger at her reckless financi Perhaps she would have liked to confide in someone about all these things.
Some blame it on novels packed with sentimentalist kitsch; some point out her too-lofty dreams, her too-narrow house, so that the higher she raised the bar of happiness the harder it got to climb; some direct their anger at her reckless financial transactions that put her family in bankruptcy; some are disappointed at the lack of her sense of duty towards her husband and the small child; some dub her a coward view spoiler [for committing suicide when her secrets were about to get out, renouncing the chutzpah that had propelled her to devise rash schemes hide spoiler ].
In short, everyone thinks her as silly, stupid, selfish, vacuous, impulsive, unrealistic, et cetera, even an evil woman, [insert more abuse], bent on destroying herself and her family, echoing, in a way, Madame Tuvache's assertion that such women ought to be whipped.
A bitter, conservative woman who spoiled her son Charles as a youth and disapproves of his marriage to Emma. Justin is young, impressionable, and simple. He falls terribly in love with Emma and unwittingly gives her access to the arsenic that she uses to commit suicide. She realizes that Charles is enamored with Emma. Soon after having this realization, she dies from the shock of having all her property stolen by her lawyer. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols. Important Quotes Explained.
Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Characters Character List. Read an in-depth analysis of Emma Bovary. Charles Bovary A country doctor, kind, but simple, dull, and unremarkable. Read an in-depth analysis of Charles Bovary.
Monsieur Homais The apothecary at Yonville; a pompous, self-impressed man of the bourgeois class who helps Charles become established as a doctor in the town. Read an in-depth analysis of Monsieur Homais.
Monsieur Lheureux A sly, sinister merchant and moneylender in Yonville who leads Emma into debt, financial ruin, and eventually suicide by playing on her weakness for luxury and extravagance. Hippolyte The crippled servant at the inn in Yonville. Binet The tax collector in Yonville. Lariviere An esteemed doctor from Rouen who is called in after Emma takes arsenic at the end of the novel.
The elder Madame Bovary A bitter, conservative woman who spoiled her son Charles as a youth and disapproves of his marriage to Emma. The event was actually inspired by a real-life dance that Flaubert attended with his parents in , when he was 14 years old.
Held by a local aristocrat, the experience impressed Flaubert so much that he also described elements of it in his early short story " Quidquid Volueris " and in an letter to a friend. Shortly before Madame Bovary was published, Flaubert ended a years-long affair with the married poet Louise Colet. Flaubert met Colet in , not long after his sister, Caroline, died in childbirth.
Flaubert and Colet fell in love, and they exchanged letters throughout the course of their on-and-off-again relationship.
At the age of 17, Delamare left her rural home to marry a health officer who, like Charles Bovary, was also a widower. Delamare cheated on her spouse, spent his money on frivolities, and ultimately incurred so much debt that she killed herself with poison at the age of The sculptor James Pradier's wife, an adulterous spendthrift, might have also influenced Flaubert to create Emma.
The author spent up to 12 hours a day writing at his desk, and would even shout out sentences to gauge their rhythm. It sometimes took him up to a week to finish a single page, and a year's worth of work once yielded only 90 pages. In contrast, Flaubert spent just 18 months writing the first page draft of The Temptation of Saint Anthony , the novel he spent most of his adult life drafting.
This early version was so overwrought that Flaubert's best friend, the poet Louis Bouilhet, suggested that he "throw it into the fire and never speak of it again.
Flaubert dedicated Madame Bovary to Bouilhet and wrote its epigraph to his lawyer, Marie-Antoine-Jules Senard, who successfully defended Flaubert during his trial.
0コメント