Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert (1857)
“A bored doctor's wife reads too many romance novels and destroys herself, her husband, and everyone who loved her — and Flaubert makes you understand exactly how.”
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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert (1857) · 329pages · Realist / Second Empire France · 9 AP appearances
Summary
Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary, a provincial doctor, expecting the passionate life she read about in novels. Reality — dull dinners, a devoted but boring husband, rural Normandy — fails her catastrophically. She has two adulterous affairs, accumulates ruinous debt buying luxury goods, and poisons herself when her creditors close in. Her husband dies of grief shortly after. Their daughter ends up in a cotton factory.
Why It Matters
Madame Bovary is the novel that invented the modern novel. Before Flaubert, fiction was primarily either narrative (things happen) or didactic (the narrator tells you what to think). Flaubert removed the narrator's moral authority, developed free indirect discourse into a full literary technique,...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Highly controlled formal prose with precise shifts between cold clinical observation and piercing lyrical intensity — Flaubert moves between registers as argument, not decoration
Narrator: Flaubert's narrator is the most studied in Western literature: omniscient, impersonal, seemingly objective — but depl...
Figurative Language: High, but strategically concentrated. Flaubert deploys metaphor and simile as events
Historical Context
Second Empire France (1852–1870) — Napoleon III's France, an era of industrial development, bourgeois confidence, and suppressed political opposition: The Second Empire's bourgeois confidence and suppression of dissent is Homais's world — he belongs to the self-satisfied progressive class that Napoleon III's regime produced and rewarded. Emma's r...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Flaubert famously said 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' Given that Flaubert was a man and Emma is a woman, what does this identification mean? What does it reveal about how he uses free indirect discourse?
- Emma is destroyed by reading romantic novels. Is Madame Bovary itself a romantic novel? What kind of reading does it require, and does that reading protect against bovarysme or produce it?
- Analyze the agricultural fair scene. How does Flaubert use simultaneous narration to make an argument about romantic language without stating it directly?
- The novel ends with Homais receiving the Legion of Honor. Is this a comic anticlimax, a moral statement, or both? What does Flaubert's choice of final sentence argue about provincial society?
- Free indirect discourse makes it impossible to know, at many moments, whether we're reading the narrator's judgment or the character's thought. Find three examples and explain what ambiguity each one produces.
Notable Quotes
“She had read Paul and Virginia, and she had dreamed of the little bamboo house, the negro Domingo, the dog Fidèle.”
“Before her marriage she had believed herself in love; but since the happiness which should have resulted from that love had not come, she must, she...”
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
Why Read This
Because every technique you will ever use in literary analysis — close reading, unreliable narration, free indirect discourse, irony by juxtaposition, register analysis — was either invented or perfected here. Because 'bovarysme' is a real conditi...