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= Madame_Bovary =
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Introduction
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'Madame Bovary' (; ), originally published as 'Madame Bovary:
Provincial Manners' ( ), is a novel by French writer Gustave Flaubert,
published in 1857. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in
order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.
When the novel was first serialized in 'Revue de Paris' between 1
October and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel
for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story
notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, 'Madame
Bovary' became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two
volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now
considered Flaubert's masterpiece, and one of the most influential
literary works in history.
Plot synopsis
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Charles Bovary is a shy, oddly dressed teenager who becomes an
'Officier de santé' in the Public Health Service. He marries the woman
his mother has chosen for him, the unpleasant but supposedly rich
widow Héloïse Dubuc. He sets out to build a practice in the village of
Tostes.
One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg and
meets his patient's daughter, Emma Rouault. Emma is a beautiful,
poetically dressed young woman who has a yearning for luxury and
romance inspired by reading popular novels. Charles is immediately
attracted to her, and when Héloïse dies, Charles waits a decent
interval before courting Emma in earnest. Her father gives his
consent, and Emma and Charles marry.
Emma finds her married life dull and becomes listless. Charles decides
his wife needs a change of scenery and moves his practice to the
larger market town of Yonville. There, Emma gives birth to a daughter,
Berthe, but motherhood proves a disappointment to Emma. She becomes
infatuated with Léon Dupuis, a law student who shares Emma's
appreciation for literature and music. Emma does not acknowledge her
passion for Léon, who departs for Paris to continue his studies.
Next, Emma begins an affair with a rich and rakish landowner, Rodolphe
Boulanger. After four years, she insists they run away together.
Rodolphe does not share her enthusiasm for this plan and on the eve of
their planned departure, he ends the relationship with a letter placed
at the bottom of a basket of apricots delivered to Emma. The shock is
so great that Emma falls deathly ill and returns to religion.
When Emma recovers, she and Charles attend the opera, at Charles'
insistence, in nearby Rouen. The opera reawakens Emma's passions, and
she re-encounters Léon who, now educated and working in Rouen, is also
attending the opera. They begin an affair. Emma indulges her fancy for
luxury goods and clothes with purchases made on credit from the
merchant Lheureux, who arranges for her to obtain power of attorney
over Charles' estate.
When Lheureux calls in Bovary's debt, Emma pleads for money from
several people, only to be turned down. In despair, she swallows
arsenic and dies an agonizing death. Charles, heartbroken, abandons
himself to grief, stops working, and lives by selling off his
possessions. When he dies, his young daughter Berthe is placed with
her grandmother, who soon dies. Berthe lives with an impoverished
aunt, who sends her to work in a cotton mill. The book concludes with
the local pharmacist Homais, who had competed with Charles' medical
practice, gaining prominence among Yonville people and being rewarded
for his medical achievements.
Characters
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Emma Bovary is the novel's eponymous protagonist. She has a highly
romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion, as
well as high society.
Charles Bovary, Emma's husband, is a very simple and common man. He is
an 'officier de santé', or "health officer".
Rodolphe Boulanger is a wealthy local man who seduces Emma as one in a
long string of mistresses.
Léon Dupuis is a clerk who introduces Emma to poetry and who falls in
love with her.
Monsieur Lheureux is a sly merchant who lends money to Charles and
leads the Bovarys into debt and financial ruin.
Monsieur Homais is the town pharmacist.
Justin is Monsieur Homais' apprentice and second cousin who harbors a
crush on Emma.
Style
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The book was in some ways inspired by the life of a schoolfriend of
the author who became a doctor. Flaubert's friend and mentor, Louis
Bouilhet, had suggested to him that this might be a suitably
"down-to-earth" subject for a novel and that Flaubert should attempt
to write in a "natural way," without digressions. The writing style
was of supreme importance to Flaubert. While writing the novel, he
wrote that it would be "a book about nothing, a book dependent on
nothing external, which would be held together by the internal
strength of its style", an aim which, for the critic Jean Rousset,
made Flaubert "the first in date of the non-figurative novelists",
such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Though Flaubert avowed no
liking for the style of Balzac, the novel he produced became arguably
a prime example and an enhancement of literary realism in the vein of
Balzac. The "realism" in the novel was to prove an important element
in the trial for obscenity: the lead prosecutor argued that not only
was the novel immoral, but that realism in literature was an offence
against art and decency.
The realist movement was, in part, a reaction against romanticism.
Emma may be said to be the embodiment of a romantic: in her mental and
emotional process, she has no relation to the realities of her world.
Although in some ways he may seem to identify with Emma, Flaubert
frequently mocks her romantic daydreaming and taste in literature. The
accuracy of Flaubert's supposed assertion that "Madame Bovary, c'est
moi" ("Madame Bovary is me") has been questioned. In his letters, he
distanced himself from the sentiments in the novel. To Edma Roger des
Genettes, he wrote, "Tout ce que j'aime n'y est pas" ("all that I love
is not there") and to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie, "je n'y ai
rien mis ni de mes sentiments ni de mon existence" ("I have used
nothing of my feelings or of my life"). For Mario Vargas Llosa, "If
Emma Bovary had not read all those novels, it is possible that her
fate might have been different."
'Madame Bovary' has been seen as a commentary on the bourgeoisie, the
folly of aspirations that can never be realized or a belief in the
validity of a self-satisfied, deluded personal culture, associated
with Flaubert's period, especially during the reign of Louis Philippe,
when the middle class grew to become more identifiable in contrast to
the working class and the nobility. Flaubert despised the bourgeoisie.
In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, the bourgeoisie is characterized
by intellectual and spiritual superficiality, raw ambition, shallow
culture, a love of material things, greed, and above all a mindless
parroting of sentiments and beliefs.
For Vargas Llosa, "Emma's drama is the gap between illusion and
reality, the distance between desire and its fulfillment" and shows
"the first signs of alienation that a century later will take hold of
men and women in industrial societies."
Literary significance and reception
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Long established as one of the greatest novels, the book has been
described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James wrote: "'Madame
Bovary' has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it
stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable
assurance as both excites and defies judgment." Marcel Proust praised
the "grammatical purity" of Flaubert's style, while Vladimir Nabokov
said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to
do". Similarly, in his preface to his novel 'The Joke', Milan Kundera
wrote, "not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of
aesthetic inferiority. Ever since 'Madame Bovary', the art of the
novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry." Giorgio de
Chirico said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view,
the most perfect book is 'Madame Bovary' by Flaubert". Julian Barnes
called it the best novel that has ever been written.
The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the
nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned
with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than
of external things. Thus it prefigures the work of modernist novelists
Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
The book was controversial upon its release: its scandalous subject
matter led to an obscenity trial in 1857. Flaubert was acquitted. 'Le
Figaro' was negative of the work. They stated, "Monsieur Flaubert is
not a writer."
English translations
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The English translations include:
* The first to attempt a translation was Juliet Herbert, who worked
closely with the author. For lack of a publishing contract, Flaubert
dropped the project.
* Then in 1878, George Saintsbury published an essay containing
translations of excerpts from the novel.
* Mary Neal Sherwood under the pseudonym John Stirling (1881)
* Eleanor Marx (1886)
* Henry Blanchamp (1905)
* J. Lewis May (1928)
* Gerard Hopkins (1948)
* Joan Charles (abridged, 1949)
* Alan Russell (1950)
* Francis Steegmuller (1957)
* Mildred Marmur (1964)
* Paul de Man (1965)
* Merloyd Lawrence (1969)
* Geoffrey Wall (1992)
* Margaret Mauldon (2004)
* Lydia Davis (2010)
* Christopher Moncrieff (2010)
* Adam Thorpe (2011)
Film and television
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'Madame Bovary' has had the following film and television adaptations:
* 'Unholy Love' (1932), directed by Albert Ray
* 'Madame Bovary' (1934), directed by Jean Renoir and starring Max
Dearly and Valentine Tessier
* 'Madame Bovary' (1937), directed by Gerhard Lamprecht and starring
Pola Negri, Aribert Wäscher and Ferdinand Marian
* 'Madame Bovary' (1947), directed by Carlos Schlieper and starring
Mecha Ortiz, Roberto Escalada, Enrique Diosdado and Alberto Bello
* 'Madame Bovary' (1949), directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring
Jennifer Jones, James Mason, Van Heflin, Louis Jourdan and Gene
Lockhart
* 'Madame Bovary' (1964), a BBC TV series written by Giles Cooper
* 'Madame Bovary' (1969), directed by and starring Edwige Fenech
* 'Madame Bovary' (1975), a BBC TV series that used the same script as
that of 1964
* 'Save and Protect' (1989), directed by Alexandr Sokurov
* 'Madame Bovary' (1991), directed by Claude Chabrol, and starring
Isabelle Huppert in 1991
* 'Maya Memsaab' (1993), a Hindi-language film, directed by Ketan
Mehta and starring Deepa Sahi
* 'Madame Bovary' (2000), a TV series written by Heidi Thomas, a WGBH
production for BBC
* 'Madame Bovary' (2014), directed by Sophie Barthes and starring Mia
Wasikowska, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Paul Giamatti, and Ezra Miller
* 'Emma Bovary' (2021), a France Télévisions TV film starring Camille
Métayer and Thierry Godard
David Lean's film 'Ryan's Daughter' (1970) was a loose adaptation of
the story, relocating it to Ireland during the time of the Easter
Rebellion. The script had begun life as a straight adaptation of
'Madame Bovary', but Lean convinced writer Robert Bolt to re-work it
into another setting.
Other adaptations
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* Emmanuel Bondeville's opera 'Madame Bovary' was produced in 1951.
* Posy Simmonds' 1999 graphic novel 'Gemma Bovery' (and Anne
Fontaine's film adaptation) reworked the story into a satirical tale
of English expatriates in France.
* 'Abraham's Valley' in 1993, directed by Manoel de Oliveira, is a
close adaptation set in Portugal, in which the novel is mentioned and
discussed several times.
* The novel was loosely adapted in the Christian video series
'VeggieTales' under the name 'Madame Blueberry' and established the
titular character herself as part of the series’s main cast.
* Harold Noben's opera Bovary premiered April 12, 2025, at the Théâtre
National in Brussels, Belgium.
See also
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* 'I Am Not Madame Bovary' (originally titled 'I Am Not Pan Jinlian')
* 'The Perpetual Orgy'
* Arsenic poisoning
* Delphine Delamare
External links
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*
* [
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14155/pg14155.html Original
text from Project Gutenberg]
*
* [
http://www.bovary.fr/ Les manuscrits de 'Madame Bovary'] - Site
with images and transcriptions of Flaubert's original manuscripts,
plus 4500 pages deleted/censored material
*
[
https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Aglobe_radio%20title%3Abovary&sort=publicdate
'Madame Bovary'], 13-part Globe Radio adaptation, aired on NPR
Playhouse in the late 1980s.
*
[
http://www.litteratureaudio.com/livre-audio-gratuit-mp3/flaubert-gustave-madame-bovary.html/
'Madame Bovary', audio version] 20px
*
[
http://www.tailoredtexts.com/read/madame-bovary-flaubert-gustave/#!/10778/en/d/0/0/0/
'Madame Bovary'] (original version) with 7500+ English annotations at
Tailored Texts
* [
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007s1xs Madame Bovary], BBC Radio
4 discussion with Andy Martin, Mary Orr & Robert Gildea ('In Our
Time', 12 Jul. 2007)
License
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License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Bovary
