Madame Bovary and the Danger of Reading Too Many Romances: Flaubert's Scandalous First Novel

Madame Bovary was put on trial because, when Gustave Flaubert's novel first appeared as a serial in the Revue de Paris between October and December 1856, public prosecutors attacked it as obscene. The trial in January 1857 made the book notorious, Flaubert was acquitted on 7 February 1857, and when the novel came out in two volumes that April it became a bestseller. The story itself is simple and devastating: Emma Bovary, the wife of a dull country doctor, tries to escape the boredom of provincial life through love affairs and luxury, and is ruined by debt. Today it is regarded as a founding work of literary realism and one of the most influential novels ever written. This guide covers the plot, including the ending, so read on only if you do not mind spoilers.

Flaubert and the five-year book

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen, in Normandy, in 1821, the son of the chief surgeon of the city's main hospital, and he is considered the leading exponent of literary realism in France. He began Madame Bovary in 1850, after returning from a journey to Egypt, and the novel took him five years to write. He spent most of his life at Croisset, beside the Seine near Rouen, and the Normandy he knew so well is the world of the book.

The subject was suggested in part by his friend and mentor Louis Bouilhet, who thought a down-to-earth story would suit him, and it was partly inspired by the life of a schoolfriend who became a doctor. Flaubert cared about style above almost everything. While writing, he said he wanted to write "a book about nothing", held together by the inner strength of its style. That obsession with exact, quiet sentences is one reason the novel still feels so modern.

How it begins

Surprisingly, the novel does not open with Emma. Its first words, "Nous étions à l'Étude, quand le Proviseur entra" ("We were in study hall when the headmaster came in"), introduce Charles Bovary as an awkward new boy at school, seen through the eyes of his laughing classmates. Charles grows into a shy, poorly dressed young man who does badly in medical school and becomes a health officer rather than a full doctor. Only after we know how ordinary he is do we meet the woman who will marry him and be disappointed by him.

The story in brief (spoilers)

Charles first marries a widow chosen by his mother and sets up a practice in the village of Tostes in Normandy. Called to set the broken leg of a farmer, Théodore Rouault, he meets the farmer's daughter Emma, a beautiful, convent-educated young woman whose ideas of love and luxury come from popular novels. After his first wife dies, Charles courts Emma and marries her.

Married life soon bores her. After a glittering ball where she dances with a viscount, ordinary days feel unbearable. Charles moves to the larger market town of Yonville-l'Abbaye, where their daughter Berthe is born, but motherhood disappoints Emma too. She becomes infatuated with Léon, a young law clerk who shares her taste for literature and music, but he leaves for Paris before anything happens. Hoping her husband will at least become famous, she encourages him to try a new operation on the clubfoot of Hippolyte, a servant at the local inn. It fails disastrously, the leg has to be amputated, and Emma's contempt for Charles becomes complete.

She then begins an affair with Rodolphe, a wealthy landowner who has had many mistresses. After four years she begs him to run away with her. On the eve of their departure he ends it with a letter hidden at the bottom of a basket of apricots, and the shock makes her seriously ill. Recovered, she meets Léon again at the opera in Rouen and starts a second affair. Meanwhile she buys clothes and luxuries on credit from the cunning merchant Lheureux, who arranges for her to gain power of attorney over her husband's property.

When Lheureux finally calls in the debts, Emma begs several people for money, including Rodolphe, and is refused. In despair she swallows arsenic and dies. The novel does not end with her. Charles, heartbroken, stops working and sells off his possessions; after his death their daughter is sent to work in a cotton mill. In the final lines the pharmacist Homais, a pompous social climber, receives the Legion of Honour. Flaubert gives the last word not to tragedy but to triumphant mediocrity.

The people in the book

Emma Bovary is the novel's great creation. Shaped by sentimental novels, she craves beauty, wealth, passion and high society, and she cannot see the real world around her. Charles is kind, devoted and completely unable to understand her. Rodolphe is a practised seducer; Léon is a romantic who grows more cautious with age. Lheureux, whose name sounds like "the happy one", is the quiet engine of Emma's ruin, and Homais represents the self-satisfied, half-educated bourgeois that Flaubert despised.

Themes: illusion against reality

The realist movement was partly a reaction against romanticism, and Emma can be read as romanticism in person: her feelings have no connection to the realities of her world. Flaubert seems at times to share her longings but more often mocks her daydreams and her taste in books. The famous line "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" is often attributed to him, but its accuracy has been questioned, and in letters he denied putting his own feelings or life into the novel. The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa described Emma's drama as the gap between illusion and reality, between desire and its fulfilment.

The book is also a portrait of the bourgeoisie under King Louis-Philippe, with its shallow culture, love of things and parroted opinions. Emma's tragedy is personal, but it happens in a world where everyone is selling something. It even gave the French language a new word: bovarysme, coined by the critic Jules de Gaultier in 1892, means escapist daydreaming in which a person imagines himself or herself as the hero of a romance while ignoring everyday reality.

The trial and the legacy

At the 1857 trial the lead prosecutor argued not only that the novel was immoral but that realism itself was an offence against art and decency. The government had brought the action against both the publisher and the author on a charge of immorality, and both were acquitted. Not every critic was convinced afterwards; Le Figaro declared that Monsieur Flaubert was not a writer. Later readers disagreed strongly. Henry James praised its perfection, Marcel Proust admired the purity of its grammar, Vladimir Nabokov said that it was prose doing what poetry is supposed to do, and Julian Barnes called it the best novel ever written.

Because the novel pays such close attention to thoughts and feelings rather than outward events, it is often said to prepare the way for Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. It was first translated into English by Eleanor Marx in 1886 and has been filmed many times, by Jean Renoir, Vincente Minnelli and Claude Chabrol among others. If you have read Anna Karenina, the comparison is irresistible: two married women, two affairs, two deaths, but where Tolstoy opens up a whole society, Flaubert narrows his gaze to one small town and one restless mind.

Learn with Madame Bovary: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to live beyond your means	to spend more money than you have	Emma lived beyond her means for years.
to buy on credit	to buy now and pay later	She bought dresses on credit from Lheureux.
ennui	deep boredom and dissatisfaction	Provincial ennui slowly crushed her.
to have your head in the clouds	to be lost in unrealistic dreams	He has his head in the clouds, like Emma.
to call in a debt	to demand that money be paid back	The merchant suddenly called in the debt.

Try this: Write three English sentences about someone (real or fictional) who lives beyond their means, using "buy on credit" and "call in a debt".