Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, France. His father was a doctor. When he was thirteen he wrote to a friend that he would be "quite disgusted with life were he not engaged upon a novel." Like many young men of his day he felt disgusted by the "bourgeois" society into which he was born. When he began writing Madame Bovary he wanted to write a story about ordinary people, yet he held these types of people in contempt. "The bourgeois -- that dull, graceless animal, petty, materialistic, cliche-ridden --could make him physically ill" (6) Yet, in Bovary, Flaubert attempts to paint an objective portrait of these folks.
It was a friend of Flaubert, Louis Bouilhet, who gave him the idea for this novel based on a local occurrence he thought might make an excellent, realistic novel. And Madame Bovary was born. In Flaubert's version of the original, a young woman, Emma, is married to a dull country doctor. She quickly gets bored with her life and wants finery beyond their means and the community. Emma is always pining for something more than her life offers. She takes a lover and when that affair ends, she takes a second lover. Her taste for finery leads her to go hopelessly into debt which eventually leads to more and more desperate acts and ruination for the whole family.
Flaubert wanted Bovary to be a meticulously constructive piece of literature. He also wanted to show people talking, acting, thinking as real people do these things. He spent more time than the average French writer (any writer?) to the writing of his sentences. "It was his ambition to make them rhythmical, lyrical, and expressive in would life prose to the level of poetry" (7) Sometimes it would take Flaubert a week to write two pages of text. But all this work on his sentences paid off because it is remarkably easy to read, considering the time period in which it was written.
Alan Russell, the translator and the writer of the introduction for the version of Madame Bovary I read, said that Emma Bovary is one of the "great individuals of fiction." She is "self-centered, self-dramatizing, envious, improvident, impulsive, aspiring above her station or capabilities, egotistical, and desperate with raging of unsatisfied desire. Of such a character her name, 'Bovary', as become a symbol of those qualities" (9). Needless to say, she is not likable in the least.
Whenever I read a book known as a "classic" I wonder why this book, this story has stood the test of time and what universal message to it continues to portray. I wasn't sure how to answer those questions when I finished Madame Bovary. All I could think was it was too bad Emma didn't live in the 21st century. If so she could have divorced her boring husband, had sex with as many men as she wished without most people batting an eye, crowd-sourced funding to cover her debts, and gained fame and recognition as a social media influencer making daily instagram posts about her most recent complaints or showing off her new clothes.
I eventually turned to Shmoop to get the answers I craved as to the classic status of this book. Here are a few points they made about Madame Bovary:
- Bovary is one of the finest examples of "realistic" fiction written up to that point in time and had tremendous influence on literature for decades afterwards.
- Flaubert's writing creates a level of intimacy with the characters that up to that time was never done. We may not like them or their actions but we know what they are thinking and feeling.
- They agree with me. They think Emma is stuck in the wrong century.
So do teachers still assign Madame Bovary to their classes of 11th or 12th grade students to read? I doubt it. If they did, I suspect there would be a lot of kids who sneak off to watch the movie or read the crib notes, refusing to dive deeply into the story of an unlikable, self-centered woman stuck in a small community with nothing to do but shop and pine for romance.
What was your experience with the book? Though I found the text very readable I just didn't want to read it. Sorry, Emma Bovary, I didn't like you and wanted to spend as little time as possible with you. I kept going because this is my Classics Club SPIN selection for the Spring. My rating 3 stars.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life. Translated by Alan Russell, Penguin Books, 1988.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Madame Bovary Introduction | Shmoop." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 30 Jun. 2026.
-Anne
