Madame Bovary
Based on Wikipedia: Madame Bovary
In January 1857, a French novelist stood trial for obscenity. His crime? Writing a book so realistic that prosecutors argued realism itself was an offense against art and decency. The book was Madame Bovary, and its acquittal on February 7th didn't just save its author from punishment—it transformed a scandal into a bestseller and launched what many consider the greatest novel ever written.
Gustave Flaubert had spent five agonizing years crafting this story of a provincial doctor's wife who destroys herself chasing romantic fantasies. He was notorious for laboring over single sentences for days, reading each paragraph aloud to test its rhythm. The result was prose that critics would later say did what poetry was supposed to do.
But let's start with what happens in the book, because the plot itself tells us something profound about human nature.
A Story of Wanting
Charles Bovary is introduced as a figure of gentle comedy: a shy, awkwardly dressed teenager who does poorly in medical school and becomes not a physician but an officier de santé—essentially a public health officer, a step below a real doctor. His mother picks out his first wife, an unpleasant widow named Héloïse who is supposedly wealthy but turns out not to be. Charles sets up practice in a Norman village called Tostes and seems content enough with his modest life.
Then he meets Emma Rouault.
She's the daughter of a farmer whose broken leg Charles has come to set. Beautiful, convent-educated, dressed with poetic flair, Emma has spent her youth devouring romantic novels that have filled her head with visions of passionate love, exotic travel, and aristocratic glamour. When the widow Héloïse conveniently dies, Charles courts Emma and they marry.
Here is where Flaubert's genius becomes apparent. Another novelist might have made Emma's disillusionment with marriage dramatic—a cruel husband, perhaps, or some gothic tragedy. Instead, Flaubert gives her something worse: a kind, devoted, thoroughly boring man. Charles loves Emma completely. He just cannot understand her. When she sighs, he thinks she's hungry. When she grows listless, he diagnoses it as a medical condition requiring a change of scenery.
The gap between what Emma wants and what life offers her is the engine of the entire novel.
The Fancy Ball
One pivotal scene crystallizes Emma's predicament. She and Charles attend a ball at a local aristocrat's château, where Emma dances with a viscount and glimpses the world she believes she was meant to inhabit. The evening is magical. For one night, she tastes luxury, refinement, romance.
Then she goes home to Tostes.
The contrast destroys her. Everything about her provincial life—the small house, the predictable meals, her husband's placid contentment—now seems unbearable. She develops what we might today recognize as depression, though Flaubert describes it simply as ennui, that peculiarly French word for a boredom so profound it becomes a kind of spiritual sickness.
Charles's solution? They move to a larger town, Yonville-l'Abbaye. Emma gives birth to a daughter, Berthe. Surely motherhood will fulfill her.
It doesn't.
The Affairs
In Yonville, Emma meets Léon Dupuis, a young law clerk who shares her appreciation for literature and music. They develop an intense emotional connection but don't consummate it—Léon lacks the courage to act, and Emma hasn't yet given herself permission to transgress. When Léon leaves for Paris to continue his studies, Emma is left more frustrated than before, having tasted emotional intimacy only to lose it.
Meanwhile, Charles attempts to build his reputation through an innovative surgery on a local inn-servant named Hippolyte, who has a clubfoot. The operation is a disaster. Gangrene sets in. Hippolyte's leg must be amputated. Emma watches her husband fail spectacularly at the one moment he tried to be more than mediocre, and her contempt for him becomes complete.
Into this void steps Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy landowner who seduces women as casually as he hunts. He recognizes Emma immediately for what she is: bored, romantic, ripe for an affair. His seduction is almost clinical in its calculation. He tells her what she wants to hear about passion and destiny. She falls completely.
For four years they conduct their affair. Emma dreams of running away with Rodolphe, escaping at last to the passionate life she's always craved. She plans their departure obsessively. On the eve of their flight, Rodolphe sends her a letter—delivered at the bottom of a basket of apricots—ending everything. He has no intention of saddling himself with a doctor's wife and her baggage.
The shock nearly kills Emma. She falls into a genuine illness and briefly turns to religion for comfort. When she recovers, she and Charles attend the opera in Rouen, where she encounters Léon again. He's now educated, worldly, working in the city. This time, neither of them hesitates. They begin an affair.
The Merchant's Trap
Running parallel to Emma's romantic catastrophes is a financial one, embodied by a merchant named Lheureux. He's one of literature's great villains precisely because he never does anything overtly evil. He simply makes things available. He extends credit. He suggests purchases. He understands that Emma's hunger for beautiful things—silk scarves, fancy furniture, exotic luxuries—is bottomless.
Lheureux enables Emma to spend money she doesn't have, securing promissory notes against Charles's property. When her debts grow unmanageable, he arranges for her to obtain power of attorney over her husband's estate, allowing her to borrow even more. Charles, trusting and oblivious, signs whatever papers are put before him.
The debts compound. Lheureux calls them in.
Emma, desperate, begs everyone she knows for money. She goes to Rodolphe, her former lover, hoping his wealth might save her. He refuses. She has nowhere left to turn.
In despair, Emma swallows arsenic from the pharmacy. Her death is not romantic. Flaubert, the realist, describes it in clinical, horrifying detail—the vomiting, the convulsions, the black liquid seeping from her mouth. She dies in agony while Charles weeps at her bedside, still not understanding what has happened to his life.
The Aftermath
Charles survives Emma only briefly. Heartbroken, unable to work, he sells off his possessions one by one and eventually dies. Their daughter Berthe is sent to live with her grandmother, who soon dies as well. The child ends up with an impoverished aunt who puts her to work in a cotton mill.
The novel's final sentence belongs to Monsieur Homais, the local pharmacist who had been a minor character throughout—a pompous, corrupt social climber who practiced medicine illegally and competed with Charles for patients. After all the tragedy, after Emma's death and Charles's ruin and Berthe's descent into child labor, the book ends by telling us that Homais was awarded the Legion of Honor.
It's one of the most savage final lines in literature. The mediocre and the cynical prosper. The dreamers destroy themselves. The innocent suffer. Life goes on.
What Flaubert Was Doing
The traditional view of Madame Bovary is that it's an attack on romanticism—that Flaubert is mocking Emma's foolish dreams and showing the danger of confusing novels with life. There's something to this. Emma's reading habits are explicitly blamed for her distorted worldview. As the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa observed, "If Emma Bovary had not read all those novels, it is possible that her fate might have been different."
But Flaubert's relationship to his heroine is more complicated than simple mockery.
He famously declared, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"—Madame Bovary is me. Scholars have debated whether he actually said this, and in his letters he denied putting any of his own feelings into the book. Yet something about Emma clearly obsessed him. He spent five years on her story, agonizing over every detail of her inner life. He understood her longings even as he diagnosed their absurdity.
What Flaubert truly despised was not romanticism but the bourgeoisie—the French middle class that rose to prominence during the reign of King Louis Philippe in the early nineteenth century. In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, Flaubert catalogued the clichés and shallow thinking that he saw as characteristic of bourgeois culture: intellectual superficiality, raw ambition, love of material things, and above all the mindless parroting of received opinions.
Emma, in this reading, is trapped between two kinds of falseness: the cheap romantic fantasies she absorbed from bad novels and the stifling mediocrity of provincial bourgeois life. Neither offers her anything real. Her tragedy is that she can see through the emptiness around her but has nothing genuine to replace it with.
The Trial
When Madame Bovary first appeared in installments in the Revue de Paris between October and December 1856, it caused an immediate scandal. The French government, under Napoleon III, prosecuted Flaubert for offending public morals and religion.
The prosecutor's argument was revealing. He didn't simply claim the novel was immoral—he argued that literary realism itself was an offense. Art, he contended, should elevate and ennoble. Showing life as it actually was, in all its sordid detail, violated the fundamental purpose of literature.
Flaubert was acquitted, but the trial made the book notorious. When it was published in two volumes in April 1857, it became an instant bestseller. The scandal had done what marketing never could.
Interestingly, the same thing happened a few months later to another French writer, Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) was also prosecuted for obscenity in 1857. Baudelaire was convicted and fined, and several poems were banned. It was a pivotal year for French literature—the moment when the guardians of public morality tried to stop the tide of realism and lost.
The Prose
What makes Madame Bovary so influential isn't just its subject matter but how it's written.
Flaubert pioneered what critics call the style indirect libre, or free indirect style—a technique where the narrative voice slides imperceptibly between objective description and a character's inner thoughts. When we read that Emma found her life "dull," we're not sure if that's Flaubert's judgment or Emma's feeling. This ambiguity creates an intimacy with characters that earlier novels rarely achieved.
He was also obsessive about rhythm and sound. He would test each paragraph by reading it aloud in what he called the gueuloir—literally, the "shouting room." If a sentence didn't flow when spoken, he rewrote it. The result is prose that, as Vladimir Nabokov noted, does what poetry is supposed to do.
While writing the book, Flaubert described his ambition as creating "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style." This sounds almost like a manifesto for modernist literature—and indeed, critics see Madame Bovary as prefiguring the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. The novel's interest in psychological accuracy, its focus on consciousness rather than external events, pointed the way toward the literary experiments of the twentieth century.
The critic Jean Rousset called Flaubert "the first in date of the non-figurative novelists," comparing his achievement to abstract painting—art that derives its power from form rather than representation.
What Others Have Said
The praise for Madame Bovary from other writers borders on the worshipful.
Henry James, himself a master of psychological fiction, wrote that the book "holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment." Marcel Proust praised its "grammatical purity." The Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, better known as a painter than a literary critic, called it "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book."
Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, argued that Flaubert achieved something revolutionary: "Not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority. Ever since Madame Bovary, the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry."
Julian Barnes, the English novelist who wrote an entire book about his obsession with Flaubert, went furthest of all: he called it simply "the best novel that has ever been written."
Translations and Adaptations
For English readers, the question of which translation to read is vexed. The first attempt was made by Juliet Herbert, who worked directly with Flaubert, but the project was abandoned for lack of a publisher. Since then, there have been dozens of translations, with those by Francis Steegmuller (1957), Geoffrey Wall (1992), and Lydia Davis (2010) being among the most respected.
The novel has been adapted for film repeatedly, though none of the adaptations has achieved the status of the original. Jean Renoir directed a version in 1934. Vincente Minnelli made a Hollywood version in 1949 starring Jennifer Jones. Claude Chabrol's 1991 film starring Isabelle Huppert is probably the most faithful to the spirit of the book. Most recently, Sophie Barthes directed a 2014 version with Mia Wasikowska as Emma.
David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970) began as a straight adaptation before being relocated to Ireland during the Easter Rising. The graphic novelist Posy Simmonds reimagined the story as Gemma Bovery, a satirical tale of English expatriates in France. Even the Christian children's video series VeggieTales adapted the novel as Madame Blueberry, which is either wonderfully inventive or deeply strange, depending on your perspective.
The Enduring Question
Why does this novel continue to resonate almost 170 years after its publication?
Perhaps because the gap between our dreams and our reality never closes. We all, to some degree, live in our imaginations. We all construct fantasies about who we might become, what love might feel like, how our lives might be transformed. Social media has only amplified this tendency, filling our feeds with curated images of lives more glamorous than our own.
Emma Bovary is not simply a nineteenth-century housewife who read too many romance novels. She's anyone who has ever felt that their real life is happening somewhere else, to someone else—that their present circumstances are just a temporary inconvenience before their true destiny begins.
Flaubert understood that this feeling is both universal and dangerous. Dreams can sustain us, but they can also devour us. Emma's tragedy is not that she wanted more than provincial life could offer—that's understandable, even admirable. Her tragedy is that she could never distinguish between longing and living, between fantasy and the kind of imperfect happiness that might actually be achieved.
She wanted fire and air. What she got was arsenic and an unmarked grave and a daughter working in a cotton mill.
And the pharmacist got the Legion of Honor.