This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature - Emma Bovary. Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstacy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering, corruption and downfall. A brilliant psychological portrait, MADAME BOVARY searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Who is Madame Bovary? Flaubert's answer to this question was superb: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. This volume, with its fine translation by Lowell Bair, a perceptive introduction by Leo Bersani, and a complete supplement of essays and critical comments, is the indispensable MADAME BOVARY.

Already disappointed with humanity by the age of twenty-two, Gustave Flaubert abandoned the outside world and retired as a hermit to his family’s estate in the small town of Croisset, France. It was in this provincial Normandy setting that he created one of the world’s great novels, Madame Bovary, and in which he spent most of his life almost mystically devoted to literature. Since he was deeply affected by stress and believed that a life of activity would damage the creative process, he wanted to shut the door, close off all distractions, and bury himself in work.
Yet Flaubert was not an altogether unsocial man. He kept an apartment in Paris for the winter months, entertained friends, traveled periodically, and enjoyed being a favorite of Princess Mathilde, cousin of the Emperor of France. He never wrote for fame or money, but nonetheless enjoyed the glory his success broughtand if you see this as a contradiction to his need for seclusion, then you’ve already spotted one of several major conflicts within this talented writer.
Born on December 12, 1821, Flaubert was the son of a prominent surgeon in Rouen, France. Having spent much of his childhood in the grim environment of the hospital where his father worked, he had an idea of the gruesome pain and suffering that plagued the sick. He also had a good idea of the incompetence that plagued the medical profession. This early exposure to human frailty and professional mishaps no doubt contributed to Flaubert’s general pessimism about life,
but it also provided the solid background of medical and scientific information he drew upon to describe the middle-class medical practitioners in Madame Bovary.
The bungled clubfoot operation on the stable boy, for example, resembles incidences of malpractice he had encountered in real life.
Another result of Flaubert’s familiarity with medicine (his brother Achille was also a doctor) was his awareness that middle-class lip service to science and progress could be mere pretentious nonsense. While he believed in true science, he was wary of people, like the pharmacist Homais, who invoked the spirit of progress to justify their own comfortable positions in society.
Flaubert’s youth coincided not only with the rise of the bourgeoisie during the reign of King Louis-Philippe (1830-48), but with the period of Romanticism. This literary and artistic movement, begun in the late eighteenth century, rejected the predominant view of that century’s thinkers that “reason” was the guiding principle of life and man’s most important attribute. French education was still grounded in the previous century’s ideals, so that its models of art and literature were from the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome- a world that glorified the rational. The Romantics reacted by “rediscovering” other sides of life. They looked to nature and indulged in colorful, often excessive, explorations of human emotions.
As a boarder at the College de Rouen, a secondary school similar to the one Charles Bovary attends at the beginning of Madame Bovary, Flaubert devoured the Romantic writing of Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, and
Sir Walter Scott (among others), writers who extolled sentiment, feeling, and beauty, often in exotic historical settings. As with other young Frenchmen, Flaubert’s turn toward Romanticism led him to reject as coarse, ugly, and unfeeling the middle-class culture that had increased its influence steadily since the end of the Napoleonic era (1815). The very symbol of this culture was the king himself, Louis-Philippe (called the “Citizen King”), who along with his supporters, became the targets of the cartoonist Honore Daumier (1809-1879) and the novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850). Flaubert and a school friend created their own fictional target, called “le Garcon” (the boy), who represented everything they disliked about middle-class life- its obsession with money and politics, its intellectual pretenses, its vulgarity, and its sexual hypocrisy. Their feelings about this hypocrisy were confirmed somewhat humorously when the respectable vice-principal of the school was discovered in a local brothel.
Flaubert’s own attitudes toward love and sexuality, which were to occupy a good part of his later work and correspondence, found their first expression when he was fifteen and fell in love with Elisa Schlesinger, a married woman eleven years his senior. Although she became a friend throughout his later life, Flaubert’s obsession with this unattainable “perfect” woman set the tone of later relationships and literary themes. This type of unfulfilled yearning is typical of Romantic love relationships. In Madame Bovary, young Justin, the chemist’s assistant, longs for Emma in the same way, and Emma’s unfulfilled longing for the perfect love echoes this relationship. Even though Flaubert depicts Emma’s desires as the product of an excessive addiction to Romantic ideals, it is possible that he himself was equally their victim. It may also explain in part why Flaubert devoted himself primarily to the search for perfection in his writing rather than in personal relationships. His later relationship with Louise Colet, a poet, confirmed the pattern set by the earlier Schlesinger experience. Colet was also considerably older than Flaubert. Although in love with her, Flaubert carried on their affair primarily through letters; they only saw each other six times during the first two years. In Madame Bovary, Emma’s romances with Rodolphe and Leon rely heavily on letter-writing.
In 1841, at his father’s insistence, Flaubert went to Paris in order to study law, but for two years he led a rather aimless existence, traveling, socializing, and writing. He resumed his friendship with Elisa Schlesinger and became close friends with Maxime DuCamp, a writer and editor. He finished (but did not publish) November, a Romantic work about a man’s love for a prostitute. Although Flaubert would eventually create a more objective and realistic style, this early novel was typical of the emotional intensity of Romantic literature.
Though he finally began to study law in 1843, he hated every moment of it and felt tremendous stress, possibly the result of a conflict between his literary interests and the pressure to learn a respectable profession. In January 1844, while returning to Rouen for a vacation with his family, the twenty-two-year-old Flaubert suffered a seizure that marked the beginning of a lifelong nervous disorder. On his parents’ advice, he gave up the study of law and settled in at the family estate in Croisset, which would become his permanent home. Flaubert became very familiar with provincial living and would draw on this to describe the small, boring towns of Tostes and Yonville in Madame Bovary.
Though solitary, Flaubert traveled and kept the apartment in Paris. But when his father and sister died within a few months of one another in 1846, his hostility toward the world intensified and he became even more of a loner. He eventually became known as the “hermit of Croisset.” Avoiding interruptions, he started work on a long historical novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His style, marked by attention to detail and tightness of construction, began to take shape. Over the next few years he would become a perfectionist, spending days writing and rewriting a single page, researching his material, or searching tirelessly for the famous mot juste, the “exact word.” This belief in the precision of language would become a permanent obsession and would characterize his style more than any other technique or device. In Madame Bovary, Emma’s search for the perfect romance might be said to parallel Flaubert’s quest for the mot juste.
After spending three years on Saint Anthony, Flaubert was shocked that his close friends didn’t like it. They suggested he tackle a more realistic subject from daily life that would take him farther beyond his Romantic roots. He shelved the book and went to the Middle East, a setting that was hardly likely to suppress his Romantic tendencies. Ironically, however, the book that he began upon his return
was based not on the attractions of exotic locales, but on the everyday life he knew so well.
Madame Bovary parallels the true story of Eugene Delamare, a former student of Flaubert’s father who had practiced medicine as an army officer and had married an older woman. After her death, he married a young woman named Delphine Couturier and took up residence in the town of Ry, not far from Rouen.
Delphine was unfaithful to him, ran up many debts without his knowledge, then died, leaving him with a young daughter- all of which Emma does in Madame Bovary. After a few months, Eugene, like Emma’s husband Charles, died in despair.
Flaubert insisted that Madame Bovary was entirely fictitious, and when asked about Emma’s identity, he would argue, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (“I am Madame Bovary,” or “Madame Bovary is my creation”). His intention was to create a type of character, not a specific individual, and he claimed that Emma was “suffering and weeping at this very moment in twenty villages in France”- that is, there were women everywhere in France who were stifled and bored like Emma.
The writing of Madame Bovary dominated Flaubert’s life from 1851 to 1856.
On completing the novel, he made no effort to publish it. But at his friends’ insistence, he sent it to the prestigious Revue de Paris, which published Madame Bovary in installments in 1857. The editors suggested he cut certain “offensive” passages, but the author refused. He might have reacted differently if he had known what lay ahead. Both Flaubert and his publishers were thrown into court
on grounds that the novel was morally and religiously offensive to the public.
Ironically, when the defendants won their case, Madame Bovary became a national best-seller.
The book was also recognized as marking a turning point in the history of the novel. The combination of realistic detail, objective narrative technique, harmony of structure, and language chosen to reflect the characters’ personalities created a realistic, yet beautiful, picture for the reader. Drawing on both the Romantic emphasis on inner feelings and the Realist’s concern for truth, Madame Bovary serves as a bridge between Romanticism and the modern novel.
In Flaubert’s next book, Salammbo (1862), he returned to an exotic setting and attempted to recreate the civilization of ancient Carthage. In the mid-1860s, he began his most autobiographical novel, Sentimental Education, which centered on Frederic Moreau’s failure in an impossible love affair. During this period, he went back to The Temptation of Saint Anthony, but his solitude was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). After the war, Flaubert finally finished Saint Anthony (1874) and in 1877 published a group of three short stories (Trois Contes). In May 1880, while hard at work on his comic novel Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert collapsed and died.
Readers note that few outward events of importance occur in Madame Bovary, and the same can be said of Flaubert’s life. His concentration on the inner lives of his characters- their memories, dreams, and fantasies- might be said to reflect his own obsessions with love, sexuality, and art. The next generation of French novelists- Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Guy de Maupassant- considered themselves disciples of this man who has been called “the novelist’s novelist.” Shortly afterward, in the early twentieth century, the innovative work of the French writer Marcel Proust and the Irish writer James Joyce would be deeply influenced and inspired by Flaubert’s techniques of depicting the realities of inner experience.