Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary
	Title page of the original French edition, 1857
Author	Gustave Flaubert
Country	France
Language	French
Genre	Novel
Publisher	La Revue de Paris (in serial) & Michel Lévy Frères (in book form, 2 Vols)
Publication date	1856 (in serial) & April 1857 (in book form)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

Madame Bovary is a novel by Gustave Flaubert that was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialised in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made it notorious. After the acquittal on 7 February, it became a bestseller in book form in April 1857, and now stands virtually unchallenged not only as a seminal work of Realism, but as one of the most influential novels ever written.

The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously perfectionistic about his writing and claimed to always be searching for le mot juste (the right word).

A 2007 poll of contemporary authors, published in a book entitled The Top Ten, cited Madame Bovary as one of the two greatest novels ever written, second only to Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.^[1]

Plot summary

Madame Bovary was the first modern novel ever. DO NOT USE THIS PAGE AS A REFERENCE FOR YOUR LOWLY LITTLE RESEARCH PAPERS. IT IS THE PRODUCT OF A PERSONAL FEUD BETWEEN PROCRASTINATING HARVARD STUDENTS.

Madame Bovary takes place in provincial northern France, near the town of Rouen in Normandy. The story begins and ends with Charles Bovary, a stolid, kindhearted man without much ability or ambition. As the novel opens, Charles is a shy, oddly-dressed teenager arriving at a new school amidst the ridicule of his new classmates. Later, Charles struggles his way to a second-rate medical degree and becomes an officier de santé in the Public Health Service. His mother chooses a wife for him, an unpleasant but supposedly rich widow, and Charles sets out to build a practice in the village of Tostes (now Tôtes).

One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg, and meets his client's daughter, Emma Rouault. Emma is a beautiful, daintily-dressed young woman who has received a "good education" in a convent and who has a latent but powerful yearning for luxury and romance imbibed from the popular novels she has read. Charles is immediately attracted to her, and begins checking on his patient far more often than necessary until his wife's jealousy puts a stop to the visits. When his wife dies, Charles waits a decent interval, then begins courting Emma in earnest. Her father gives his consent, and Emma and Charles are married.

At this point, the novel begins to focus on Emma. Charles means well, but is boring and clumsy, and after he and Emma attend a ball given by the Marquis d'Andervilliers, Emma grows disillusioned with married life and becomes dull and listless. Charles consequently decides that his wife needs a change of scenery, and moves from the village of Tostes into a larger, but equally stultifying market town, Yonville (traditionally based on the town of Ry). Here, Emma gives birth to a daughter, Berthe; however, motherhood, too, proves to be a disappointment to Emma. She then becomes infatuated with one of the first intelligent young men she meets in Yonville, a young law student, Léon Dupuis, who seems to share her appreciation for "the finer things in life", and who returns her admiration. Out of fear and shame, however, Emma hides her love for Léon and her contempt for Charles, and plays the role of the devoted wife and mother, all the while consoling herself with thoughts and self-congratulations of her own virtue. Finally, in despair of ever gaining Emma's affection, Léon departs to study in Paris.

One day, a rich and rakish landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger, brings a servant to the doctor's office to be bled. He casts his eye over Emma and decides she is ripe for seduction. To this end, he invites Emma to go riding with him for the sake of her health; solicitous only for Emma's health, Charles embraces the plan, suspecting nothing. A three-year affair follows. Swept away by romantic fantasy, Emma risks compromising herself with indiscreet letters and visits to her lover, and finally insists on making a plan to run away with him. Rodolphe, however, has no intention of carrying Emma off, and ends the relationship on the eve of the great elopement with an apologetic, self-excusing letter delivered at the bottom of a basket of apricots. The shock is so great that Emma falls deathly ill, and briefly turns to religion.

When Emma is nearly fully recovered, she and Charles attend the opera, on Charles' insistence, in nearby Rouen. The opera reawakens Emma's passions and, unfortunately, she reencounters Léon who, now educated and working in Rouen, is also attending the opera. They begin an affair. While Charles believes that she is taking piano lessons, Emma travels to the city each week to meet Léon, always in the same room of the same hotel, which the two come to view as their "home." The love affair is, at first, ecstatic; then, by degrees, Léon grows bored with Emma's emotional excesses, and Emma grows ambivalent about Léon, who becoming himself more like the mistress in the relationship, compares poorly, at least implicitly, to the rakish and domineering Rodolphe. Meanwhile, Emma, given over to vanity, purchases increasing amounts of luxury items on credit from the crafty merchant, Lheureux, who arranges for her to obtain power of attorney over Charles’ estate, and crushing levels of debts mount quickly.

When Lheureux calls in Bovary's debt, Emma pleads for money from several people, including Léon and Rodolphe, only to be turned down. In despair, she swallows arsenic and dies an agonizing death; even the romance of suicide fails her. Charles, heartbroken, abandons himself to grief, preserves Emma's room as if it is a shrine, and in an attempt to keep her memory alive, adopts several of her attitudes and tastes. In his last months, he stops working and lives off of the sale of his possessions. When he accidentally comes across Rodolphe's love letters one day, he still tries to understand and forgive. Soon after, he becomes reclusive; what has not already been sold of his possessions is seized to pay off Lheureux, and he dies, leaving his daughter Berthe to live with distant relatives.

Chapter-by-chapter

Part One

Charles Bovary's childhood, student days and first marriage
Charles meets Rouault and his daughter Emma; Charles's first wife dies
Charles proposes to Emma
The wedding
The new household at Tostes
An account of Emma's childhood and secret fantasy world
Emma becomes bored; invitation to a ball by the Marquis d'Andervilliers
The ball at the château La Vaubyessard
Emma follows fashions; her boredom concerns Charles, and they decide to move; they find out she is pregnant

Part Two

Description of Yonville-l'Abbaye: Homais, Lestiboudois, Binet, Bournisien, Lheureux
Emma meets Léon Dupuis, the lawyer's clerk
Emma gives birth to Berthe, visits her at the nurse's house with Léon
A card game; Emma's friendship with Léon grows
Trip to see flax mill; Lheureux's pitch; Emma is resigned to her life
Emma visits the priest Bournisien; Berthe is injured; Léon leaves for Paris
Charles's mother bans novels; the blood-letting of Rodolphe's farmhand; Rodolphe meets Emma
The comice agricole (agricultural show); Rodolphe woos Emma
Six weeks later Rodolphe returns and they go out riding; he seduces her and the affair begins
Emma crosses paths with Binet; Rodolphe gets nervous; a letter from her father makes Emma repent
Operation on Hippolyte's clubfoot; M. Canivet has to amputate; Emma returns to Rodolphe
Emma's extravagant presents; quarrel with mother-in-law; plans to elope
Rodolphe runs away; Emma falls gravely ill
Charles is beset by bills; Emma turns to religion; Homais and Bournisien argue
Emma meets Léon at performance of Lucie de Lammermoor

Part Three

Emma and Léon converse; tour of Rouen Cathedral; cab-ride synecdoche
Emma goes to Homais; the arsenic; Bovary senior has died; Lheureux's bill
She visits Léon in Rouen
She resumes "piano lessons" on Thursdays
Visits to Léon; the singing tramp; Emma starts to fiddle the accounts
Emma becomes noticeably anxious; debts spiral out of control
Emma begs for money from several people
Rodolphe cannot help; she swallows arsenic; her death
Emma lies in state
The funeral
Charles finds letter; his death

Characters

Emma Bovary

Emma is the novel's protagonist and is the main source of the novel's title (although Charles's mother and his former wife are also referred to as Madame Bovary). She has a highly romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion and high society. It is the disparity between these romantic ideals and the realities of her country life that drive most of the novel, most notably leading her into two extramarital love affairs as well as causing her to accrue an insurmountable amount of debt that eventually leads to her suicide.

Emma is quite intelligent, but she never has a chance to develop her mind. This is perhaps due to the mediocrity of her convent education, which was considered appropriate for a young woman but which did not allow her to develop reasoning or critical thinking skills. So as an adult, Emma's capacity for imagination is far greater than her capacity for analysis. She is quite observant about surface details, such as how people are dressed, but she never looks below the surface. As a result, she is easily taken in by people who are pretending to be something more than they really are (which most people in the book do for one reason or another). Emma not only believes in the false fronts other people present to her, but she despises the very few people (Charles's mother, Madame Homais, and Monsieur Binet) who are exactly as they appear to be.

Convinced that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, Emma does not realize that extreme joy, even for the wealthy and powerful, comes in small amounts only once in a while. It's not just country life, or bourgeois life, that is dull at times. Even for aristocrats life is not an endless party. Yet Emma does not see this. She is so absorbed by the details of the ball, for example, that she's surprised to see that liqueur and wine is not served at breakfast the next day, when the Marquis's household returns to normal. Any other person would see the reduced level of formality as evidence that even the wealthy do not have fine food and drink at every meal. Not Emma. She's too eager to convince herself that there really is a group of people for whom life really is an excitement-packed drama. This delusion lasts throughout her life. Later, she fails to realize that Rodolphe's wealth hasn't made him happy, despite obvious evidence of this fact. It never occurs to her that other people's lives are much like her own: mostly ordinary, punctuated by brief periods of more extreme activity or experience.

Since Emma lives chiefly in her own fantasy world, other people's opinions or perceptions of her aren't important except to the extent that they serve some aspect of whatever drama she's trying to act out. At the ball, she's convinced that she's been fully accepted by the upper crust and is now one of them, so much so that she expects an invitation the following year. In reality, the hosts have condescended to invite Charles and Emma to the ball as payback for a favor involving some cherry tree cuttings, and they intend for the ball to be a once-in-a-lifetime treat. Indeed, Emma makes several missteps that would be embarrassing to anyone steeped in upper-class culture of the period. She waltzes so badly that she tangles her dress up with her dance partner, and she uses the gaffe as an excuse to rest her head on his chest. She's so overcome with heat and exhaustion that she complains she's about to faint, at which point a servant breaks two panes of glass to let cool air in for her. Does it occur to her to simply retire from the festivities and call it a night? No. She's one of the few people left to close the party down when the hosts finally retire. Does she make any attempt to establish new social contacts at the party? No. She does not write to the host and hostess afterwards to thank them, even though she has a brand-new writing desk and paper. Nor does she attempt to return the cigar-case she and Charles find later, which might have been a reasonable pretext to resume correspondence with their host. In short she makes no effort to actually cultivate the people in the social group to which she's decided she belongs. She doesn't go out of her way to ingratiate herself with new people, because she genuinely doesn't care what they think of her. The same indifference causes her to be rejected by most people in Tostes and Yonville, and to be very careless of her reputation once she starts having extramarital affairs. Binet, Homais, Charles's mother, and Lheureux all catch her in compromising situations, and she truly doesn't care. At some level, she wants not only the excitment of taking the risk, but possibly the drama that would result from being caught.

Emma seeks out the extremes in life, both positive and negative. That she seeks out positive experiences is obvious, because unless she's experiencing the peak of ecstasy, she's convinced she's miserable. She also re-writes her own history and memory, telling herself that she has "never" been happy, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. Her appetite for stimulation grows to the point where she becomes jaded enough to not appreciate the small pleasures in life, simply because they are small pleasures. The more she experiences, the less she is satisfied with more normal activities. Consider, for example, her taste in literature. She starts out with romances and bourgeois women's magazines targeted to her real social and economic position. From there she graduates to high-fashion women's magazines that advocate conspicuous consumption. The next step is overwrought romantic poetry, followed by tragic opera, and culminating in the violent pornography which she reads between assignations with Léon.

Emma feels entitled to seek out increasing pleasure and stimulation for herself. She finds different ways to rationalize her feeling of entitlement at different times of her life. Before her marriage, she craves excitement because she is bored. In Tostes, particularly after the ball, she believes she was unjustly born into the wrong socio-economic class and that everything would be better if only she were rich. Later, after being introduced to poetry, she believes she suffers because she has a noble soul. Ultimately she casts herself as a tragic heroine.

Emma's attraction to the negative extremes of the human experience is less obvious, but the signs are there. As a teenager, she's rewarded for an overblown, somewhat fake display of grief after her mother's death. Her father caters to her whims, as does Charles, who responds to Emma's ennui and psychosomatic illnesses by ignoring his patients and concentrating solely on his wife. Emma's fleeting but intense fascination with religion is much the same: people reward her pious conduct with extra attention and treat her as though she's superior, which reinforces her feelings of entitlement.

Throughout her life, Emma picks out the most dramatic, exaggerated depiction of the human existence and not only adopts it as her romantic or personal ideal, but convinces herself that her ideal is somehow the norm, and the reality she experiences is the exception to the rule. As a teenager she seeks to emulate the romantic novels she read while at the convent. After the ball, she seeks to emulate the nobility and the wealthy and creates a new romantic ideal based on a man she met at the ball. After being introduced to poetry, she adopts a romantic martyr-like facade. After being exposed to the opera "Lucia Di Lammermoor", which is quite possibly the most exaggerated and implausible love story ever, Emma adopts the insane fictional character Lucy Ashton as her role model and becomes convinced that the correct way to respond to serious adversity is to lose her mind and commit suicide, which she eventually does.

Each individual decision of Emma's seems plausible and reasonable in isolation, but her actions and decisions on the whole make her a very difficult character to like.

Charles Bovary

Emma's husband, Charles Bovary, is a very simple and common man. He is a country doctor by profession, but is, as in everything else, not very good at it. He is in fact not qualified enough to be termed a doctor, but is instead an officier de santé, or "health officer". When he is persuaded by Homais, the local pharmacist, to attempt a difficult operation on a patient's clubfoot, the effort is an enormous failure, and his patient's leg must be amputated by a better doctor.

Charles adores his wife and finds her faultless, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. He never suspects her affairs and gives her complete control over his finances, thereby securing his own ruin. Despite Charles's complete devotion to Emma, she despises him as he is the epitome of all that is dull and common. When Charles discovers Emma's deceptions after her death he is completely devastated and dies soon after.

Charles is presented from the start as a likeable and well-meaning fool who happens to have a good memory and a way with people. Although it annoys Emma that Charles doesn't deduce her attitude toward him based on her very subtle hints and cues, she would need a far more blunt approach to get her message across. Charles's lack of insight regarding Emma is not unique. He fails to realize that Homais is not his friend but his enemy and lets the pharmacist isolate him from the other people in town. He fails to realize that Rodolphe has designs on Emma. He trusts Léon implicitly even though he's aware Emma is emotionally attached to the young clerk. He fails to realize that Emma's expenditures have put the household in debt, and he doesn't realize that Lheureux is a financial predator. He also ignores potential allies in the town who might have pointed out what everybody else thought was obvious.

Monsieur Homais

Monsieur Homais is the town pharmacist. He is materialistic and self-centered. Though a common man, he thinks highly of himself and seeks personal attention and recognition, often by publishing pompous and banal commentaries on town events in the local newspaper. In one incident, he convinces Charles to perform corrective surgery on a young stable boy, afflicted with a club foot. During this era, remediating or eliminating a disability was a daring option and he may have considered this an opportunity to garner personal attention and praise. The operation is a disaster, and the stable boy is left with his leg amputated at the thigh.

Despite having been convicted of practicing medicine without a license, Monsieur Homais craves recognition as a medical expert. So he continues to give "consultations" in his pharmacy. This means that the presence of a licensed health officer in town is a threat to him. Not only are he and Charles in competition for patients, but if Charles were to report Homais for practicing medicine without a license, the courts would deal strictly with Homais given that it would be a second conviction. So, to keep the clueless Charles from turning him in to the authorities should Charles ever find out about the "consultations", Homais becomes Charles's best friend, at least on the surface. Meanwhile he undermines Charles at every opportunity. Convincing him to attempt the risky club foot operation was part of an ongoing strategy to discredit Charles so as to run him out of town. At the end of the book, after Charles's death, Homais uses similar strategies to get rid of another doctor and is left in sole control of the medical profession in Yonville.

Léon Dupuis

First befriending Emma when she moves to Yonville, Léon seems a perfect match for her. He shares her romantic ideals as well as her disdain for common life. He worships Emma from afar before leaving to study law in Paris. A chance encounter brings the two together several years later and this time they begin an affair. Though the relationship is passionate at first, after a time the mystique wears off.

Léon becomes disenchanted with Emma, particularly after her attentions start to affect his work. The first time she arrives at his office, he's charmed and leaves work quickly. After a while, the interruptions have an effect on his work and his attitude to the other clerks. Eventually someone sends word to Léon's mother that her son is "ruining himself with a married woman", and Léon's mother insists that he break off the affair. Léon does, but his reluctance is tempered with relief because Emma's pursuit of him has become increasingly disturbing. When Emma's debts finally come due, she attempts to seduce Léon into stealing the money to cover her debts from his employer. At this point, he becomes genuinely afraid. He fobs her off with an excuse and disappears from her life.

Rodolphe Boulanger

Rodolphe is a wealthy local man who seduces Emma as one more addition to a long string of mistresses. Though occasionally charmed by Emma, Rodolphe feels little true emotion towards her. As Emma becomes more and more desperate, Rodolphe loses interest and worries about her lack of caution. He eventually ends their relationship, but not before going through a collection of letters and tokens from previous mistresses, all of whom ended up wanting either love or money.

Rodolphe's deteriorating feelings for Emma do not keep him from accepting the valuable gifts she showers on him throughout their relationship, even though he realizes at some level that she can't afford to be so generous. The gifts she gives him are of the same value and quality as she imagines an aristocrat such as the Vicount might receive from a similarly aristocratic mistress. Rodolphe's gifts to Emma are nowhere near as valuable even though he is by far the wealthier of the two. He does not feel particularly obligated by having accepted the gifts, even though they create a large part of Emma's debt to Lheureux.

When Emma asks Rodolphe for help at the peak of her financial crisis, after refusing the sex-for-money exchange offered by the wealthy Monsieur Guillaumin, she essentially attempts to initiate a sex-for-money exchange with Rodolphe. She pretends at first to have returned out of love, then when the timing feels right she asks him for money, using an obvious lie about why she needs a loan. She therefore comes across as among the most mercenary of Rodolphe's past mistresses. Rodolphe therefore sees no need to help her, even though he could well afford to lend her enough money to keep her creditors at bay.

Monsieur Lheureux

A manipulative and sly merchant who continually convinces Emma to buy goods on credit and borrow money from him. Lheureux plays Emma masterfully and eventually leads her so far into debt as to cause her financial ruin and subsequent suicide.

Lheureux's reputation as an aggressive money lender is well known in Yonville. Had Emma or Charles had the wit to make inquiries about him or even to listen to the gossip, they would have realized that Lheureux had ruined at least one other person in town through his stratagems. Yet the only "friend" they trust, Homais, is fully aware of Lheureux's treachery but disinclined to warn Emma or Charles. So both Emma and Charles end up borrowing money from Lheureux without each other's knowledge.

Setting

The setting of Madame Bovary is crucial to the novel for several reasons. First, it is important as it applies to Flaubert's realist style and social commentary. Secondly, the setting is important in how it relates to the protagonist Emma.

It has been calculated that the novel begins in October 1827 and ends in August 1846 (Francis Steegmuller). This is around the era known as the “July Monarchy”, or the rule of King Louis-Philippe. This was a period in which there was a great up-surge in the power of the bourgeois middle class. Flaubert detested the bourgeoisie. Much of the time and effort, therefore, that he spends detailing the customs of the rural French people can be interepreted as social criticism.

Flaubert put much effort into making sure his depictions of common life were accurate. This was aided by the fact that he chose a subject that was very familiar to him. He chose to set the story in and around the city of Rouen in Normandy, the setting of his own birth and childhood. This care and detail that Flaubert gives to his setting is important in looking at the style of the novel. It is this faithfulness to the mundane elements of country life that has garnered the book its reputation as the beginning of the literary movement known as “literary realism”.

Flaubert also deliberately used his setting to contrast with his protagonist. Emma's romantic fantasies are strikingly foiled by the practicalities of the common life around her. Flaubert uses this juxtaposition to reflect on both subjects. Emma becomes more capricious and ludicrous in the harsh light of everyday reality. By the same token, however, the self-important banality of the local people is magnified in comparison to Emma, who, though impractical, still reflects an appreciation of beauty and greatness that seems entirely absent in the bourgeois class.

Style

The book, loosely based on the life story of a schoolfriend who had become a doctor, was written at the urging of friends, who were trying (unsuccessfully) to "cure" Flaubert of his deep-dyed Romanticism by assigning him the dreariest subject they could think of, and challenging him to make it interesting without allowing anything out-of-the-way to occur. Although Flaubert had little liking for the styles of Balzac or Zola, the novel is now seen as a prime example of Realism, a fact which contributed to the trial for obscenity (which was a politically-motivated attack by the government on the liberal newspaper in which it was being serialised, La Revue de Paris). Flaubert, as the author of the story, does not comment directly on the moral character of Emma Bovary and abstains from explicitly condemning her adultery. This decision caused some to accuse Flaubert of glorifying adultery and creating a scandal.

The Realist movement used verisimilitude through a focus on character development. Realism was a reaction against Romanticism. Emma may be said to be the embodiment of a romantic; in her mental and emotional process, she has no relation to the realities of her world. She inevitably becomes dissatisfied since her larger-than-life fantasies are impossible to realize. Flaubert declared that much of what is in the novel is in his own life by saying, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary is me").

Madame Bovary, on the whole, is a commentary on the entire self-satisfied, deluded, bourgeois culture of Flaubert's time period. His contempt for the bourgeoisie is expressed through his characters: Emma and Charles Bovary lost in romantic delusions; absurd and harmful scientific characters, a self-serving money lender, lovers seeking excitement finding only the banality of marriage in their adulterous affairs. All are seeking escape in empty church rituals, unrealistic romantic novels, or delusions of one sort or another.

Adaptations

Madame Bovary has been made into several films, beginning with Jean Renoir's 1933 version. It has also been the subject of multiple television miniseries and made-for-TV movies. The most notable of these adaptations was the 1949 film produced by MGM. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, it starred Jennifer Jones in the title role, co-starring James Mason, Van Heflin, Louis Jourdan, and Gene Lockhart. There was also a TV adaptation in 2000 for Masterpiece Theatre, starring Frances O'Connor and Hugh Bonneville.

David Lean's film Ryan's Daughter (1970) was a loose adaptation of the story, relocating it to Ireland during the time of the Easter Rebellion. The script had begun life as a straight adaptation of Bovary, but Lean convinced writer Robert Bolt to re-work it into another setting.

Indian director Ketan Mehta adapted the novel into a 1992 Hindi film Maya Memsaab.

Madame Blueberry is an 1998 film in the Veggietales animated series. It is a loose parody of Madame Bovary, in which Madame Blueberry, an anthropomorphic blueberry, gathers material possessions in a vain attempt to find happiness.

Academy Award winning film Little Children features the novel as part of a book club discussion, and shares a few elements of the main idea.

Naomi Ragen loosely based her 2007 novel The Saturday Wife on Madame Bovary.

Posy Simmonds graphic novel Gemma Bovery reworked the story into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France.

Trivia

In Chapter 1.2, Emma's eyes are described thus: "although they were brown, they would appear black"; in Chapter 1.5, they are described thus: "They were black when she was in shadow and dark blue in full daylight"; once they are described as having "layer upon layer of colours"; and frequently they are described as black. This discrepancy, and the issue of its importance, is explored in a chapter of British novelist Julian Barnes' novel Flaubert's Parrot entitled "Emma Bovary's Eyes". The narrator argues that this should in no way be viewed as a continuity error, as one overzealous critic intended, but merely a stylistic affectation.
In the ninth-to-last paragraph of the book, the insects Flaubert mentions (cantharides) are Soldier beetles or "leatherwings", not Spanish flies (which take no interest in pollen). This common translation mistake arises because Spanish flies (leaf-eating beetles once harvested to make medicines and aphrodisiacs) are called cantharides in French but are not members of the family Cantharidae.

References

^ http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html

External links

[1] ttp://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html

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