Madame Bovary

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.

Compare Emma's relationship to romantic language with Rodolphe's. Both use the same vocabulary — why does it destroy her and merely bore him?

Is Charles Bovary a tragic figure, a comic figure, or something Flaubert has more complicated in mind? Use his final months as your primary evidence.

Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity partly for the carriage scene — a scene in which he describes almost nothing that happens inside the carriage. How does the technique of radical restraint make the scene more powerful (and perhaps more 'obscene') than explicit description would?

Flaubert describes Emma's death using clinical medical language alongside liturgical language (the anointing of her senses). What is the effect of holding both registers simultaneously? Is this irony, elegy, or something else?

Emma cannot love her daughter Berthe. Is this a moral failure, a symptom of her disease, or Flaubert's critique of the social structure that produces such mothers?

Compare 'bovarysme' to a specific contemporary phenomenon — social media, influencer culture, idealized relationship content. Is the mechanism identical, and does understanding Emma help you understand the contemporary version?

Lheureux never threatens Emma — he always smiles, always suggests, always accommodates. How does Flaubert make a moneylender the novel's most quietly terrifying figure?

The novel opens with a 'nous' — a collective school-memory 'we' — that disappears after the first page. Why does Flaubert begin this way? What does the vanishing first person establish about the narration that follows?

Flaubert said there is no such thing as a synonym — one word can never replace another. Choose any five-word stretch of Madame Bovary and try to replace each word with a close synonym. What does the exercise reveal?

Homais debates religion with the priest Bournisien throughout the novel. Both are certain, both are wrong, and neither is able to help Emma when she needs it most. What does this parallel suggest about Flaubert's view of Enlightenment science versus Catholic faith in provincial France?

Emma's romantic desires are largely sourced from fiction she read as an adolescent. Flaubert was prosecuted for the obscenity of his novel. What is the relationship between literary representation and its effects on readers — and does Flaubert's prosecution prove Emma's point?

Compare Emma Bovary to Anna Karenina. Both novels concern adulterous wives in provincial settings who are destroyed. How do Flaubert and Tolstoy differ in their moral posture toward their heroines?

Justin unlocks the poison cabinet for Emma because he cannot refuse her. His love is described as the purest in the novel. How does Flaubert use Justin to argue about the relationship between love and helplessness?

The novel's title is Madame Bovary — her husband's name. Emma never gets to name the novel she is in. What does Flaubert's title argue about identity, marriage, and legal personhood in Second Empire France?

Trace the word 'boredom' (ennui) through the novel. How does Emma's relationship to boredom change between Part I and Part III? Is ennui a condition, a disease, or a form of intelligence?

Flaubert spent five years writing this novel and was in agony over nearly every sentence. Emma spent her life pursuing romance with no patience for effort or process. In what ways is Flaubert the formal opposite of his protagonist?

The agricultural fair scene intercuts three levels of discourse. Identify a contemporary equivalent — a situation where romantic, official, and commercial language compete simultaneously — and analyze it using Flaubert's technique.

Berthe Bovary is the character whose fate is most consequential and least discussed. Write a paragraph arguing that she, not Emma, is the novel's true tragic figure.

Why does Flaubert describe the aristocratic ball at Vaubyessard with such sensory precision? What is the function of one beautiful night in Emma's life?

Flaubert refused to write a didactic novel — he refused to tell the reader what the moral is. But 'impassibilité' is itself a moral position. What is it?

Compare Charles's hat (the novel's first object) to Emma's arsenic (the novel's last significant object). What do these two objects tell you about Flaubert's use of the material world?

Rodolphe writes Emma's abandonment letter while eating an apricot. Why does Flaubert include this detail, and what would be lost without it?

Translate one paragraph of Madame Bovary from French (or compare two existing translations). What choices does the translator have to make, and how does each choice affect the meaning — given Flaubert's doctrine that no word can be replaced?

Is Madame Bovary a feminist novel? Argue both sides: the case for (Emma's constraints are structural, her desires valid) and the case against (Flaubert's satirical treatment, her failure of maternal love, the male gaze in the narration).

If Emma had access to therapy, antidepressants, a career, and a passport, would she still have been destroyed? What does your answer reveal about how much of her tragedy is individual versus structural?