Madame Bovary

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880
 About the author
• Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) is
counted among the greatest Western novelists. He was born
in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, in the Haute-Normandie Region of
France.
• He is best known for his masterpiece Madame Bovary. The
French novelist wrote a number of other classics, however,
and is renowned as the foremost expert of French realism.
 About the author
• The publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 had been
followed by more scandal than admiration; it was not
understood at first that this novel was the beginning of
something new, the scrupulously truthful portraiture of life.
Gradually this aspect of his genius was accepted, and
began to crowd out all others.
• At the time of his death he was famous as a realist, pure and
simple.
 setting
The action begins in 1830 in northwestern France.
The locales include the fictional towns of Tostes and
Yonville and the real-life city of Rouen, on the Seine
River about seventy-five miles inland from the English
Channel.
 characters
Major Characters
• Emma Bovary. The novel’s protagonist, the Madame
Bovary of the title. A country girl educated in a convent
and married to Charles Bovary at a young age, she
harbors idealistic romantic illusions, covets sophistication,
sensuality, and passion, and lapses into fits of extreme
boredom and depression when her life fails to match the
sentimental novels she treasures.
 characters
Major Characters
• Charles Bovary. A country doctor, kind, but simple, dull,
and unremarkable. Charles is a terrible doctor who
manages simple cases decently but is incapable of
performing difficult operations. Charles dotes on his wife,
Emma, who can do no wrong in his eyes. His adoration
of Emma often leads him to act with baffling innocence.
He fails to detect her extramarital affairs with Rodolphe
and Leon.
 characters
Major Characters
• Monsieur Homais. The apothecary at Yonville; a
pompous, self-impressed man of the bourgeois class who
helps Charles become established as a doctor in the
town. Homais is superficial and obnoxious. He loves to
hear himself talk, and his lengthy commentaries are filled
with clichés.
 characters
Minor Characters
• Rodolphe Boulanger de la Huchette. He’s a handsome,
skilled Casanova, whose only goal in life is to woo
women. He decides immediately upon meeting Emma
that she should be his next mistress. Even at that early
point, he knows that their affair will end when he’s sick of
it; he contemplates how to escape from their
relationship before it even begins.
 characters
Minor Characters
• Léon Dupuis. Léon is kind of the male equivalent of
Emma. He’s young, attractive, idealistic, and romantic to
a fault. He’s also incredibly bored with small-town life in
Yonville, and looks forward to the day when he can
escape to Paris to pursue his law degree. Léon is initially
a young man with dreams of romance and love, but is
totally inactive – he’s afraid to tell Emma that he loves
her, and instead pines after her until he leaves Yonville.
 characters
Minor Characters
• Monsieur Lheureux. Monsieur Lheureux is the closest thing
we get to a truly evil creature. He is remorseless and
cunning; he knows all along that he will drive Emma to
financial ruin, and furthermore, he does it on purpose. He
has already driven another unfortunate citizen out of
business and out of town (Madame Lefrançois’s rival, the
tavern keeper), and clearly, he has no qualms about
doing the same to Emma.
 characters
Minor Characters
• Berthe Bovary. Berthe doesn’t do anything in particular,
except show the faults of her parents. She’s an infant,
then a small child in the novel, and she simply is not old
enough to act. However, we learn a great deal about
both Charles and Emma through their interactions with
her.
 characters
Minor Characters
• Madame Homais. She is barely even a character. She’s
another young-ish housewife (she’s in her thirties), but
she couldn’t be any more different from Emma. She’s
totally devoted to her husband’s mission of getting
ahead in life, and she doesn’t really seem to have any
other ambitions. She doesn’t really care about her
appearance or about how the outside world perceives
her.
 synopsis
Madame Bovary begins when Charles Bovary is a
young boy, unable to fit in at his new school and
ridiculed by his new classmates. As a child, and later
when he grows into a young man, Charles is mediocre
and dull. He fails his first medical exam and only barely
manages to become a second-rate country doctor.
His mother marries him off to a widow who dies soon
afterward, leaving Charles much less money than he
expected.
 synopsis
Charles soon falls in love with Emma, the daughter
of a patient, and the two decide to marry. After an
elaborate wedding, they set up house in Tostes, where
Charles has his practice. But marriage doesn’t live up
to Emma’s romantic expectations. Ever since she lived
in a convent as a young girl, she has dreamed of love
and marriage as a solution to all her problems. After
she attends an extravagant ball at the home of a
wealthy nobleman, she begins to dream
 synopsis
constantly of a more sophisticated life. She grows
bored and depressed when she compares her
fantasies to the humdrum reality of village life, and
eventually her listlessness makes her ill. When Emma
becomes pregnant, Charles decides to move to a
different town in hopes of reviving her health.
In the new town of Yonville, the Bovarys meet
Homais, the town pharmacist, a pompous windbag
who loves to hear himself speak.
 synopsis
Emma also meets Leon, a law clerk, who, like her, is
bored with rural life and loves to escape through
romantic novels. When Emma gives birth to her
daughter Berthe, motherhood disappoints her—she
had desired a son—and she continues to be
despondent. Romantic feelings blossom between
Emma and Leon. However, when Emma realizes that
Leon loves her, she feels guilty and throws herself into
the role of a dutiful wife.
 synopsis
Leon grows tired of waiting and, believing that he can
never possess Emma, departs to study law in Paris. His
departure makes Emma miserable.
Soon, at an agricultural fair, a wealthy neighbor
named Rodolphe, who is attracted by Emma’s
beauty, declares his love to her. He seduces her, and
they begin having a passionate affair. Emma is often
indiscreet, and the townspeople all gossip about her.
Charles, however, suspects nothing.
 synopsis
His adoration for his wife and his stupidity combine to
blind him to her indiscretions. His professional
reputation, meanwhile, suffers a severe blow when he
and Homais attempt an experimental surgical
technique to treat a club-footed man named
Hippolyte and end up having to call in another doctor
to amputate the leg. Disgusted with her husband’s
incompetence, Emma throws herself even more
passionately into her affair with Rodolphe.
 synopsis
She borrows money to buy him gifts and suggests that
they run off together and take little Berthe with them.
Soon enough, though, the jaded and worldly
Rodolphe has grown bored of Emma’s demanding
affections. Refusing to elope with her, he leaves her.
Heartbroken, Emma grows desperately ill and nearly
dies.
By the time Emma recovers, Charles is in financial
trouble from having to borrow money to pay
 synopsis
off Emma’s debts and to pay for her treatment. Still, he
decides to take Emma to the opera in the nearby city
of Rouen. There, they encounter Leon. This meeting
rekindles the old romantic flame between Emma and
Leon, and this time the two embark on a love affair. As
Emma continues sneaking off to Rouen to meet Leon,
she also grows deeper and deeper in debt to the
moneylender Lheureux, who lends her more and more
money at exaggerated interest rates.
 synopsis
She grows increasingly careless in conducting her
affair with Leon. As a result, on several occasions, her
acquaintances nearly discover her infidelity.
Over time, Emma grows bored with Leon. Not
knowing how to abandon him, she instead becomes
increasingly demanding. Meanwhile, her debts mount
daily. Eventually, Lheureux orders the seizure of
Emma’s property to compensate for the debt she has
accumulated. Terrified of Charles finding out, she
 synopsis
frantically tries to raise the money that she needs,
appealing to Leon and to all the town’s businessmen.
Eventually, she even attempts to prostitute herself by
offering to get back together with Rodolphe if he will
give her the money she needs. He refuses, and, driven
to despair, she commits suicide by eating arsenic. She
dies in horrible agony.
For a while, Charles idealizes the memory of his
wife. Eventually, though, he finds her letters from
 synopsis
Rodolphe and Leon, and he is forced to confront the
truth. He dies alone in his garden, and Berthe is sent off
to work in a cotton mill.
 Plot
Initial situation
• Emma and Charles establish their married life
– We meet Charles, then Emma and, soon enough, we see
them set up their first household in Tostes. Everything may
seem peachy from the outside, but we can sense trouble
coming. Charles is all like, "Whoohoo! Marriage is
awesome!" while Emma’s feelings are more along the lines
of "Meh." This is never a good sign for a relationship.
 Plot
conflict
• Emma gets her first taste of the good life at the
Comte d’Andervilliers’ ball
– Emma is not going to give in and settle with her small-town
life – at least, not without a fight. She’s encouraged by a
visit to the palatial home of the Comte d’Andervilliers,
where she learns that some people do live the opulent life
she dreams of.
 Plot
complication
• Léon enters the picture; Emma begins to wonder
about having an affair
– With the appearance of an eligible, romantic, adequately
handsome young man, Emma suddenly has something to
be excited about. This new development leads her to
believe that her fantasy life is actually closer than she’d
previously thought. She ponders taking action, like running
away with Léon, but doesn’t actually do anything about it.
 Plot
climax
• Emma gives in to her desires and starts her affair
with Rodolphe
– Léon is out of the picture, but Rodolphe shows up soon
enough – and it doesn’t take him long to convince Emma
to become his mistress. After she gives in to Rodolphe’s
advances, Emma’s character changes. Instead of just
wishing that things would happen, she begins to make
them happen, by whatever means possible.
 Plot
suspense
• Léon and Emma’s affair resumes and gets riskier
– After their awkward reunion at the opera, Emma and Léon
finally get their feelings out in the open. Emma, whose
tendency towards recklessness we already witnessed in her
affair with Rodolphe, becomes truly foolhardy, taking risks
that make our blood pressure rise. Her lack of caution is
notable, not only in her relationship with Léon, but in her
financial decisions.
 Plot
denouement
• Monsieur Lheureux demands his money; Emma despairs
– Everything in Emma’s life comes crashing down around her
when Monsieur Lheureux sends a collection agency after
her. Her shock and desperation mount as she attempts to
find the payback money – suddenly, all the mistakes she
made earlier are back with a vengeance. Instead of
everything working out, all of Emma’s problems present
themselves with renewed strength.
 Plot
conclusion
• Emma commits suicide; Charles consequently dies
– Emma dies due to her own foolish actions but we don’t
necessarily condemn her, and even though Charles’s
neglect of Berthe verges on criminal, we don’t judge him,
either. Righteous morality would have been the easy way
out for this novel – but Flaubert doesn’t take that route.
Instead, he allows us, the readers, to see the impact that
the actions of a single person can have on the lives of
others, and make our own decisions about it.
 symbolism
The Blind Beggar
• A picture of physical decay, the blind beggar who
follows the carriage in which Emma rides to meet
Leon also symbolizes Emma’s moral corruption. He
sings songs about “birds and sunshine and green
leaves” in a voice “like an inarticulate lament of
some vague despair.”
 Point of view
• Supposedly First Person; Actually Third Person
Omniscient
– This sounds quite odd and complicated, and it kind of is. In
the first chapter, we have a mysterious, nameless, faceless
first person narrator (supposedly a former classmate of
Charles Bovary) who recounts the first time Charles
appeared in boarding school. However, this is not your
average first person narrator. We don’t know anything
about the guy, and he doesn’t make a single appearance
in the book.
 Point of view
– Furthermore, he knows everything about Charles. This
makes for a natural transition into the narrative voice of the
rest of the book; from Chapter Two on out, we see things
through the perspective of a third person omniscient point
of view. But again, this is not simply an average outside
observer… we get a deeply personal, intensely internalized
view of the characters.
 tone
Intimate Yet Detached
Flaubert’s novel manages somehow to be both intimate
and detached from its main characters – as though it
can peer inside their souls, while still remaining outside
ultimately. Flaubert accomplishes this by refusing to
manipulate the reader’s emotions; instead of getting us
to sympathize with Emma or Charles, we see and
understand what’s going on with them.
 themes
• Deception: Emma continually deceives her husband
while committing adultery.
• Greed: Unscrupulous Lheureux runs the Bovarys into debt
to satisfy his lust for money.
• Naiveté: Dr. Bovary never suspects his wife of infidelity
even though his neighbors become well aware of
Emma's extramarital activity.
• Prodigality and Materialism: Emma spends lavishly,
believing that money can buy happiness.
 symbolism
Dried Flowers
• A picture of physical decay, the blind beggar who
follows the carriage in which Emma rides to meet
Leon also symbolizes Emma’s moral corruption. He
sings songs about “birds and sunshine and green
leaves.” We then discovered that what we thought
was a song about an innocent woman is actually a
bawdy, sexual song.
 symbolism
The Lathe
• Binet’s habit of making useless napkin rings on his
lathe is a symbol with several meanings. First, it
represents the useless, nonproductive, ornamental
character of bourgeois tastes. Second, it represents
something more ominous—the monotony of the life
that traps Emma.
 moral
Happiness is primarily a decision. It is not our situation
that defines it, it is about how we choose to respond to
our situation that really determines our happiness.
 Literary approach
Socio-cultural Context
Madame Bovary deals with many issues that are still
prevalent today-issues such as depression, the
relentless pursuit of happiness, and financial problems.
Throughout the novel, Madame Bovary experiences
all of these in a way that is surprisingly easy for the
modern reader to relate to.
 Literary theory
Romanticism
Our protagonist spends the whole novel going back
and forth about whether she’s in love, out of love,
thinking about love, dreaming about love, worrying
about love. In other words, it’s a lot like modern day
life.
 Literary theory
Realism
Realism asserts an individual’s right to choose his or her
own path. In the novel, Emma had the control over
her life. But she chose the wrong path because of her
selfish dreams.
 Literary theory
Feminism
The novel deconstructs the prim, idealized vision of the
perfect nineteenth century woman, simply by giving
her thoughts, feelings, and desires. Our protagonist is
simultaneously the perfect woman and the nightmare
woman of this period. She’s beautiful, a good
housekeeper, and on the outside seems like an
obedient wife, but she’s actually an adulteress,
 Literary theory
Feminism
a spendthrift, and, to be honest, frivolous. Through the
life of Emma Bovary, Flaubert attempts to show us an
objective, intimate perspective on the difficulties of
womanhood during a restrictive and judgmental time
period.
 Literary theory
Characterization. The author presented the characters by their:
• Social Class
– This is a book about the middle class: none of its characters
are either poverty-stricken or fantastically hoity-toity.
• Thoughts and Opinions
– Flaubert takes us straight into the minds of our characters,
revealing everything they think and feel to us. This is our
best resource for getting to know them; he’s unflinching
and direct in showing us their deepest desires.
 Literary theory
Characterization. The author presented the characters by their:
• Actions
– Actions do indeed speak louder than words. We see
characters say one thing and do another over and over
again, thus betraying their real personalities.
• Names
– Many of the names in Madame Bovary comment aptly
upon the nature of the characters. "Bovary," for example, is
a play on "bovine," or cow-like.