
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is a classic novel that follows the story of Emma Bovary, a woman who is unsatisfied with her provincial life and seeks fulfillment in love and excitement. Despite being married to a country doctor, Charles Bovary, Emma embarks on adulterous affairs and indulges in spending money beyond their means. As her pursuit of happiness leads to ruin, the novel delves into themes of romanticism, disillusionment, and the consequences of unrealistic expectations.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Triggers include themes of infidelity, mental health struggles, suicide, financial ruin, and societal critique.
Has Romance?
Romantic elements are central to the narrative, particularly Emma's extramarital affairs and her quest for fulfillment.
From The Publisher:
A new translation by Adam Thorpe
Gustave Flaubert once said of his heroine, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi." In this acclaimed new translation, Adam Thorpe brings readers closer than ever before to Flaubert's peerless text and, by extension, the author himself.
Praise for Adam Thorpe's translation of Madame Bovary
"What leaves me reeling with each rereading (and Adam Thorpe's new translation is, pardon the pun, to die for) is the use of language. There can be no doubt as to the reason for Flaubert's brain popping at the top of the stairs when he was fifty-eight. He broke it scouring for perfect sentences, words, le mot juste."-Russell Kane, The Independent
"Flaubert described his great work as a poem, so it is fitting that a poet and novelist of Thorpe's stature should turn his hand to it."-Robin Robertson, The Herald (Scotland)
Ratings (59)
Incredible (8) | |
Loved It (17) | |
Liked It (14) | |
It Was OK (10) | |
Did Not Like (8) | |
Hated It (2) |
Reader Stats (122):
Read It (65) | |
Want To Read (48) | |
Did Not Finish (2) | |
Not Interested (7) |
4 comment(s)
I'm not sure how I want to rate this book or how I feel about it. I still love some parts of it and gives and interesting perspective on life in that time. But it has some things I don't enjoy as much.
I think I would have liked “Madame Bovary” more if I had read it in its original language French. The effect was very less as compared to the hype this book got. I, being a classic book adorer, found this book quite less interesting or “not my cup of tea” kind.
This is a story of a marriage. When an doctor of average intelligence, Charles Bovary marries Emma Rouault, who is the daughter of a farm owner, both dream of a lovely domestic life in future. But soon Emma finds her husband not up to her expectations and not a male whom she would admire! Even though she mothers a daughter from him, she feels her life dull and uninteresting. She starts reading more and more novels just to keep her occupied and starts comparing the life of the book characters with her own.
On the other hand, Charles loves her more and more each day. He does everything that is possible to bring her back to normal. Emma to find excitement in life starts love affairs outside. And her husband is still unaware. Emma dies after taking arsenic, when her debts mount because of her spend thrifting (of course to overcome boredom). Charles, left grief stricken , finally sells his possessions and stops working. Then he finds Emma’s love letters and breaks down and dies leaving his daughter an orphan and forced to work from an aunt who herself is poor.
To be straight, I didn’t like the plot itself. It might have been a sensation in it’s time, but now, it didn’t make any impact on me. Characters were well developed and overly dramatic ( not as much as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s). The narration was ok, and I had an audiobook so it might also be the reader’s voice, that made me think so.
I hated Emma from the beginning till FOREVER….
I sympathised on Charles Bovary.
And My heart cried for their child Berthe’s future.
Al principio me parecio que iba a ser aburrido. Es un libro lento y no pasan demasiadas cosas aunque el libro trate de toda la vida de la pareja protagonista. Si estas buscando un libro con mucha accion o donde el argumento se mueva rapidamente, este no es tu libro. En general los eventos se ven venir y es esta anticipacion que tambien tienen los protagonistas lo que los hacen incluso mas atractivos cuando estos eventos suceden.
Creo que el lenguaje al principio me molestaba, tantas palabras que no conocia y fue lo que me trajo de vuelta a la historia. Flaubert es un maestro del lenguaje y de la descripcion, en especial cuando describe los sentimientos de los personajes. Una maravilla, merece una relectura solo por releer sus descripciones.
Y por eso le doy 5 estrellas, los personajes tienen una corriente de pensamientos y de sentimientos que somos capaces de leer y esta corriente varia simplemente porque el personaje recuerda algo en particular. Y no solo de madame Bovary, Flaubert nos deja ver el mundo interior de varios de los protagonistas del libro.
A la vez la historia es simple y muy lineal, quiza es un punto en su contra para alguna gente, para mi es lo que la hace especialmente llamativa. Me da la sensacion de que si otras historias se hubieran mezclado para darle "mas profundidad" lo que hubiera pasado es que el libro seria un lio confuso.
As to Emma, she did not examine her heart to know whether or not she loved him. Love, she believed, should come on all at once, with great claps of thunder and lightning – a hurricane from heaven that falls upon your life, turns it topsy-turvy, tears up intentions like leaves and sweeps your whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that, on the foundation terrace of a house, the rain makes lakes when the gutters are blocked, and so she remained safe and secure, until suddenly she discovered a crack in the wall.
Madame Bovary was a revelation. Not for the plot—which I didn’t expect to care for, and still find fairly uninspiring—but for Flauert’s writing style, as brilliantly translated by Adam Thorpe. (Apparently Thorpe made the conscious decision to stick with period English for his translation, and the impact on the reading experience is profound. I truly felt like I was reading a beautifully written Victorian novel. From now on, this is something I intend to seek out in translated literature.) The novel is cinematic and almost dreamlike, strewn with the most beautiful descriptions and rich with metaphor. It feels decadent, opulent, glamorous, gilded…it’s just the sort of prose I love most.
Summarized on paper, it’s not a story that much appeals to me. I sympathize with Emma to an extent, but this is not a novel that really tries to convince the reader that infidelity is sometimes justified. She is bored by her husband, but theirs is not a loveless or abusive marriage on his side; in fact, Emma occasionally wishes Charles would be cruel to her so that she might feel justified in her affairs. I didn’t need an entire book to convince me that adultery is bad. (I didn’t really follow the details of the bills being passed around, but I got the gist.) Similarly, much of the conversation surrounding
Madame Bovary seems to latch onto the idea that Emma has been led astray by her love of reading novels, but I found the opposite to be true: Emma reads novels to escape and find the romance and passion that by her own nature she so desperately desires. As a character study, I did come out with some interesting takeaways:
Emma eventually grows as bored of her lovers as she does her marriage; she does initially try to resist temptation, but lets herself be conquered by her heart; both of her lovers seek merely to “possess” her.
But what I really loved was the prose itself.
Interestingly, most of the novel feels slightly detached from the characters. Very little time is spent recounting immediate action or character dialogue, nor are we given much insight into the direct thoughts of the characters. The narrator instead is high above, painting beautiful scenes that feel almost surreal. Similarly, several passages are quite sensual, but rarely explicit or immediate.
Oh, and
what an ending. I knew the broad strokes of how it would end, and picked up enough of the foreshadowing to figure out some of the specifics, but was not expecting how
gruesome and prolonged Emma’s death would be. Flaubert does not give her the quick end of
Anna Karenina: Emma’s final days are painful, protracted, and described in excruciating details. But interesting, again unlike
Anna Karenina, Emma does not seem to regret her decision. Indeed, if anything it appears that she finally attained the sainthood she desired. And after all that, only Charles mourns her
.
Some favorite passages:
In the loneliness of her life, she transferred onto this child’s head all her scattered, broken vanities.
You went up to his room, you settled down: the midges and the moths swirled around the tallow.
The rain was no longer falling; day was breaking, and, on the leafless apple trees, the birds stayed motionless, ruffling their little feathers in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched out as far as the eye could see, and the clumps of trees around the farms made, at rare intervals, deep violet patches on this vast grey surface that fused at the horizon with the gloomy tint of the sky.
The fire-shovel, tongs and bellows, all of massive proportions, shone like polished steel, while along the walls stretched a copiousness of coppers and pans, in which the clear flame of the fireplace glittered unevenly, mingling with the sun’s first gleams arriving through the panes.
He arrived one day at about three o’clock; everyone was in the fields; he entered the kitchen, but failed to spot Emma at first; the shutters were closed. Through the cracks in the wood, the sun stretched out its long thin rays on the flagstone floor, shattering against the corners of the furniture and trembling on the ceiling. Flies were climbing the length of the glasses left on the table, and buzzing as they drowned at the bottom, in the cider’s dregs. The daylight that came down the chimney, giving a velvet sheen to the fireback’s soot, turned the cold cinders slightly blue. Between the window and the hearth, Emma was sewing; she wore no shawl; you could see on her bare shoulders tiny drops of sweat.
Emma’s dress, too long, dragged a little at the hem; from time to time, she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved fingers, picked off the coarse grasses and tiny spears of thistle, while Charles, empty-handed, waited for her to finish.
In bed, in the morning, their heads side by side on the pillow, he would watch the sunlight thread through the down on her fair cheeks, half-hidden by the scalloped ties of her bonnet. Seen from so close, her eyes seemed to him magnified, especially when she opened her lids several times over on waking; black in shadow and deep blue in daylight, it was as though her eyes had successive layers of colour, and which, thicker deep down, grew clearer as they rose to the enamelled surface.
Before they were married, she had believed herself to be in love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from this love had not come, she must have been mistaken, she reflected. And Emma endeavoured to find out what precisely was meant in life by the words delight, passion and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.
It was all passions, suitors, sweethearts, persecuted ladies swooning in lonely summer-houses, postillions slain at every staging-post, horses ridden to death on every page, dark forests, troubles of the heart, eternal vows, sobbings, tears and kisses, little rowing boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the bushes, gentlemen as brave as lions, as gentle as lambs, as virtuous as no one ever is, always well dressed, and who cry in bucketloads. Thus for six months, at fifteen, Emma soiled her hands on the dust of old circulating-libraries. Later, with Walter Scott, she became smitten by historical things, dreaming of chests, wardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to have lived in an old manor-house, like those châtelaines in their long dresses, who, under the trefoil of pointed arches, whiled away their days leaning on the stone and cupping their chin, to watch a white-plumed knight on a black horse gallop towards them from the depths of the countryside.
and she could not now imagine that this calm she was dwelling in constituted the happiness of which she had dreamed.
When the sun sets, you breathe by the gulf’s shore the scent of lemon trees; then, in the evening, on the villa’s verandah, alone and with fingers entwined, you gaze upon the stars, making plans.
It seemed to her that certain places on the earth must yield happiness, like a plant peculiar to that soil and growing poorly anywhere else.
Well may it have been her wish to confide all these things to someone. But how to express an indiscernible disquiet, which alters its shape like the clouds, which whirls like the wind? So she could not find the words, the opportunity, the boldness.
‘Why, dear God, did I marry?’ She wondered if, by other combinations of chance, there might not have been a way to have met a different man; and she tried to imagine what they might have been, these incidents that had never occurred, this other life, this husband that she did not know.
As she went in, Emma felt shrouded in warm air, a mingling of flower scents and elegant linen, the aroma of meats and the fragrancy of truffles. The flames from the candles in the candelabra lengthened on the silver dish-covers; the cut-glass crystal, dulled by condensation, sent back wan rays; bouquets were lined up the length of the table, and, on the wide-bordered plates, the napkins, tricked out to look like a bishop’s mitre, each held between the gape of their two folds a tiny oval loaf. The red claws of lobsters overshot the dishes; fat fruits in openwork baskets climbed in tiers from a moss bed; the quails had kept their feathers, vapours rose;
Iced champagne was poured. Emma’s whole body quivered when she felt the cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor eaten pineapple. Even the powdered sugar seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere.
and a stroll was taken in the hot-house, where fantastical plants, bristling with hairs, tiered upwards in pyramids under hanging vases, which, like nests crammed with too many snakes, had long, green, interlaced cords tumbling down from their rims.
Her journey to La Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like those huge crevices that a storm, in a single night, sometimes scours in the mountains. Nevertheless, she was resigned; she reverently folded away in the chest of drawers her beautiful costume, right down to her satin slippers, whose soles had been yellowed by the parquet’s slippery beeswax. Her heart was like them: rubbed against wealth, it had been left a surface deposit which would never wash off.
And little by little, the faces blended in her memory, she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles, she no longer saw so distinctly the liveries and the rooms; a few details slipped away, but the regret stayed.
she wiped the dust off her shelves, looked at herself in the mirror, took down a book, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall in her lap.
Like a shipwrecked sailor, she swept a despairing gaze over the solitude of her life, searching afar for any white canvas on the foggy horizon. She had no idea of what this chance happening might be, what wind might push it right to her, towards what shore it might carry her, whether it was a rowing boat or a three-masted vessel, laden with anguish or crammed with joys up to the gunnels.
But it was above all at meal-times that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the stove that smoked, the door that squeaked, the walls that oozed moisture, the damp paving; all the bitterness of existence seemed to be served up on her plate, and, with the boiled beef’s reek, there rose other similarly nauseating whiffs from the bottom of her soul.
One day, while she was tidying up a drawer in anticipation of her departure, she pricked her fingers on something. It was a wire on her marriage bouquet. The orange-blossom was yellow with dust, and the satin ribbons, piped in silver, were frayed at the edges. She threw it in the fire. It blazed up faster than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush on the embers, slowly consuming itself. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries flashed, the brass wires writhed, the lace melted; and the paper florets, all shrivelled up, swaying along the fireback like black butterflies, finally flew away up the chimney.
I detest those commonplace heroes and mild feelings, as exist in life.’ ‘In fact,’ the clerk observed, ‘as these works do not touch the heart, they wander, it seems to me, from the real aim of Art. It is so soothing, among life’s disenchantments, to be able to turn in your imagination to noble characters, unsullied affections and pictures of happiness.
She desired a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this notion of having a male child was like the anticipated revenge for all her former powerlessness. A man, at least, is free: he can leaf through loves and lands and pass through obstacles, have a taste for the most remote joys. But a woman is continually impeded. Inert and pliant at the same time, against her she has the weakness of the flesh and the law’s subjections. Her will, like her bonnet’s veil constrained by a ribbon, flutters at every breath of wind; there is always some desire that urges, some seemliness that constrains.
In the warm season, the broader bank exposed the foundations of the garden walls, where a staircase of a few steps led down to the river. It flowed without a sound, swift and cold to the eye; slender long grasses bowed down there as one, depending on the current that pressed upon them, to spread out like forsaken heads of green hair in its limpidness. Sometimes, on the tips of the rushes or the water-lily leaves, an insect with delicate legs crawled or alighted. A single sunbeam pierced the waves’ little blue bubbles as they burst in one another’s wake; the lopped and ancient willows mirrored their grey bark in the water; beyond, all around, the meadowland seemed empty.
The garden walls, their coping studded with pieces of bottle, were as warm as greenhouse glass. Wallflowers had grown in the brickwork; and, with the edge of her spread parasol, Madame Bovary, as she passed by, made a few of their withered blooms drop their yellow pollen, or else some branch of honeysuckle or traveller’s joy hanging down on the outside would trail for a moment on the silk, catching in the fringe.
and, a novelist’s work having brought into vogue a mania for cacti, Léon bought some for Madame, carrying them on his lap in the Hirondelle, all the while pricking his fingers on their hard bristles.
She wished Charles would thrash her, that she could have detested him more justly, taken her revenge.
The evening haze passed between the leafless poplars, blurring their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a delicate gauze pinned on their branches.
Everything seemed to her muffled in a gloom which wavered confusedly over the exterior of things, and the heartache sank into her soul with soft howls, such as the winter wind makes in abandoned castles. It was that type of waking dream you experience when something is gone for ever, the lassitude that grips you after each fait accompli, in short the suffering that the interruption of any habitual motion, the abrupt ceasing of a prolonged vibration, brings.
Poor little woman! Gasping for love, like a carp for water on a kitchen table.
There were large clearings full of flowering heather; and sheets of violets alternated with the tangle of trees, which were grey, fawn-coloured or golden, in a variousness of leaves. Often they would hear, beneath the bushes, the faint flap of wings darting, or else the hoarse, soft caw of crows flying among the oaks.
He drew her further off, around the rim of a small pool, its waters green with duck-weed. Withered water-lilies lay motionless among the rushes. At the sound of their footsteps in the grass, frogs leapt to hide themselves.
Under her window was a beehive, and sometimes the bees, whirling in the light, would tap on the panes like bouncing balls of gold. What happiness in those days! What freedom! What hope! What abundance of illusions! There were none left now.
This fondness was, in fact, gaining more and more ground under the repulsion she felt for her husband. The more she surrendered herself to one, the more she utterly detested the other; never had Charles seemed more disagreeable to her, his fingers so stubby, his mind so dull, his manners so commonplace, as after her assignations with Rodolphe, when they would sit together.
And straightaway, he reached up to the mantelpiece for Emma’s shoes, all pasted with mud – the mud of assignations – that came off in powder under his fingers, and which he would watch gently float up in a beam of sunlight.
The moon, quite round and purple-coloured, rose up level with the ground, at the far end of the field. She climbed swiftly between the poplars’ branches that hid her here and there, like a black curtain full of holes. Then she appeared, blazing with whiteness, in the empty sky she had illuminated; and so, slowing on her course, she let fall upon the river a great stain, that made an infinity of stars; and this silvery glimmering seemed to writhe there, down to the depths, as if it were a headless snake covered in luminous scales. And it was not unlike some monstrous candelabra too, from whose whole length streamed drops of melting diamonds. The warm night spread out around them; sheets of shadow filled the foliage.
a bare hand slipped under the little curtains of yellow linen and threw out some torn scraps of paper, that scattered on the wind and alighted further away, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in flower.
There was a smell of absinthe, cigars and oysters.
and she laughed a high and licentious laugh when the froth from the champagne overflowed the slender glass onto the rings on her fingers.
She was the lover from every novel, the heroine of every play, the vague she of every book of verse. He would recognise on her shoulders the amber colour of the odalisque bathing; she had the elongated body of feudal chatelaines; she also resembled the pale woman of Barcelona, but above all she was wholly Angel!
Down it went into the depths of her soul like a whirlpool in an abyss, sweeping her off amid the spaces of a limitless melancholy.
But the vilifying of those we still love loosens us from them a little. Idols should not be touched: the gilt comes off on the hands.
and Emma returned to him yet more inflamed, more eager. She undressed violently, tearing away the slender laces of her corset, which would hiss about her hips like a creeping snake. She would go up on her naked tip-toes to check yet again if the door was properly closed, then slip off all her clothes in a single movement; and, pale, speechlessly, in earnest, she would fall upon his chest, with a slow shudder.
She wasn’t happy, had never been so. From where did it come then – this deficiency of life, this instantaneous decay of everything she leaned upon?
Emma found in adultery all the same dullnesses of marriage.
She would have liked to stop living, or uninterruptedly to sleep.
They had to lift her head a little, and so a torrent of black fluids poured, like a vomiting, out of her mouth.
‘Likewise with bees: they fly away from the hive when someone dies.’
About the Author:
Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen, France, and did not leave his birth city until he was 19 when he went to study law in Paris. After three years, however, Flaubert abandoned law and began writing. His first finished work was…
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