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.”
Short 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.
Detailed Summary
Charles Bovary is introduced as a clumsy schoolboy, already marked by mediocrity. He becomes a health officer, marries a widow for money, and when she dies he courts Emma Rouault, the daughter of a farmer whose leg he has set. Emma is beautiful, educated at a convent, and has spent her adolescence d...