Synopsis
A guide to reading "Madame Bovary" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.
Flaubert's portrait of an adulteress who seeks freedom from a prosaic, disappointing life and ultimately is destroyed by her selfishness was considered scandalous when it was published. Flaubert chose his subject to illustrate his belief that any aspect of life, however trivial or vulgar, could be a subject for literature, and could be raised to the status of art by the quality of the writing.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1990-03-01 | | Edition Description: | Reissue |
| Size | | Length: | 512 pages | | Height: | 7.0 in | | Width: | 4.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 7.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
Novel in which a woman defies the standards of conventional French society.
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 ecstasy 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? Flauberts answer to this question was superb: "Madame Bovary, cest 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.
Industry Reviews
"Consider Emma in the light of suburban life today. She is bored with a devoted husband, whom she chose for herself; she is bored with her child, except when she chooses to play the role of loving mother; she is demanding, capricious, extravagant, self-pitying, sentimental, hard and totally selfish. But all of these things flow from her idleness. She is beautiful and intelligent....What destroys her is the combination of this cheaply romantic, self-dramatizing habit of mind and the dullness and emptiness of a provincial village life....The imagination of an Emma is always one step ahead of her circumstances."
New York Times Book Review - Louis Auchincloss (07/17/1966)
"Flaubert, by a single phrase--a notation of some commonplace object--can convey all the poignance of human desire, the pathos of human defeat; his description of some homely scene will close with a dying fall that reminds one of great verse or music."
Edmund Wilson
"...Possibly the most beautiful book ever composed; undoubtedly the most beautifully written novel....A book that invites superlatives....The most important novel of this century."
Frank O'Connor
"Madame Bovary [is my favorite book]...because the writing is absolutely precise and simply perfect. This book was a considerable turning point in fiction, an innovation."
Washington Post Book World - John Cheever (03/09/1969)
"When we consider the great novels of the last century...and when, from the fabric of a 'Madame Bovary', we take the following, one by one: characters, their development, situations, plot, subject, content--after such a subtraction, a second-rate literature of entertainment will have nothing left. But a 'Madame Bovary'...will still retain the cardinal thing--the characterization of reality almost as a philosophical entity, universally shared, experienced by us all as a changeless companion."
unpublished letter to "Encounter" magazine - Boris Pasternak (08/22/1959)
"Emma Bovary is deluded by literature. Because she is in search of ecstasy and transcendence, she falls madly in love with a cad, then with a coward, ignoring the plodding husband and child who both adore her. She is looking for a higher, more spiritual life than the one available to her as the wife of a bourgeois country doctor, and in this quest she finds only self-destruction."
Salon - Erica Jong (09/15/1997)
"An interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: 'Madame Bovary'."
"Characters in Fiction" - Mary McCarthy
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