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.”
Madame Bovary— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Gustave Flaubert · Published 1857· Era: Realist / Second Empire France·329 pages
Themes explored: desire, illusion, class, marriage, boredom, romanticism, materialism, destruction
About Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was born in Rouen, Normandy, the son of a distinguished surgeon. He studied law in Paris, suffered a mysterious neurological breakdown at twenty-two, and retreated to the family estate at Croisset, where he would spend the rest of his life in almost monastic dedication to prose. He had a long, passionate, intellectually charged correspondence with the writer Louise Colet, who became his primary correspondent during the writing of Madame Bovary. He never married. The novel took five years to write (1851–1856), during which his letters to Colet constitute a running commentary on every sentence. On publication in serial form in 1856, the government prosecuted Flaubert and his publisher for 'offending public morals and religion.' They were acquitted. The novel became one of the most celebrated in French literature. Flaubert spent the rest of his life working on Salammbô, Sentimental Education, and the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet, dying in 1880 without completing it.
Life → Text Connections
How Gustave Flaubert's real experiences shaped specific elements of Madame Bovary.
Flaubert grew up in Rouen and Normandy; his father was the chief surgeon of the Rouen hospital
The novel's setting in Normandy, its medical milieu (Charles is a health officer), and its clinical precision in the death scene
The surgical precision of Flaubert's prose is not metaphor — it is inheritance. He observed his father operate and applied the same standard to sentences.
Flaubert suffered from what may have been epilepsy — sudden, mysterious attacks that ended his legal studies in Paris and forced his retreat to Croisset
Emma's mysterious collapses and physical illness following emotional crises
Flaubert knew what it meant to have a body that betrayed you in response to circumstances you couldn't control. He rendered Emma's collapses from inside experience.
Flaubert's romantic life was largely epistolary — his relationship with Louise Colet was conducted primarily through letters, maintained at distance
The centrality of letters in the novel — Emma's love letters, Rodolphe's abandonment letter, the discovery of letters after death
Flaubert understood letters as a form where the gap between the written self and the real self is most visible. He used this knowledge throughout.
Flaubert claimed 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' — identifying himself with his heroine
Emma's longing for something more than provincial life; the suffocating adequacy of her surroundings
Flaubert was himself imprisoned in Croisset — brilliant, ambitious, isolated. His identification with Emma's boredom is genuine, which is why the portrait is merciless and tender at once.
Historical Era
Second Empire France (1852–1870) — Napoleon III's France, an era of industrial development, bourgeois confidence, and suppressed political opposition
How the Era Shapes the Book
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 romantic ideas are already anachronistic in 1857 — Romanticism was dying, replaced by Realism, and Flaubert wrote the death of Romanticism from inside a Romantic consciousness. The prosecution for obscenity was an act of Second Empire censorship against a novel that showed, without moralizing, what respectable society actually contained.
Why Madame Bovary Matters Historically
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, and made prose style itself an argument. Every major novelist from James to Woolf to Nabokov acknowledges the debt. The novel was prosecuted for obscenity in 1857 and acquitted; within twenty years it was considered a masterpiece; within fifty years it was considered the foundation of modern fiction.
- First sustained deployment of free indirect discourse as a structural technique — the model for all subsequent interior fiction
- First realist novel to achieve its argument entirely through style rather than narrator commentary
- First major novel prosecuted for obscenity for content it doesn't actually show — the cab scene is narrated through implication only
- The agricultural fair scene as the first multi-level simultaneous narration in European fiction
Prosecuted in France in January 1857 for 'outrage to public morals and religion' alongside its publisher and the editor of the Revue de Paris. Flaubert and his publisher were acquitted; the journal's editor received a minor fine. The prosecution was largely political — Flaubert had friends in literary Paris, and the regime found it expedient not to convict. The acquittal made the novel famous. In subsequent decades it has been challenged in schools for its treatment of adultery and its failure to condemn immoral behavior.