Madame Bovary
A woman whose wanting is shaped entirely by what she has read. Desire arriving already borrowed from somewhere else.
A perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure.
Emma, raised on convent romances, marries Charles Bovary, an earnest and limited country doctor, and finds provincial marriage in Normandy smaller than anything she had pictured. She reaches past it into two affairs, into furnishings and finery bought on credit from the merchant Lheureux, into a self assembled from the lives she envies. Flaubert holds the ordinary in close, unsparing focus while she strains against it.
For the consulting room, the novel tracks a wanting that never settles on its object. Each thing thins as Emma reaches it; the lover, once hers, flattens into the same dullness as the husband. She measures her days against what she supposes other people feel, and the measuring is what keeps her hungry. Flaubert follows the small mechanics, a purchase, a fresh lie, another plan, by which the dissatisfaction refills itself faster than any pleasure can drain it.
About the author
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880) was a French novelist known for the exacting precision of his prose. His best known work, Madame Bovary (1857), follows the disappointments of a provincial doctor's wife and helped popularise free indirect discourse, a technique that lets a character's thoughts colour the narration. When the novel appeared, French authorities prosecuted it for offending public morality, and Flaubert was acquitted. He wrote slowly, reading sentences aloud to test their rhythm.
Details
- 1856
- French
- 384
- 9780143106494