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: | 1998-01-01 | | Series: | Wordsworth Collection |
| Size | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 6.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
The year 1857 propelled Flaubert into the law courts and into celebrity. It was not exactly the kind of celebrity he had wished for. 'Madame Bovary' had appeared serially in 'La Revue de Paris'. Now the imperial prosecutor was attacking the work for being offensive to religion and morality. Not only the seduction scenes, but the episodes dealing with religion and the description of Emma's death, came under direct censure. More than the subject, the general tone of the novel was denounced as immoral: the pervasive eroticism, the poetry of adultery, the so-called 'realism' of the style. Flaubert, excellently defended by his lawyer, was acquitted. The book was published soon after, benefiting from the advance courtroom publicity.
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
| See an error? Submit a change request |
All rights reserved.
