book review of madame bovary

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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – review

I didn't like Madame Bovary when I first encountered the book as a teenager. The story of a suicide of a doctor's wife in rural 1840s Normandy seemed too banal for me. Like many others, I didn't really like Emma, who seemed neither intelligent nor charming. But the book has become one of the few works of fiction that I read again and again, decade by decade, and each time it seems different, as if Flaubert and his heroine were following me through life. It may help that my French family come from the part of Normandy in which Flaubert set his story, but I sense that I would love the book as much if I came from Patagonia.

I feel I've seen the expanse of white stocking between Emma's ankle-length boots and her long skirt that so excited Flaubert. Every moment of her terrifying death by arsenic poisoning might be occurring now, before my eyes. I've encountered many versions of the brilliantly rendered discussions about human existence that dot the novel, giving it its sharp, ironic edge. Someone whom I married told me that most women think of life as negatively as Emma did. Thirty years later I am still wondering whether this is true. When my French mother was 92, I found myself arguing about the book with her. She said that she had never met a woman as stupid as Emma, but I was convinced that Emma was far from stupid. She just had the wrong ideas about life and – in a modern way, for which I couldn't reproach her – felt entitled to them.

There is no Shakespeare in French literature, and Hugo and Balzac don't quite fit the bill. My mother was a Proustian, capable of reinterpreting a host of his observations for her own life. I do that, too, but Madame Bovary fills another gap. Every observation of Flaubert's has gone into French life with the force of a large meteorite. I like to look at the impact, in other novels, in films, even in photography. But I also know that I shall never really comprehend the full extent of the damage done to our illusions by Flaubert's great book.

"A good sentence in prose," declares Flaubert, "should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic and sonorous." But Flaubert writes in a variety of styles, some low, some high. He taught us to read novels for their style, and yet his own masterpiece deprives one of such comfort. It is absurd to insist, as Flaubert did, that Madame Bovary is not a work of realism. As his very un-Flaubertian contemporary Zola observed, the book is profoundly, shatteringly real.

Are we capable of being truthful? Do human beings ever really tell the truth about the things that really matter? "Madame Bovary, c'est moi, " Flaubert exclaimed. He seems to say either that we should tell the truth but don't, or, worse, that we cannot: "... None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs," he observes in what must be the book's most celebrated mot, "or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity."

This is the 20th English translation of Madame Bovary . Lydia Davis is an accomplished American short-story writer and translator of Proust. She she recently that she didn't much like the character of Emma, and spent three years on the book. (Flaubert took four and a half years to write the original.) Sometimes Davis's staid American idioms remind me of the genteel locutions of the literary folk in Tom Rachman's recent comic novel The Imperfectionists , set in a failed American newspaper in Europe. Something of provincial France – the sheer crudeness of much of the dialogue, its obsessive rehashing of vulgar cliche – has gone badly missing. Davis isn't alert enough to the sheer range of Flaubert's progressive bêtes noires .

It is just not plausible to suggest, as Davis does, that the pharmacist and would-be politician Homais, with his ugly children and republican Phrygian caps, is one of the more sympathetic characters. Homais writes a piece suggesting that Emma mistakenly dipped her hand in the arsenic jar while making a cake. Emma, of course, never baked a cake in her life, and this is a feeble lie contrived to save the pharmacist's skin. Not incorrectly, Flaubert believed that most of the public discourse of his time consisted of lies.

But I don't agree with the eminent Flaubertians (Julian Barnes among them) who find Davis's efforts clunky. Emma's passions extend to shopping as well as sex, and the connection is spelled out by Davis's spare prose. She has also caught for the first time in English the powerfully filmic aspect of Flaubert's narrative – the way in which he is able to cut without apparent effort between close-ups and wide shots. In a Greenwich Village cinema, I once encountered a half-ruined print of Jean Renoir's 1932 version. Emma was plumper than I had imagined, Charles even glummer. But you could see the characters struggle, always failing. Against the odds, Davis has performed a similar act of transposition, creating a Madame Bovary for our time.

Nick Fraser is editor of Storyville, the BBC's documentary strand

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By Kathryn Harrison

• Sept. 30, 2010

Poor Emma Bovary. She will never escape the tyranny of her desires, never avoid the anguish into which her romantic conceits deliver her, never claim the oblivion she sought from what is perhaps the most excruciating slow suicide ever written. Her place in the literary canon is assured; she cannot be eclipsed by another tragic heroine. Instead, each day she will be resurrected by countless readers who will agonize over the misery she brings herself and everyone around her and wonder at Flaubert’s ability to, godlike, summon life from words on a page.

The power of “Madame Bovary” stems from Flaubert’s determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes. Not his talent to do so — that would not have been enough — but his determination, which he never relaxed. “Madame Bovary” advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one. “A good sentence in prose,” he wrote, “should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable. ”

As Lydia Davis describes Flaubert’s work habits in the introduction to her translation of the book that “permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter,” Flaubert’s attention to detail was as painstaking as humanly possible. He spent up to 12 hours a day at his desk, for months at a time, discarding far more material than he kept and reporting as little progress as a single page per week. Given the pressure Flaubert applied to each sentence, there is no greater test of a translator’s art than “Madame Bovary.” Faithful to the style of the original, but not to the point of slavishness, Davis’s effort is transparent — the reader never senses her presence. For “Madame Bovary,” hers is the level of mastery required.

Having taken to heart the advice of his best friend, the poet Louis Bouilhet (to whom he dedicated “Madame Bovary”), Flaubert settled on a mundane topic to suppress his admitted “tendency to wax lyrical and effusive in response to exotic materials.” (An early draft of “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” was so purple Bouilhet suggested he burn it.) Adultery, financial ruin: these dramas played out in every social circle, Flaubert’s included. Emma’s fate is borrowed from two real-life cautionary tales, the adultery and suicide of Delphine Delamare, and the heedless extravagance that bankrupted Louise Pradier. If the plot was a simple enough equation, adding one vain, selfish act to another until they collectively resulted in disaster, the demands Flaubert placed on his execution of the narrative were severe and absolute.

Readers cannot like Emma Bovary, and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks, whether literal or metaphorical. How can a covetous, small-minded woman, incapable of love and (as she feels no true connection to anyone) terminally bored by her life, fascinate us as she succumbs to one venal impulse after the next? Flaubert commands his audience’s attention by rendering every aspect of Emma’s life — he called his novel “a biography” — with such skill that readers need not willingly suspend disbelief. Whether or not they admire Flaubert’s masterwork, they cannot doubt its trenchant, often uncanny realism.

On the face of it, Emma Bovary’s life assumes the shape of that of another celebrated heroine. Anna Karenina has a repellent husband, embarks on an affair with a man who ultimately betrays her love, and commits suicide. But Anna is sympathetic; her tragedy results as much from her circumstances (a woman who must yield to the conventions of 19th-century Russian society) as from her character. Married to an unfeeling man 20 years her senior, Anna doesn’t smother the passion Vronsky awakes in her. Her innate decency cannot overcome her hunger for love. Readers root for Anna and watch Emma with increasing horror, because Emma forces us to confront the human capacity for existential, and therefore insatiable, emptiness. Fatally self-absorbed, insensible to the suffering of others, Emma can’t see beyond the romantic stereotypes she serves, eternally looking for what she expects will be happiness. Anna remains vulnerable to her husband’s threat to take away the son she loves; when Emma isn’t being actively cruel, she ignores her daughter, motherhood having turned out to be one more reality that didn’t measure up to her fantasy of it.

Emma doesn’t have character flaws so much as she lacks character itself. She’s a vacuum, albeit a sensitive and sensual one, sucking up every ready-made conceit. As a convent student Emma mistakes her “ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-­fated women” like Joan of Arc for a religious vocation, dreaming of voluptuous sacrifices perfumed by incense. Contemplating her future with Charles Bovary, she wanted “to be married at midnight, by torchlight,” expecting matrimony to teach her the meaning of “the words ‘bliss,’ ‘passion’ and ‘intoxication,’ which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.” Seduced by Rodolphe, Emma feels her most intense pleasure alone, before a mirror, when she looks at her newest self and repeats over and over: “I have a ­lover! A lover!”

As for that lover, after taking Emma riding into the woods and ravishing her there, “­Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.” This sentence is worth a day’s work, if that’s what it took Flaubert to assemble the details necessary to illuminate so critical a moment in Emma’s plummet. The dastard’s teeth already sunk in a subsequent gratification of his appetite; the phallic penknife; the broken restraint; the experience of drawing a previously chaste woman into adultery so unaffecting that his attention has already strayed to a routine chore: what more is needed to confirm ­Rodolphe’s base nature? The seduction accomplished, it’s only a matter of time before he casts Emma aside, before she takes and is disappointed by another lover, before she falls prey to the money-lender Lheureux.

Flaubert’s “scorn for the bourgeoisie,” whose essence he intended Emma to represent, was based, above all, in its tendency to unconsciously appropriate and serve existing sentiments. Because Emma never questions the validity of her fantasies, borrowed from romance novels or inspired by attending an aristocrat’s ball, she embraces the terms of her disappointment over and over again. Turning her back on the real love she is offered, Emma is always waiting for someone or something better, at the very least the next distraction from her restless ennui. Her 19th-century death — after swallowing the one thing to permanently satisfy hunger: poison — might occur in any age, including our own, and summons less grief than gratitude. At last she has solved the problem of herself.

It is a shame Flaubert will never read Davis’s translation of “Madame Bovary.” Even he would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.

MADAME BOVARY

Provincial ways.

By Gustave Flaubert

Translated by Lydia Davis

342 pp. Viking. $27.95

Kathryn Harrison writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her new novel, “Enchantments,” will be published next year.

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MADAME BOVARY

by Gustave Flaubert translated by Lydia Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2010

—Wendy Smith

I’d better confess up front: I have always disliked Madame Bovary . I read it in English in high school, in French in college, and both times I was repelled by what I saw as Gustave Flaubert’s (1821–80) contempt for his characters. I couldn’t warm up to a novel that so mercilessly depicted its heroine—and almost everyone around her—as shallow, ignorant, selfish and greedy. Flaubert’s famous declaration, “ Madame Bovary, c’est moi ,” must be an example of his celebrated irony, I thought; his cold, clinical narration demonstrated not a shred of empathy.

Granted, someone whose favorite author was Charles Dickens was not necessarily the best audience for his considerably less sentimental French contemporaries. But I adored Stendhal and Balzac, also read in college, whose sardonicism was tempered by affection for at least some of their characters. Flaubert, I concluded after my second try, was one of those savage artists, like Stanley Kubrick, that I just didn’t get. Over the years, however, I realized that, although a masterpiece doesn’t change, people do, and you can grow to appreciate works of art that once seemed antipathetic. Kubrick has become one of my favorite filmmakers, for example, and when Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary came my way, I thought I might find myself savoring Flaubert’s ruthless detachment as I had come to enjoy the black humor of Dr. Strangelove . Well, kind of. Davis, herself an acclaimed short-story writer as well as a distinguished translator, does a brilliant job of capturing Flaubert’s diamond-hard style. I don’t remember which earlier English version I read, but I do remember that it seemed antiquated as well as unpleasant. Davis’ English prose has precisely the qualities she notes that Flaubert was striving for in French; it is “clear and direct, economical and precise.” This translation reminds you what an aggressively modern writer Flaubert is: suspicious of all received wisdom, infuriated by any value system—Catholicism, rationalism—that willfully ignores the world as it really is. Sentences I had missed before now jumped out at me: “A man, at least, is free…but a woman is continually thwarted.” I still didn’t believe Flaubert much liked silly, sensual Emma Bovary, but I could see that he thoroughly understood the society that produced her. Did I like Madame Bovary better this time around? Not really, but I admired it much more. Flaubert’s courageous refusal to pander to our need for sad stories to be softened by reassuring morals, or at least tragic grandeur, ages very well indeed. He won’t lie, and he makes it very difficult for us to lie to ourselves. I’d still rather be reading Bleak House , but I get it.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-670-02207-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010

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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

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ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

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Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

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Book Review: “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert

My Facebook Reading Challenge 2018 is well underway and March’s theme was a classic. I chose Madame Bovary , Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 classic, because it seemed to fit well with a lot of the women’s issues around and being discussed at the moment, particularly gender equality and sexual exploitation. It is fair to say that it had a mixed reception among the readers on the Facebook group!

I don’t think even Flaubert liked his characters and I think it was the intention of the author that we stand with him and examine the people he puts before us, with all their flaws. I believe he wants us also to dig a little deeper and examine the French provincial society that gave rise to Emma. As a young woman she lives a dull and uninteresting life with her widowed father on a farm, until the day she marries Charles, a physician in a neighbouring town, and goes to live a dull and uninteresting life with him. Passed from one man’s home to the next. Emma would not have had expectations, but she was an intelligent woman and the kind of life she was forced to lead did not fulfil her deeper needs. She is a woman of deep passions, but there is no outlet for them, apart from the romantic novels she devours. Certainly, Charles does not really do it for her! “Charles’s conversation was as flat as any pavement.”

Flaubert hints that Emma’s lack of fulfilment may be dangerous when he observes, after she and Charles were invited to an aristocratic ball, where she glimpses how the other half live and begins to fantasise:

“This life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north; and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart.”

What a sentence! Emma is naïve and inexperienced, however. Her life has been limited and she sees events in the most superficial of ways:

“She confused in her desire, sensual luxury with true joy, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment.”

Flaubert doesn’t expect us to like Emma very much, but I think he wants us to see her as a product of a time and a place, not as wilful and malicious.

Seduced by romantic fantasy, Emma takes lovers, both of whom are equally selfish and unpleasant. Whilst she is clearly a willing participant in her adultery, there is no doubt that both Leon and Rodolphe exploit Emma. When Emma’s reckless behaviour leads her to run up unsustainable debts, the town’s notary, from whom she has been borrowing money, also exploits her. When he requests sexual favours in return for his continued discretion we can see how deeply lost Emma’s situation is and how as a woman she has almost no power or autonomy. Her response to him, is when we begin to see for the first time something more admirable in her spirit:

“You are taking insolent advantage of my distress, monsieur. I may be in a pitiful state, but I am not up for sale!”

Parts of the book are heavy going, but it is in Part Three that we see the tragic coming-together of events, the closing-in on Emma of all the consequences of her misguided actions, her falsehoods, and the tremendous dislike she accrued. She is not a nice woman – she betrayed her husband, who did not understand her, but loved her in his own way, rejected her daughter and treated those about her with contempt. She was the architect of her own downfall, but she was also a victim of heartless men, of social norms and conventions that failed women like her and gave them no outlet.

She is a difficult heroine for us, but one who makes us think, for sure. Recommended because it’s just one of those books you have to read!

Do you find it hard to connect with the classics? What is your favourite?

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3 thoughts on “Book Review: “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert”

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A great review. Thanks. I reread it a while ago but I suspect I didn’t get right to the end, which I now must do. I think the quotes you chose were really good.

Thank you. Yes, it’s worth a re-read.

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“Pourquoi, mon Dieu ! me suis-je mariée ?” – Madame Bovary  

Summary of madame bovary (i warn you: this is with spoilers).

The story begins when Charles Bovary was still a teenager, unable to adjust to his new school and laughed at by his new classmates. Eventually, after he finished his medical studies, he became a second-rate country doctor. His mother married him to a widow who died soon after. She was older than Charles, and he wasn’t in love with her, there was only jealousy and sadness from her side. I adored the manner in which Flaubert mentioned her death: “tandis que Charles avait le dos tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit : « Ah ! mon Dieu ! » poussa un soupir et s’évanouit. Elle était morte ! Quel étonnement ! ” :’D   (in English: “while Charles had his back turned to close the curtain on the window, she said: “Ah! my God ! », let out a sigh and passed out. She was dead! How astonishing it is! )

In the last moments of the first Madame Bovary’s life, Charles met a beautiful young lady who’s the daughter of one of his patients. Even though his patient is already recovered and healthy, he still keeps coming to their farm, which made his wife jealous. Now that she’s dead, he allowed himself to fall in love with this young lady, whose name is Emma, and asks her to marry him. Emma said yes, and the newly wed couple settles in Tostes, a Norman village where Charles practices as a doctor. The reality of her marriage, however, is not as passionate as Emma expected… As a young girl, she dreamed of love and marriage as the solution to all of her problems. She read these novels in which the men were all romantic, in which the characters had fights full of emotions, in which there was passion between the two lovers. Whereas her marriage with Charles turns out to be monotone and boring. Charles, on the other hand, is happy. He’s married the woman of his dreams.

After an extravagant ball at the Marquis d’Andervilliers’s, Emma takes refuge in the memory of that evening and begins to dream of an ever more sophisticated life. She dreams of Paris, reads Balzac and Eugène Süe, is bored and depressed when she compares her fantasies to the reality of her monotonous life, and finally her apathy makes her sick. When Emma becomes pregnant, Charles decides to move to another city in the hopes of improving her health.

In Yonville-L’Abbaye, the Bovary couple meet Homais, the town pharmacist, a pompous talkative mill who listens to himself talk and Léon Dupuis, a notary’s clerk, who, like her, is bored with rural life. and loves to escape through romantic novels. They happen to have common tastes and when they talk with each other there’s a growing passion between them… 

Eventually, Emma gives birth to her daughter Berthe. She actually wanted a son, so she continues to be depressed. The relationship she’s got with Léon is platonic and fun, but when she realises that Léon actually loves her, she feels guilty and gives herself the role of a devoted wife. She starts to spend a lot of borrowed money on expensive dresses and furniture (all on her husband’s name,  of course). Léon gets tired of waiting and, believing that he will never be able to possess Emma, leaves to study law in Paris. Emma had feelings for him so she grows even sadder now that he left. 

Not long after that, Emma lets herself be seduced by a wealthy neighbour named Rodolphe Boulanger, who’s attracted by her beauty. From the day Rodolphe met her, he’s had bad intentions. Emma thinks he truly loves her, and she is often indiscreet when she’s with him, so that all the locals chat about her. Charles, however, suspects nothing. His adoration for his wife and his stupidity combine to make him deaf to all gossip. His professional reputation suffers a blow when, urged on by Homais and Emma, he attempts surgery to treat the clubfoot from Hippolyte, the hostel’s stable boy, and ends up having to call another doctor to amputate the leg. (It went terribly wrong)

Disgusted with her husband’s incompetence, Emma throws herself even more passionately into her affair with Rodolphe who doesn’t treat her very nicely. She borrows more and more money to buy him gifts and suggests that they run away together and with Berthe to Italy. He nods softly. But, quite quickly, Rodolphe grew bored of Emma’s demanding affections. Refusing to run away with her, he leaves her with only a letter. If this was in our time, it would have felt like a break up with a simple text message. Desperate, Emma gets sick again and even thinks of killing herself.

When Emma regains a bit of strength, Charles is in financial difficulty: he has had to borrow money to pay his wife’s debts but also her treatment. However, he decides to take her to the opera in the nearby city of Rouen, to make her feel better. At first, Emma loves the opera, and just when Charles starts to enjoy it as well, Léon shows up. She basically forces her husband to leave the opera, just so she could talk with Léon again. Their meeting rekindles the old romantic flame between Emma and Léon, and this time they engage in a love affair. Emma gets drunk on her weekly trips to Rouen and she borrows more and more money at exaggerated interest rates from Mr. Lheureux (and her husband will have to pay these debts, of course). She is less and less discreet with Leon. So much so that on several occasions his acquaintances are on the verge of discovering Emma’s infidelity.

Over time, Emma gets bored with Léon and vice versa. Not knowing how to leave him, she is demanding more and more, as her debt swells day by day. Finally, Lheureux has Emma’s property seized to compensate for the debt she has accumulated. Terrified that Charles will find out about the situation, she tries desperately to raise the money she needs, calls on Leon and all the businessmen in town. Finally, she even tries to prostitute herself by offering to come back to Rodolphe if he gives her the money she needs. He refuses, and, pushed to the limit, she commits suicide by swallowing arsenic. She dies in horrible suffering in front of a distraught Charles who does not know what to do.

For a while, Charles idealized the memory of his wife, before discovering the letters of Rodolphe and Léon. Confronted with the truth, he breaks down for good. He dies of grief, and their daughter, Berthe, needs to live with an impoverished aunt, who sends her to work in a cotton mill.

Book review: Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis

This article was published more than 13 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Gustave Flaubert, auteur

I have read English translations of Madame Bovary four times now, and until this one, by Lydia Davis, I always appreciated Gustave Flaubert's novel with a somewhat removed feeling - stamped it as "great" and went on, not terribly moved. It is, after all, about a provincial French woman of the early 19th century who is beautiful, selfish and forever immature, a man's idea of a woman, you might say, and not that illuminating to actual women, notwithstanding its place in the pantheon (right there next to Anna Karenina , another man's idea of a woman).

The last translation I read was by Paul DeMan, the official Norton translation, a translation that reads like an academic exercise. But nestled in there, after DeMan's attempt, is an amusing observation about Flaubert by Jean-Paul Sartre, "His physicians dubbed him a nervous old woman and he felt vaguely flattered" , followed somewhat later by a question, "Why did it [the public]so value as an admirable character portrayal of a woman … what was at bottom only a poor disguised man?"

Sartre professes perplexity, but his insight is perhaps the key to why Davis's translation is fresh, dynamic and riveting: She is a woman pretending to be a man who is pretending to be a woman, thereby erasing all but the external markers of gender and getting right to the heart of Emma Bovary's complex and fascinating humanity. For all of us, male or female, Flaubert has a way of rendering physical experience that persistently short-circuits thought and judgment; no matter what Emma is thinking or intending, her progress is arrested by sights, sounds, fragrances and sensations that seduce and distract her. We end up not being able to condemn her because we cannot divorce ourselves from the empathy Flaubert has forged, first between Emma and himself, and then between Emma and us.

Madame Bovary is often called the first "realist" novel, but the realism is intensely subjective. It is not the socio-economic facts of French life in 19th-century Normandy that Flaubert is interested in, but the moment-by-moment passage of time as it exists in that setting. Flaubert could have chosen any character in any setting, but he chose someone who lived in the world he was most familiar with (he had heard of a local woman who had had several affairs, accumulated debts and committed suicide). In some sense, he chose a character whose life was not at all dramatic in a grander sense - no accomplishments, no influential friends, no trips even to Paris - and by giving her such an exquisite sensitivity to passing sensations, created a drama that fills the reader with anticipation and dread, demonstrating that suspense in a novel lies not in the question, "What happens next?" but in the question, "Can my character avoid what happens next?" The answer for Emma Bovary is "no." And yet she seems to have free will, thereby raising all sorts of philosophical, psychological and cultural issues.

In her informative introduction, Davis, a respected poet and short story writer whose 2004 translation of Swann's Way was widely praised, comes close to asserting that her version of Madame Bovary is truer to the Flaubert's original than those that have gone before; she has even left in careless errors that Flaubert himself made with regard to "pronoun reference and capitalization." She has also included a very informative set of notes for modern readers who might not understand what Corbeille was, or a "Trafalgar pudding." But I have to admit that I only found the notes after I turned the last page of the novel.

The great accomplishment of Davis's translation has nothing really to do with her meticulousness, and everything to do with the spirit and energy that drive the narrative. She has returned Emma Bovary to us as a young woman who has had a certain sort of old-fashioned convent education, and then feels out of place on her father's farm, who marries for the lack of a better offer and then is exposed to the very elegance that she knows is out there, just beyond her reach, who is, just at the wrong moment, seen from afar by a practised seducer. She is a woman who is sunk deep in her own sensibility, too unworldly to understand the deceptions hidden in the beauty she can't resist. Yes, this is a great translation of a great novel. Flaubert successfully entered a female consciousness because he was a preternaturally acute observer. If you have missed it before, you should not miss it this time.

Jane Smiley's most recent novel is Private Life. She is also the author of The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer, and A Good Horse.

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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) translated from the French by Margaret Mauldon (2004) Oxford University Press (2004) 329 pp

I know: I’m way behind here. Consistently lauded as one of the two or three greatest novel of all time, frequently the precedent to whatever book I’m reading (can one write about adultery without some root in Madame Bovary ?), but I thought I knew everything about it because it’s one of those stories one cannot help but have touched upon somewhere. Why read it, then? Well, it’s a bit awkward in conversation when I admit that I’ve never read it. And then my wife read it a few years ago and has been coaxing me to open it up. And, honestly, after reading another critical essay about a contemporary book that has its roots in Madame Bovary , I wanted to know what all the fuss was about.

To begin with, I should say that another reason I avoided reading Madame Bovary is because I hate reading classics in translation unless I’m sure I have an excellent translation. The edition my wife read had several awkward sentences — and even used the word “freaking,” as in “I’m freaking hungry” — so it was hard to believe that it was faithful to the flow and passion of Flaubert’s language. I feel it’s such a disservice to the author (and myself) to read a poor translation of her book: how many people have been put off of world masterpieces because they read some publisher’s cheap edition with the cheap or archaic translation? At that point it’s all about getting the plot line across, even if the sentences are syntactically convoluted. Furthermore, I think that Nabokov’s translations of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is bad because he believed in translating the Russian into its strict literal equivalent in English, sacrificing the poetic melody of the original (incidentally, when Nabokov’s friend Edmund Wilson reviewed Nabokov’s translation in the New York Review of Books, it caused their falling-out). There is value in Nabokov’s style of translation, obviously, but I find that value comes mostly when one wants to delve into scholarship, not into reading for reading’s sake. For me, at that point, it’s necessary to find a skilled translator who succeeds in getting the meaning, form, and poetry across. I think we’ve got one great translation of Madame Bovary here. Margaret Mauldon has been translating French classics since 1987. Her translation of Madame Bovary appeared in 2004, and it’s beautifully rendered. I can’t think of a single sentence where I thought, boy, is she trying to write English? And I was looking.

Now, enough about the translation. While reading the book, I discovered another reason to read Madame Bovary : it is more than just a good story. More than most authors, Flaubert manages to make his form perfectly complement his substance. In other words, on a sentence level, each word and comma serves to not only express a thought but also a certain pacing and emotional journey, so the reader feels very involved. It is to Flaubert that is most applied the phrase he made famous:  le mot juste , meaning the author searches for not just the word with the correct meaning but also for the word with the correct sound and shape. This strategy is also carried out on a paragraph, chapter, and on the book as a whole. We go up and down with Emma; when she is bored, the sentences are longer and contain more tedious detail. When she is excited, the sentences push into one another, barely ending before the next one begins, building crescendo by the syntax. It’s beautiful. Proust and Joyce acknowledge a debt to Flaubert.

The story begins not by introducing Emma, the soon-to-be Madame Bovary, but her soon-to-be husband, the bumbling Charles Bovary, or, as I now prefer to call him, charbovari . I did not know it before reading, but before Charles marries Emma he marries an older widow “with more pimples on her face than a tree has buds in springtime” but who did not lack suitors. When as a young physician, newly married, Charles meets Emma, he is instantly charmed by her. Before too long Charles’ miserable wife dies, and Charles can marry Emma. (For some reason, though he lusts after Emma while already married to the widow, readers tend to forget Charles’ own tendencies to be unfaithful when Emma makes him a cuckold.)

Charles is happy immediately upon marrying Emma. Here is a passage about Charles’ early days of marriage with Emma (the passage was just suggestive enough — look at the last phrase — to be one of the pieces of evidence against Flaubert in the obscenity trial that elevated this book to a must-read):

And then, on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway or in the sunken lands under bowering trees, on paths where the grain stood knee-high, with the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night’s bliss, his spirit at peace, and his flesh content, he would ride along ruminating his happiness, like someone who, after dinner, goes on savouring the taste of the truffles he has eaten.

It seems that when Charles consumates his marriage he feels he has already achieved all there is in life, so he stops trying too hard. Not that he had a lot going for him anyway. Here’s how Flaubert introduces the couple after their wedding night:

The next morning, by contrast, he seemed a different man. He was the one you would think had been a virgin, whereas the bride gave absolutely no sign that meant anything to anybody.

Charles quickly resembles the awkward school boy we met in chapter one, “walking half bent over her with his arm round her waist and his head crushing the front of her bodice.” Emma, who thought that marriage would be all excitement, rapture, and everything she’d imagined after reading her books, becomes despondent and depressed. After coming to the conclusion that since she was unhappy that she must not have ever loved Charles, she despises him.

So it was upon him that she focused the multifaceted hatred born of her unhappiness, and every attempt she made to conquer this feeling only served to strengthen it; for the futility of her efforts gave her another reason to despair and intensified her estrangement from Charles. Even her own meekness goaded her to rebel. The mediocrity of her home provoked her to sumptuous fantasies, the caresses of her husband to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, so that she could more justifiably detest him, and seek her revenge. She was sometimes astonished at the appalling possibilities that came into her head; and yet she must go on smiling, go on hearing herself repeat that she was happy, act as if she were, and let everyone belief it!

Emma is ripe for for some dashing Frenchman to take her away — and there are many willing candidates. Flaubert has just begun to dissect this marriage and the concept of love. My preconception of this novel was that Flaubert, not a particularly faithful man himself, had some qualms about the notion of “love.” Indeed, when many of his characters express love or longing for each other, Flaubert mocks them; what they say is contrived, pure cliché. Here is a wonderful scene where Rodolphe, who’s had his eye on Emma for a while, begins to pursue her at the county agricultural fair. This scene also captures the way Flaubert comments upon his characters indirectly, allowing external elements to do the description and the criticism, as Rodolphe’s declarations of love are separated by an awards ceremony at the fair:

And he seized her by her hand; she did not withdraw it. “Prize for all-round excellence in farming!” proclaimed the chairman. “The other day for example, when I came to your house . . .” “To Monsieur Bizet, of Quincammpoix:” “Did I know then that I’d come here with you?” “Seventy francs!” “Time and again I’ve intended to leave, yet I’ve followed you, I’ve remained by your side.” “Manures:” “Just as I’d remain at your side tonight, tomorrow, day after day, my whole life!” “To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!” “For never before have I felt so utterly enchanted by anyone . . .” “To Monsieur Bain, of Givry-Saint-Martin!” “So that I’ll cherish the memory of you forever.”

Nothing Rodolphe says here is original. “Manure” is indeed le mot juste . And Rodolphe himself knows it’s manure; he doesn’t truly love Emma at all. Ironically, later on Flaubert revisits the idea that the language of love — and perhaps love itself — is somewhat vacuous. Here Emma has proclaiming her undying love to the bored Rodolphe, but . . .

Because wanton or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he only half believed in the sincerity of those he was hearing now; to a large extent they should be disregarded, he believed, because such exaggerated language must surely mask commonplace feelings: as if the soul in its fullness did not sometimes overflow into the most barren metaphors, since no once can ever tell the precise measure of his own needs, of his own ideas, of his own pain, and human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.

The beautiful way Flaubert describes the way Emma is truly feeling, though inadequately expressing, shows how the book roams around the nuances and subtleties of love (and many other things), at one time critical, at another time with deep esteem. The characters of Emma and Charles are similarly difficult to measure. One desires to blame someone for the tragic course this book takes, but at once all and none are blameworthy. Not only did I find this book worth reading once; it could very well reach the rarified heights of being one of my perrenial reads.

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32 comments.

I must also admit that I have not read Madame Bovary, although I have pondered doing so in the past. Your thoughtful review has encouraged me that I should attempt it in the future, though I will be certain to be cautious when it comes to selecting the translation.

My own Madame Bovary experience, and it is only two years old. I finished reading it the first time and thought “why does everyone think this is so great?” (And I don’t think I can blame the translator –sorry, I forget who it was.) So I decided, quite quickly, to read it again — and was stunned from page one at how much I had missed the first time. All of which is just a warning that this is a complex but incredibly good book — very good review too.

This is a book I re-read every few years, so am glad you enjoyed it Trevor. A Sentimental Education is also well worth reading.

You know, adevotedreader, I often mistakenly assume that since a particular author has one or two really well known works, I assume the rest aren’t worth much. I know very little about A Sentimental Education but will need to check it out. Thanks!

Steph, this one is worth checking out sooner rather than later. It’s not too long, and it really shows what literature is capable of achieving.

Thanks for the kind words, Kevin. I’m very interested to see what I pick up on another read.

Your review captures why I needed to read this book twice. One of my failings as a reader is that I tend to pay attention to social context, sense of place and characterization on the first time through — often at the expense of appreciating style and language. (This would explain why I became a journalist rather than a poet.) Madame Bovary has all those things, but even more important, as you note, is Flaubert’s style (whatever the translation may be). I think it was only on the second time through that I started to appreciate that — and must admit that until I read your excellent review I didn’t understand that that was what the difference was. Thanks.

Fantastic review Trevor, I hadn’t picked up the way the sentences altered to fit the desired tone and it’s a great insight.

Madame Bovary is, for me, the greatest novel I have ever read. I consider it pretty much peerless, a spectacular work of great literature which shows just what the novel can aspire to. Put another way, I quite like it.

I’m glad you quoted the cracked kettle section, it’s wonderfully written, as indeed is the section in the fair with its cruel banalities. But then, as is the whole work really. I do think you picked very apposite quotes for your review though.

On translations, I read the Penguin Classics translation, which I enjoyed (obviously given my comments here). I must dig it out and compare the passages you quote to see how they compare.

Anyway, enough gushing, delighted to see you review this Trevor. Nicely done.

For me Madame Bovary is a triumph of style and language. There is social commentary and other observation, but I don’t think that’s where it’s greatness lies.

Trevor, forgot to ask, is there a Eugene Onegin translation you would recommend? I have the Penguin Classics again, but haven’t yet engaged with it.

Trevor, you are to be praised for taking on such a Big One and coming out of it so well!

My own Madame Bovary experience, like Kevin’s, is only a few years old, and like you (and unlike Kevin!) immediately I realised why this was one of the great novels. It was also I believe Richard Yates’s favourite novel, after or alongside The Great Gatsby .

Good luck with the move. Since I am sure you are still fine-tuning, I do have one problem — your screen is wider than the image I get on my computer so I have to navigate to get to the right hand sidebar, where the latest comments are posted (a part of the screen that does interest me). You have joined PGA Tour.com in a “most annoying” category — I have to manipulate my screen to see what I most want to see. Other screens I frequently visit have the same problem — the left sidebar, which is pretty constant and of marginal value, is always there in full, the right, which changes the most, is the one I have to work at to get to. So when you finetune, as I am sure you will, do me a favor and take this into consideration. Even just swapping left and right would work for me.

Other than that, great.

Another small problem — for some reason, my first comment got moved up in the comments section.

Kevin, the great thing about this is that I can fully manipulate my column widths. However, it sounds like you might have a screen set at low resolution. I’ll get on here later to see what width would best fit screens like yours.

As for your comment, I finally switched my time from GMT to my own EST, so this thinks your early comment is later. Once this initial time change of five hours has passed, that problem will go away.

Thanks for the feedback. I hope to do quite a bit of revision here so it all helps.

Very odd Trevor – my comment appears in the middle of the comments even though I posted it after all the others from Kevin and Max. Technological teething troubles?

Congratulations on the move Trevor, I’ll be interested to see how you develop the place.

For the moment, so you know, I’m getting the same screen size issue as Kevin. I’m not technologically sophisticated to know why I’m afraid.

I’ve updated my blogroll to include your new address. Good luck with the new site!

As a frequent victim of time zone changes (my wife travels internationally a lot), I have ever intention of playing these five hours as a game as much as possible. This is serve one, there may well be others to disrupt you.

Ohhh . . . Kevin. I’m afraid your serve hit the net. The five hours are apparently up and all is on track for the future!

By the way, I modified the column width. How is it now?

Nice new blog! I’ve updated my feed reader, as well as your participant link on The Complete Booker .

Thanks Laura!

Modification works fine for me — thanks. It is also not the first time a serve has hit the net.

Congratulations; the new site looks great! If there’s one thing wrong with WordPress, it’s the inflexibility of the templates.

I have yet to read Madame Bovary, but I’ll be sure to return to this review after I have. As for the matter of translations, I agree completely with what you say. I’ve been put off so many times by poorly-written – and outdated – translations. Initially, I planned on completing Garnett’s ‘Anna Karenina’, but I think I will be reading the Pevear-Volokhonsky.

Trevor: Sorry about being a techie complainer. The comments link on the NBCC post doesn’t seem to be working — given that some us may well want to comment later today…..

Oh, the problems of setting up a new site…..

Hmmmm, thanks Kevin. I’ll try to see if I can find and fix the problem. I’m sure it’s something easy.

By the way, I’m hoping to expand those pages and have individual pages for discussion on each of the books on the shortlist. Hopefully I can get it working!

I meant to say Trevor, that I like the new design very much, now that I’ve worked out what happened with my comment appearing in the middle like that.

And the NYRB spines too. Do I get a prize for naming them all? The Slaves of Solitude, In Hazard, That Awful Mess on the Via Somethingia , something by Leonardo Sciascia, and Beware of Pity . Well, three and a half out of five isn’t bad.

Excellent job, John. I’m sure there aren’t many others who could name them all on sight. The Sciascia book is The Name of the Owl . And it’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (a very strange but gratifying book).

I’m having trouble with the blog width. My screen resolution is 1152×768. The text of the review is cut off to the right and the right-hand sidebar is completely invisible. I wouldn’t mind if there was a horizontal scroll bar, but there isn’t, so I have to move the window way to the left and then extend the right hand side, which is rather a nuisance. Hopefully you can do something about it?

(Oh my, “I’m freaking hungry”?! Flaubert probably turned in his grave.)

Great new look on your blog. Congrats!

Question on the widow: Was she very rich?

I saw a couple of versions of Madame Bovary (PBS and an old movie.) I think that I will tackle it in 2011.

What a good review — it had me raring to have another go with Mme. B. I tried when I was too young for it — not that I think there’s a particular perfect age for the novel, but I definitely wasn’t in the right frame of mind to read it then. But now…let’s see.

When you read it again, estelle, please return to let me know if it is better than before. I definitely don’t think I would have appreciated it had I read it when I was younger. I don’t think I would have understood it, for one thing. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the writing, for another. Then again, maybe had I read this when I was younger I would have caught on to this whole literature thing much sooner : ).

For any interested, the University of Rouen has just posted the complete manuscripts of Madame Bovary .

Four times I started Madame Bovary and failed to get past the first third. But I read Sentimental Education and thought so highly of it that I tried MB again — and the fifth time I finally “got it.” My problem had been that I went into the novel with preconceptions that were false. It’s no Anna Karenina, where the main character is sympathetic. Emma Bovary is a horrid person and Flaubert is merciless toward her. It’s a brutal book, but it’s also a great one.

Emma Bovary is a horrid person and Flaubert is merciless toward her.

And I quite feel sorry for Emma (and, interestingly enough, perhaps less so for Anna Karenina — until that heartbreaking scene with her child). Sure, Emma was idealistic and felt romance was her destiny, but to get saddled with charbovari! who just ceases to do anything for their relationship. And, in her attempts to get that romance she ends up with others only in it for the thrill. I agree that Flaubert is brutal (and I feel bad for charbovari! , too.

Ahh, it is a rich, wonderful book. Thank you for bringing it to mind today, Phillip — apparently I do have a desire to read the new Lydia Davis translation.

At least Anna loved her children, and part of her depression is due to losing them. Emma can’t stand Berthe, never could. The debts Emma runs up lead to the financial downfall of her husband; after he dies, Flaubert sends little Berthe to work in a cotton factory. I reread few novels, but I think I read a clunker of a translation of Bovary . Let me know if Davis did justice to Flaubert — he worked so damn hard on getting it right, so I owe him another reading. BTW, Tolstoy grew mightily sick of his heroine.

At least Anna loved her children, and part of her depression is due to losing them. Emma can’t stand Berthe, never could.

True, and certainly remembering those passages makes me less sympathetic to Emma. In fact, after I posted my comment above my wife reminded me of those parts and I thought I might should come in here and amend. So thanks!

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Review – Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Introduction: madame bovary by gustave flaubert.

The timeless classic Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (Oxford World's Classics) is one of those books which is constantly on the various lists of must read books. And I can see why! Gustave Flaubert has written a masterpiece, there is no doubt about that, but at the end of Madame Bovary, this deep melancholy wrapped it arms around me and I quickly had to pick up another book which would make me laugh.

What a depressing ending. If we do not have hope, then what do we have? There has to be hope amidst despair, and I did not feel this while reading Madame Bovary. I didn’t get the sense that the key characters were growing to be better people. There was no feeling of redemption either.

Content: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is set in northern France in the 1850s. There are two Madame Bovaries in the book, but the main character is Emma Bovary the daughter-in-law, and her husband Charles Bovary, the senior Madame Bovary’s son.

The older Madame Bovary is a very controlling woman who marries off Charles to a widow who was much older than he was. When she dies, Charles marries Emma, a farmer’s daughter, who he met while treating her father. Emma marries Charles, thinking she is heading to Adventureland and instead ends up in Snoozeville. Although Charles adores his wife, and is very kind to her, he is exceedingly boring and not much fun to be around. And after marriage, he takes no pains in his appearance. Emma becomes bored with him and lives a life of adventure through the novels she reads and develops a taste for passion and the finer things in life.

As the story unfolds, you see that Emma and Charles are not well-matched, and she becomes very discontented with her life. Emma meets Leon a young student who she yearns for but doesn’t do anything about it, then he moves away. Later she meets Rodolphe a wealthy, local landowner, who pursues her relentlessly. She makes plans with Rodolphe to run away, but at the last minute he “discards” her in a cruel manner after a three-year love affair.

Emma is devastated and becomes quite ill. She slowly recovers, and Charles takes her to the nearby town Rouen to see an opera in a desperate act to aid her recovery. While there, they reconnect with Leon who soon after also pursues Emma. She succumbs once again, and tells Charles she is taking piano lessons and sets her plans in place to visit Leon at a hotel in Rouen each week. To cover her actions, she makes a deal with the piano teacher to keep her cover. Emma is a master of deceit.

Emma spends money faster than Charles earns it because she has to have beautiful things, many of which she buys on credit. She becomes so mired in debt that when they call in the loans she cannot pay them and drives her husband into bankruptcy. Emma eats arsenic powder which she steals from a neighbour who is a pharmacist. She dies a painful death, which is described quite vividly, and of course Charles is so distraught because he has always been smitten with her.

He later finds the evidence of her betrayal and one disaster after another keeps on happening to the Bovary family. To me it was just too much. Flaubert was making a statement with Madame Bovary. According to Books That Changed the World by Andrew,

“Flaubert’s meticulous attention to realistic detail and the presentation of immediately recognizable scenes and exchanges made the novel appear shockingly like an objective depiction of provincial life – which was exactly what he wanted…Flaubert’s undisguised contempt for bourgeois manners and morality…led to charges that he was condoning adultery…”

Final Thoughts: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

I recommend Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert because it’s truly a masterpiece, but if you are looking for a happier ending like I was, this is not the book for you. So why read Madame Bovary? It makes a perfect financial case study, and it's very well written and deals with serious issues that most feel uncomfortable talking about in our society even today: Infidelity, suicide, class structures, discrimination, greed and our finances.

About the Author  Avil Beckford

Hello there! I am Avil Beckford, the founder of The Invisible Mentor. I am also a published author, writer, expert interviewer host of The One Problem Podcast and MoreReads Success Blueprint, a movement to help participants learn in-demand skills for future jobs. Sign-up for MoreReads: Blueprint to Change the World today! In the meantime, Please support me by buying my e-books Visit My Shop , and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter and Pinterest !

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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: A Book Review

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The debut novel of French novelist Gustave Flaubert published in 1856, Madame Bovary is often commended as a classic piece of literature, widely held as exemplary work of literary realism, and most often considered to be Flaubert’s masterpiece.

Originally written in French, the book first came out in separate increments in the newspaper La Revue de Paris , and it was met with much contention among readership. In fact, the public was so upset that Flaubert was charged with obscenity and having committed an “outrage to public morality and religion.” A subsequent trial over the book’s publication ensued. Flaubert was ultimately acquitted in 1857, and due to its notoriety, Madame Bovary quickly became a bestseller. [Side-note: Madame Bovary on Trial by Dominick LaCapra is a fantastic book all about this trial and it includes an analysis of the novel and details how and why the book was so provocative when it came out.]

Madame Bovary , 163 years later, still remains considered one of the greatest books of all time. The Guardian has it listed as number 22 on their list of greatest books of all time, on GreatestBooks.org , it sits at number 12, and The Atlantic ranks it number 2 on their list of greatest books of the 19th century. Needless to say, Madame Bovary is highly regarded across the masses as a profound and important piece of literature, and there are many reasons why.

Note : I didn’t plan this but I ended up reading two different translations: I started with the Modern Library College edition circa 1957 translated by Francis Steegmuller, and shortly into Part Three, I switched to the Bantam Classic edition circa 1959 translated by Lowell Bair (mainly for portability reasons), which is regarded as the standard edition/translation of the novel.

So keep in mind, while I write about the beauty of the prose, not only is it a great testament to the genius of the author Gustave Flaubert, but also the translators Steegmuller and Bair.

Summary [spoilers ahead]

First things first: jump into your time machine and travel back to the 1850’s French countryside.

TLDR: Summed up, it is about a woman’s journey as she attempts to escape her ennui and discontent in life. (Of course, it's a tad more nuanced than that).

Part one starts out centered on Charles Bovary and takes place in Tostes, France, a small town on the outskirts of Rouen: his childhood, his experiences in school; then his adolescence into early adulthood, his experiences in medical school, where he fails out the first time, but on the second, he succeeds and returns home to Tostes a certified doctor; his marriage to Hélouïse Dubuc, having been arranged by Charles’s mother; and then the death of Hélouïse. Toward the end of his marriage, Charles attends to a local farmer named Rouault who has broken his leg. While he is there, he meets Rouault’s daughter Emma with whom he is immediately infatuated with. After Hélouïse’s death, Charles begins to visit Emma more frequently and eventually begins to fall in love with her. Charles first asks Emma’s father if he could marry his daughter, to which he was met with a positive response, and then later found that Emma reciprocated his feelings. They were wed and set off to live happily ever after (or so its seemed; all of this, by the way, takes place within the first like forty pages.)

Their marriage starts out pretty fine, it appears, and we learn a bit more about Emma’s background. She grew up countryside with her farmer father, but eventually went away to school at a convent for nuns. She began to grow a bit rambunctious and inquisitive with the “higher” side of life, mostly taking influence from the novels she read, tales of great knights rescuing damsels in distress and countless love stories. In her head she began to dream of the happiness that love would bring and, falling more into her reverie, veered away from religion, eventually leaving the convent.

Well things take a turn when Charles receives a letter from the French viscount, a Marquis d’Andervilliers, (whom Charles had relieved of an abscess shortly before) inviting both Charles and Emma to an overnight dinner and ball he is throwing at his mansion. Charles and Emma get dressed to the nines and proceed to head out to the viscount’s palace where, upon entering, Emma is immediately overwhelmed with the luxurious, high-class atmosphere of the event. Countless people are there; men drabbed in well-tailored suits, women in beautiful, doubtlessly expensive ball-room gowns, a live orchestra playing music to a giant hall in which people are dancing gracefully. Emma is smitten by this scene, and completely intoxicated by the grandiose lifestyle that she was, up until then, totally unaccustomed to. She eats incredible food, chats with educated, well-versed individuals, and dances her ass off. She’s living the dream and doesn’t want it to end.

When they come back to reality, Emma continues to reminisce in the memory of that night for weeks, months to come. Her home life does not even pale in comparison to the glorious, high class lifestyle of those people that she so envies. And slowly this begins to consume her. She gets bored and disappointed with her life and her marriage. She slowly begins to resent Charles citing his lack of ambition and culture. Over time she grows more and more depressed, each and every day daydreaming of a better life, a life in Paris, a life like the ones of the guests at that party, a life that her classmates back at the convent surely must have by now, any life would be better than hers. Eventually, Emma grows so discontent, she loses her appetite and grows unhealthy, which Charles notices. He brings her to a doctor in town who diagnoses her with “a nervous illness” stating that a “change of air” was needed. Charles decides to move to another town name Yonville-l’Abbaye, and part one ends with the two of them leaving Tostes. In the last line before part two, we learn that Emma is pregnant.

Emma has a girl, despite wanting a boy, and the name the child Berthe. In Yonville, all is well at first (again), until Emma begins to grow depressed again. However, this time she is depressed because she falls in love with a handsome, young man named Léon, who also secretly is in love with her. They spend a lot of time alone together, but he never makes a move out of respect for Emma and her husband, and eventually he moves away to Paris. After he leaves, Emma is even more depressed and grows to hate her husband. Then, she meets a thirty-four-old man named Rodolphe. Rodolphe is rich, debonair, liberal, educated and cultured, and kind of a ladies’ man. He finds Emma attractive (just as she him) and he begins scheming on how to win her despite her being married and him having a mistress already.

Part two begins with a large ceremony, an Agricultural Show, in which a bunch of political officiates come to Yonville to praise the farmers with awards for their services. Rodolphe and Emma attend together but watch from a secluded tower overlooking the ceremony. It is here that Rodolphe tries to entice Emma with his gift of gab, so to speak, harping on about love and beauty and hedonistic philosophies. Emma is impressed but unsure of her feelings; she still wavers in between what’s right and what she wants. Eventually over time, as the two continue to see each other–going on walks, horseback riding, having meals–Emma begins to fall desperately in love with him. They begin having an affair, and Emma, completely shook with these fresh feelings of love and exuberance, continues to fall further and further in love with Rodolphe.

They begin sneaking off together in the early light of morning, their secret trysts growing more frequent, and soon Emma begins to grow paranoid that they’ll be found out. However, she is unperturbed because she has found meaning in life again; she has found love and so she has found happiness. However, the more she falls in love with Rodolphe, the more she grows to hate Charles. Eventually as Emma reaches new heights within her discontent for her home life, she decides to desert Charles and move away with Rodolphe. Everything is set in motion, all the plans accounted for, but on the very day that her departure was to take place, Rodolphe sends her a letter saying he’s leaving her. To Rodolphe, despite his genuine feelings to her, there was no future in the prsopect of their relationship (he goes in, saying a bunch of just flowery statements to supposedly lessen the blow but makes it way worse; go read it).

Emma is heartbroken, so heartbroken in fact, she gets extremely ill and is bed-ridden for many months. She loses a ton of weight, won’t speak to anyone, and it almost looks like she’s going to die. But then suddenly, she has this strange, religious epiphany and all is well! She’s up and moving about, making food and sewing clothes, gardening and reading; all of it she attributes to finding the love of God and basking in the glory of his name. She goes straight up Catholic manic. Though under the surface, she is still spiraling out of control, citing the fact that she simply has given up–“Love had disappeared from her life…”

Part two concludes with a trip to the opera in Rouen, which you can probably guess the effect that has on Emma. At the opera, not only is Emma struck again with the elegance and class of the event, thus all those feeling of the viscount’s event rushing back to her, she also become crazy entranced in the show itself, and the hope of love and beauty and art and all also come rushing tenfold. And then! Guess who she runs into at the opera: Léon! The one that got away.

In the last scene, Emma, Charles, and Léon are at a café after the opera (they dipped out of the opera in middle of the last act), and Léon mentions that there is another showing of the opera the next night. While Charles has to go back to Yonville because he can’t miss any more work, he suggests that Emma stay in Rouen with Léon for the weekend so that she can attend the opera once again, this time alone with Léon. (Dum dum dum).

The end up skipping the opera and just chatting at a café for a few hours, and of course, Léon confesses his love for her, again. Emma is still hesitant and at a cathedral, she gives him a letter refusing his advances (amidst the company a very persistent verger, might I add). Then she heads back to Yonville.

When she gets home, she finds out that Charles’s father has died, and everyone is pretty upset. His mom comes to town and they start planning the funeral and what not. In the midst of all this turmoil, the Bovary’s are in need of a notary in regards to all their expenses, inheritance, etc, and Emma suggests that they take Léon on for his services. And Emma insists that she go back to Rouen to ask him in person, to which (as usual) Charles encourages.

Léon and Emma begin their secret relationship, having what is described as a “honeymoon” phase. Emma starts traveling to Rouen every week (under the guise of piano lessons), and Léon traveling to Yonville, all the while both are writing each other love letters. And this goes on for a while, but eventually Emma grows a bit manic. It is here that we begin to see Emma’s financial problems starting to weigh more heavily on her. Throughout the book, Emma has been borrowing money from a cunning, manipulative merchant named Lheureux. Because she is a bit naïve when it come to math and money as well as extravagant and spends money flippantly, she begins to fall further and further into debt to Lheureux. (this will come back to haunt her)

Despite their affair, Emma’s happiness starts to dwindle yet again, and she starts to grow restless with Léon. When on one certain occasion Léon gets caught up with lunch plans with somebody else, Emma freaks out, berates him endlessly, and ends up deserting him. Charles, on the other hand, has been noticing Emma’s absences and grows worried (Emma would often stay overnight in Rouen without telling Charles). We start to see the final descent of Emma’s happiness and the subsequent inception of her decadence and corruption, especially with Emma finally receiving court summons to pay off her outstanding debts, a total sum of 8000 francs.

Emma does not have that kind of money. She begs Lheureux who is relentless and unwavering; she begs Léon for money, convincing him to ask his employer; she even goes to Rodolphe’s mansion (remember him?) and begs him for money, to which she is met with refusal. Knowing that her hidden financial failures were finally going to be exposed and that the courts were going to seize everything that she and Charles owned, Emma launches into a manic episode which results in her breaking into the pharmacist Homais’ (the Bovary’s good friend and neighbor) drug cabinet and stealing arsenic. She eats the arsenic and dies (a scene that lasts multiple pages as many people come to her aid and try to save her, ultimately unsuccessfully).

Charles is completely devastated, and now taking on all of Emma’s debts, he finds himself in near complete ruin. After Emma’s funeral and the court’s seizing of nearly all his property, Charles falls into a depression. And one day while cleaning out old drawers, Charles finds all of Emma’s love letters, both to Léon and Rodolphe. This is the last blow to Charles’s heart, and the book ends with Charles entering into his garden, sitting under a tree, and succumbing to his depression and misery, finally dying. His daughter Berthe is sent to live with his mother, and eventually to his aunt.

There’s a lot to unpack in Madame Bovary, so let’s jump in.

The story of Emma is the war being dream and reality. From early in her life, she becomes enticed and prone to the romantic side of life–through literature, the mysticism of religion, love and beauty, etc. When her marriage to Charles is not like her fictionalized vision of what a marriage and love should be, she grows tired and intolerant. She will always seek the ecstasy, the bliss, the passion when it comes to love which inevitably leads to her multiples affairs. And it makes sense that, outside of her marriage to the boring Charles, she would fall for Rodolphe and Léon, two very different men.

The duality of Léon and Rodolphe is striking: Rodolphe represents this sort of Epicurean, libertine, hedonistic fantasy that Emma falls into head first, something that she never realizes existed let alone something that fits so perfectly to her dreams; Léon represents the other side, the noble, the just, the love of beauty with ambition, the one that the angel on Emma’s shoulder tells her she should be with. Rodolphe is the “bad boy” and Léon is the “good guy” so to speak. But outside of all of this is Charles! The man to whom Emma is actually married. It’s interesting how these two forces clash in her secret, adulterous life, unbeknownst to Charles, however, I believe that’s also what is most striking about this novel. It is that Emma is able to so easily walk into this “other life,” this “different side of her” without feeling even a morsel of guilt. In fact, it’s of the contrary; the hatred she feels for Charles grows and grows, which continuously pushes her into affairs, which she justifies with her increasing hatred toward Charles. It’s an unstoppable mental wheel which Emma is at the center of, turning it with her desires, totally blind of how each spoke is a potential dagger in Charles’s heart.

There’s a reason behind Emma’s ability to compartmentalize her actions and reasons aside from the seemingly empty conscience within her: Emma is discontent with her middle-class status, something we saw toward the beginning of the novel with her getting a taste of the upper-class at the viscount’s party. It is this very notion that drives Emma into mental, emotional, and also financial descent. Emma consistently dreams of a life bigger than hers, and so she looks and feels things greater than others. She remains true to this dream of hers throughout the entire novel–often growing restless when things begin to plateau, basking in the glory of art and beauty, living in romantic novels, and holding her sentiments and principles close to heart (like when she falls into her debt, she refuses to prostitute herself when the option is presented). And eventually it is this dream that brings about her demise; Emma finally realizes that it is an unattainable dream, and only in death could she finally be content.

[Emma sort of reminds me of Mildred in Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, as she becomes more manipulative not only towards Charles, but also Léon. In Of Human Bondage , Mildred is a borderline sociopath who strings Phillip Carey along throwing him through many, many loops of psychological and emotional torment; it appears that Emma is slowly walking along a same path as Mildred.]

Poor, poor Charles. He really takes the bearing of the atrocities throughout the novel, however, in doing so, Flaubert presents an interesting commentary on provincial life. Charles is the dull-minded, slow, unimaginative, unambitious, middle-class country doctor who would, without ever meeting Emma, most likely meander throughout life, finding joy in the small things and never amounting to anything truly exceptional. He is the perfect contrast to Emma’s infinite infatuations with the extraordinary.

Charles is easily manipulated and taken advantage of, especially by women. From the first instance of his mother controlling nearly every aspect of his life, including arranging his first marriage, to the last instance of Emma finally robbing him silly from beyond the grave. Charles is a man who is prone to being swindled because he is constantly blinded by the presumed goodness in everyone. It might also be connected to this one personality flaw Charles’s frequent inability to notice when Emma is upset as well as his complete unawareness of her affairs, which were at times, so blaringly obvious. Charles is a dolt, uncultured and inept in nearly every aspect of life except in his love for Emma. It is Charles’s undying love for Emma that contributes to his blindness, and when Berthe is born, Charles feels that he has accomplished the sole purpose of life and yearns for nothing more. Charles is completely selfless, while Emma is completely selfish.

Flaubert created Charles, not only as a contrast to Emma’s personality which in turn emphasized her actions and behaviors, but also perhaps as a way to represent and personify aspects of the middle-class life in France at the time, (something that may still resonate in 2019).

Madame Bovary is often listed among the ranks of the finest realistic novels. Flaubert’s third person omniscient perspective and hyper-description of life makes for a pretty vivid novel, to say the least–from the bucolic; pictures of the countryside, gardens, and farmers, stables, menial workers, lower-class citizens and an insurgency against low wages, injuries and botched surgeries etc.; to the streets of Yonville; well-dressed men and women sauntering down avenues, the cafes filled with conversation, the beggars on the streets, the persistent priests with an air of religious superiority, the harsh swindlers and money-men; to the contrasting Victorian-era; grandiose displays of wealth and intelligence, high art such as theater and opera, extravagant clothes, white-collars jobs, giant mansions, luxuriant parties, esoteric philosophies, and highfalutin senses of confidence. The way that Flaubert is able to paint the world, and all sides of it through his prose is truly unbelievable. However, within his prose, there are methods to his artistry that contribute to deem the novel a literary work of realism.

Flaubert paints a picture that is unadorned and unromantic and, in doing so, depicts the dullness and banality of a middle-class life. And it’s a true testament to his craft how Flaubert is able to capture that dullness without writing a novel that is dull. One of my favorite techniques that Flaubert uses is his sprinkling of sudden disruptions within certain scenes.

Scenes that are supposed to be moving, emotional, momentous, and monumental are often interrupted by something–whether it’s an argument between two minor characters, a persistent priest trying coax the lead characters into a guided tour, a monotonous long-winded diatribe by a loquacious character while Emma is in the midst of incredible internal turmoil, and even the long, sardonic debates filled with quips and jokes in the midst of Emma on her death-bed. It’s almost humorous at times how such tiny occurrences steal the light from a scene that otherwise would have been beyond moving. And it’s in these little accoutrements that I believe Flaubert earns his praise. Flaubert is depicting real life where tiny things suddenly happen in the midst of greater things, and then those greater things are affected, often diminished. Also, in a way, Flaubert is poking fun at romanticism. If such moments were written without these interruptions, these moments would have been grand and emotional, and therefore the book may have been a work of romanticism. But because Flaubert threw in these tiny moments throughout the story, little things that steal the emotion that would have been , it is a fantastic example of the changing literary movement of the 19th century.

When the book came out, as I stated earlier, Flaubert was charged with obscenity, specifically in regards to the church. And I think the reason for that involves a few minor characters, one being a priest, the other being a pharmacist. Both characters clash philosophically on multiple occasions, often debating on concepts in Christianity, and on most of these occasion, the pharmacist ends up taking the upper hand. Flaubert writes a few different instances that, in the midst of argument, the concept of religion sort of deconstructs (shoutout the French philosopher Jacque Lacan). These instances where religion tends to contradict itself would have been an incredible threat to the greater society which was so regulated by the clergy. I had to constantly remind myself to imagine reading this book in the mid 19th century, and in doing that, I began to see how important this book was for that time.

Besides religion, Emma as a character was literally a threat to the status quo (very Chopin-esque). To think that a woman, a wife , was capable to such indecent thoughts, acting out viciously and spitefully against her husband, and having multiple affairs, in a time where religious principles governed the mass of societal living, was not something easily considered. Her entire journey and transformation, with all of her actions, thoughts, feelings, I am sure ruffled the feathers a few people. Ah to be fly on the wall in that courtroom during Flaubert’s trial!

Afterthoughts

This was truly a beautiful book, a testament to genius of Flaubert (it was his first novel!), as well as the translators. I can understand why it is so highly regarded in the canon of classic literature. And more than that, Flaubert description is seriously uncontested. I found myself living inside this novel, breathing the French air, feeling the stones embedded in the avenues under my feet, hearing the birds chirp and the horses trotting, tasting the wine, and feeling what it was like to be there, really there.

I highly recommend this book to honestly anyone, but especially to those who enjoy love stories that don’t have nice endings, and also those who simply want to escape into another life in another time and gain an incredibly moving picture of lives that are, in so many ways, very relatable.

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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

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A- : remarkable character study, impressive writing

See our review for fuller assessment.

   From the Reviews : "As for the intimate, deeper center of the book, there is no doubt that it resides in the adulterous woman; she alone possesses all the attributes of a worthy hero, albeit in the guise of a disgraced victim." - Charles Baudelaire, L'artiste "The first thing to say about Madame Bovary is that it's a terrific story. Other comparably great and famous novels aren't, but it is. Everyone should read it. (...) No doubt this new translation of Madame Bovary is a labor of love. But affection and affectation don't sit well together." - Clive James, The Atlantic " Madame Bovary is first and foremost a book, a carefully composed book, amply premeditated and totally coherent, in which nothing is left to chance and in which the author or, better, the painter does exactly what he intends to do from beginning to end." - Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi "The last translation I read was by Paul DeMan, the official Norton translation, a translation that reads like an academic exercise. (...) The great accomplishment of Davis's translation has nothing really to do with her meticulousness, and everything to do with the spirit and energy that drive the narrative." - Jane Smiley, The Globe and Mail "The root feature of Davis�s translation is a close attention to Flaubert�s grammar and sentence structure, and an attempt to mirror it in English. (...) Davis�s quest to be �very close, very faithful� to the French works best when the Flaubertian sentence is plain and declaratory. (...) To compare several different versions of Madame Bovary is not to observe a process of accumulation, some gradual but inevitable progress towards certainty and authority (except in the occasional discarding of error); rather, it is to gaze at a sequence of approximations, a set of deliquescences. (...) Davis�s Madame Bovary is a linguistically careful version, in the modern style, rendered into an unobtrusively American English." - Julian Barnes, London Review of Books "The power of Madame Bovary stems from Flaubert�s determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes. (...) Readers cannot like Emma Bovary, and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks, whether literal or metaphorical. (...) It is a shame Flaubert will never read Davis�s translation of Madame Bovary . Even he would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves." - Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review "In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post    Quotes : "What is remarkable in Madame Bovary is that its mediocre beings, with their earthbound ambitions and pedestrian problems, impress us, by virtue of the structure and the writing that create them, as beings who are out of the ordinary within their ordinary manner of being ." - Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Perpetual Orgy Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

He must have a wife as well. She found him one: a bailiff's widow from Dieppe, forty-five years of age, fifty pounds of income.

At the time of Charles' first appearance at Les Bertaux she regarded herself as being utterly disillusioned, with nothing more to learn and nothing more to feel.      Then, the anxiety occasioned by her change of state, or perhaps a certain agitation caused by the presence of this man had sufficed to make her believe herself possessed at last of that wonderful passion which hitherto had hovered above her like a great bird of rosy plumage in the splendour of a poetic heaven ...

Three pretty words and she'd adore you, I'll be bound. Tender, charming it'd be ... Yes, but how to shake it off afterwards ?

She repented her past virtue as though it were a crime; what still remained of it collapsed beneath the savage onslaught of her pride. She revelled in all the malicious ironies of adultery triumphant. The thought of her lover returned to her with a dizzy seductiveness, she gave herself up to it entirely.

It was time to be serious. Accordingly he was renouncing the flute, elevated sentiments, and the imagination. Every bourgeois in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or a minute has believed himself capable of a grand passion, a high endeavour. Every run-of-the-mill seducer has dreamed of Eastern queens. Not a lawyer but carries within him the débris of a poet.

About the Author :

       French author Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) wrote several acknowledged classics.

© 2003-2023 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

Odd and Bookish

With a dreamy far-off look and her nose stuck in a book, review: madame bovary.

Rating: ★★★★★

I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher (Canterbury Classics) for promotional purposes. 

What a tragic yet captivating tale! 

I added this book to my “To Read” shelf on Goodreads way back in March of 2015. Now 9 years later I finally read it and I’m so glad I did.  

There is nothing happy about this story, but it’s beautiful and intriguing in its own way. Immediately upon starting, I was pulled right into the story. 

Madame Bovary is such a fascinating character. She’s not particularly likable, and that’s precisely why I liked her. She’s a complicated woman who makes numerous questionable decisions, but I find that makes for the most interesting of characters. I found myself constantly thinking about her and what I would do if I were in her shoes. 

For a classic, the writing style is easy to read and follow but still elegant. I didn’t have trouble understanding what was going on. The chapters are fairly short which also helps. 

I originally was going to give this book 4 stars, but after a few days of reflection, I decided I had to give it 5 stars. This is a story that will stick with me for a while. 

Overall, I loved this story and I can’t believe it took me this long to read it. It was well worth the wait! 

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Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics) Paperback – December 31, 2002

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 335 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Classics
• Publication date December 31, 2002
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 7.74 x 5.08 x 0.91 inches
• ISBN-10 0140449124
• ISBN-13 978-0140449129
• Lexile measure 920L
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

About the author.

Geoffrey Wall is author of the critically acclaimed Flaubert: A Life and translated Madame Bovary for Penguin Classics.

Michèle Roberts is the author of ten highly praised novels.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We were in the prep-room when the Head came in, followed by a new boy in mufti and a beadle carrying a big desk. The sleepers aroused themselves, and we all stood up, putting on a startled look, as if we had been buried in our work.

The Head motioned to us to sit down.

'Monsieur Roger,' said he in a quiet tone to the prep master, I've brought you a new boy. He's going into the second. If his conduct and progress are satisfactory, he will be put up with the boys of his own age. '

The new boy had kept in the background, in the corner behind the door, almost out of sight. He was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was clipped straight across the forehead, like a village choirboy's. He seemed a decent enough fellow, but horribly nervous. Although he was not broad across the shoulders, his green cloth jacket, with its black buttons, looked as if it pinched him under the arms and revealed, protruding well beyond the cuffs, a pair of raw, bony wrists, obviously not unaccustomed to exposure. His legs, encased in blue stockings, issued from a pair of drab-coloured breeches, very tightly braced. He had on a pair of thick, clumsy shoes, not particularly well cleaned and plentifully fortified with nails.

The master began to hear the boys at their work. The newcomer listened with all his ears, drinking it in as attentively as if he had been in church, not daring to cross his legs or to lean his elbows on the desk, and when two o'clock came and the bell rang for dismissal, the master had to call him back to earth and tell him to line up with the rest of us.

It was our custom, when we came in to class, to throw our caps on the floor, in order to have our hands free. As soon as ever we got inside the door, we 'buzzed' them under the form, against the wall, so as to kick up plenty of dust. That was supposed to be 'the thing.' Whether he failed to notice this manoeuvre or whether he was too shy to join in it, it is impossible to say, but when prayers were over he was still nursing his cap. That cap belonged to the composite order of headgear, and in it the heterogeneous characteristics of the busby, the Polish shapska, the bowler, the otterskin toque and the cotton nightcap were simultaneously represented. It was, in short, one of those pathetic objects whose mute unloveliness conveys the infinitely wistful expression we may sometimes note on the face of an idiot. Ovoid in form and stiffened with whalebone, it began with a sort of triple line of sausage-shaped rolls running all round its circumference; next, separated by a red band, came alternate patches of velvet and rabbit-skin; then a kind of bag or sack which culminated in a stiffened polygon elaborately embroidered, whence, at the end of a long, thin cord, hung a ball made out of gold wire, by way of a tassel. The cap was brand-new, and the peak of it all shiny.

'Stand up,' said the master.

He stood up, and down went his cap. The whole class began to laugh.

He bent down to recover it. One of the boys next to him jogged him with his elbow and knocked it down again. Again he stooped to pick it up.

'You may discard your helmet,' said the master, who had a pretty wit.

A shout of laughter from the rest of the class quite put the poor fellow out of countenance, and so flustered was he that he didn't know whether to keep it in his hand, put it on the floor or stick it on his head. He sat down and deposited it on his knees.

'Stand up,' said the master again, 'and tell me your name.'

In mumbling tones the new boy stammered out something quite unintelligible.

Again came the inarticulate mumble, drowned by the shouts of the class.

'Louder!' rapped out the master sharply. 'Speak up!'

Whereupon the boy, in desperation, opened his jaws as wide as they would go and, with the full force of his lungs, as though he were hailing somebody at a distance, fired off the word 'Charbovari.'

In an instant the class was in an uproar. The din grew louder and louder, a ceaseless crescendo crested with piercing yells--they shrieked, they howled, they stamped their feet, bellowing at the top of their voices: 'Charbovari! Charbovari!' Then, after a while, the storm began to subside. There would be sporadic outbreaks from time to time, smothered by a terrific effort, or perhaps a titter would fizz along a whole row, or a stifled explosion sputter out here and there, like a half-extinguished fuse.

However, beneath a hail of 'impositions,' order was gradually restored. The master--who had had it dictated, spelled out and read over to him--had at length succeeded in getting hold of the name of Charles Bovary, and forthwith he ordered the hapless wretch to go and sit on the dunce's stool, immediately below the seat of authority. He started to obey, stopped short and stood hesitating.

'What are you looking for?' said the master.

'My ca--' began the new boy timidly, casting an anxious glance around him.

An angry shout of 'Five hundred lines for the whole class' checked, like the Quos ego, a fresh outburst. 'Stop your noise, then, will you?' continued the master indignantly, mopping his brow with a handkerchief which he had produced from the interior of his cap.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics; Revised edition (December 31, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 335 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140449124
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140449129
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 920L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.74 x 5.08 x 0.91 inches
• #5,116 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• #15,176 in Classic Literature & Fiction
• #31,044 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the authors

Paper mill press.

Paper Mill Press is proud to present a timeless collection of unabridged literary classics to a twenty-first century audience. Each original master work is reimagined into a sophisticated yet modern format with custom suede-like metallic foiled covers.

Gustave Flaubert

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, madame bovary.

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For a classic literary character whose motivations are so plain and so primal, Emma Bovary has been a tough nut to crack on screen.

Several esteemed directors have given it a shot over the years, including Vicente Minnelli in 1949 and Claude Chabrol in 1991. Finally, a woman— Sophie Barthes —has directed and co-written a film version of “ Madame Bovary ,” but strangely, that doesn’t result in any more richness or enlightenment.

Whereas the tone of Gustave Flaubert ’s great novel—which created such a scandal when it was published in 1856—was all-knowing and almost mocking of his characters, their follies and their foolish decisions, Barthes takes a tack of emotional detachment. Mia Wasikowska is more than willing to make this flawed, doomed heroine enormously unlikable, but her choices seem impetuous and childish rather than a deeply felt backlash against stifling boredom within a loveless marriage at a time when women had zero agency over their own lives.

Perhaps the intention was to contemporize this figure, though; with her distractingly flat American accent, Emma Bovary could be Betty Draper, or a reality-show housewife, or the mom waiting in front of you in an SUV in the pickup line at school. 

Barthes and co-writer Felipe Marino have significantly streamlined and mixed up the narrative, beginning with Emma’s tragic ending and working their way back to it. They’ve jettisoned the beginning of the book focusing on husband Charles’ childhood, they do away entirely with the couple’s daughter, Berthe, and they combine two male characters to create Emma’s first, tumultuous lover. Major emotional shifts come abruptly, while other sections are languid, brooding and often wordless to reflect Emma’s isolation.

This “Madame Bovary” begins as teenage Emma is packing up her belongings and preparing to leave the convent to marry the man her farmer father has arranged as her husband: country doctor Charles Bovary ( Henry Lloyd-Hughes ). But life in the small, provincial town of Yonville soon makes her miserable, as she spends her days alone reading or wandering in the garden while Charles tends to patients. Even when he’s home, he’s such a numbing drag that he may as well not even be there.

Emma longs for more—excitement, passion, status, love. She shows restraint at first when smitten law clerk Leon Dupuis (a boyishly romantic Ezra Miller ) skittishly professes his affections for her. But she’s definitely ready for extramarital activities once the dashing Marquis ( Logan Marshall-Green ) makes even more overt advances. The affair emboldens her and gives her glimpse of the good life, inspiring her to spend more and more money she doesn’t have on lavish dresses and decorations from the obsequious dry-goods dealer Monsieur Lheureux ( Rhys Ifans ), who’s all-too happy to continue extending her credit. Marshall-Green and Ifans both do their best to enliven the proceedings, the former with sheer sex appeal and the latter with sly menace. Similarly, Paul Giamatti —who starred in Barthes’ last feature, the kooky and clever sci-fi comedy “ Cold Souls ”—nails the pushy patter of local pharmacist Monsieur Homais.

But as we know—either from reading the book in high school or merely from watching the first few moments of Barthes’ film—Emma’s longing for upward mobility becomes her downfall. There’s little tension as her romantic and financial calamities collide, only mere traces of tragedy. Even at nearly two hours, much-needed character development is sorely lacking.

“Madame Bovary” is never less than lovely to look at. Cinematographer Andrij Parekh ’s melancholy images seamlessly combine muck and luxury, sometimes within the same image, in a way that’s reminiscent of Joe Wright ’s “ Pride and Prejudice ” and Thomas Vinterberg ’s “ Far From the Madding Crowd ” earlier this year.

And the clothes are gorgeous (the work of costume designers Christian Gasc and Valerie Ranchoux) as Emma’s tastes become more expensive and extravagant. Fastidiously tailored and flouncy, her ornate gowns in a wide array of jewel tones vividly reflect her transformation from pious convent girl to brazen adulteress.

But the lavish aesthetic trappings, combined with the emotional emptiness, only combine to make Barthes’ film feel like “Madame Bovary: The Fashion Show.”

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Madame Bovary (2015)

Rated R some sexuality/nudity

118 minutes

Mia Wasikowska as Emma Bovary

Ezra Miller as Leon Dupuis

Laura Carmichael as Henriette

Henry Lloyd-Hughes as Charles Bovary

Paul Giamatti as Monsieur Homais

Rhys Ifans as Monsieur Lheureux

Logan Marshall-Green as The Marquis

• Sophie Barthes
• Felipe Marino
• Gustave Flaubert

Original Music Composer

• Evgueni Galperine
• Sacha Galperine

Cinematography

• Andrij Parekh

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