Talk to Madame Bovary like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Emma Bovary is a doctor's wife in provincial Normandy who believes, with absolute conviction, that real life should feel like the romantic novels she devoured as a girl. Her husband Charles is kind, dull, and utterly incapable of meeting the emotional and aesthetic appetites she has cultivated. Over the course of the novel she pursues two affairs, accumulates ruinous debts buying the life she imagined, and ends in catastrophe. Flaubert tells this story with a precision so cold and precise that it became the founding document of literary realism.
The novel is simultaneously a portrait of Emma and a dissection of an entire social world. Flaubert despised provincial bourgeois life — its complacency, its clichés, its smug self-satisfaction — and he puts that contempt into the prose itself. The famous style indirect libre (free indirect discourse) means we are constantly inside Emma's overheated consciousness and simultaneously outside it, watching her romanticize and deceive herself. This technique is Flaubert's most lasting formal contribution: the gap between how Emma experiences things and how the narrator renders them is where the novel lives.
What it gets right
- 1.
Free indirect discourse — the technique of narrating in third person while inhabiting the character's inner voice — originated here in its fully developed form and changed the course of the novel.
- 2.
Emma Bovary was shaped by romantic fiction, and the novel is partly a critique of what reading certain kinds of fiction does to readers — a recursive joke that still cuts.
- 3.
Flaubert's famous remark 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' points at something real: Emma's craving for an ideal impossible world is Flaubert's own aesthetic craving turned inside out.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was a French novelist regarded as one of the supreme stylists in Western literature. His major works include Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbô (1862), A Sentimental Education (1869), and Three Tales (1877). Flaubert was famously painstaking — he could spend days on a single sentence — and his development of free indirect discourse transformed the possibilities of prose fiction. He was tried for obscenity over Madame Bovary, acquitted, and the novel became an immediate success.
