His mother, Madame Bovary senior, has greats plans for him to become a doctor. “She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.”Īs a 15-year-old young man, Charles Bovary moves with his parents to Rouen in Normandy, France.Flaubert traveled widely, and these travels inspired many of his stories.There are several film and TV adaptations of the novel, and it was even turned into an opera.A motif of blindness is present throughout the novel in character’s unwillingness to see what is right in front of them.The objective and impersonal style of the novel and the use of free indirect discourse marked the development of a new literary form: the Realist novel.Madame Bovary was a turn away from the Romanticism that Flaubert had previously embraced.It took Flaubert five years to write the novel, and he would often spend a day working and reworking just one page.Flaubert’s controversial subject matter – female sexuality and adultery – caused a huge scandal, and Flaubert had to appear in court on charges of obscenity.Her husband is found dead shortly after by the couple’s young daughter.
When these finally fall due, Emma commits suicide. Her recklessness with money leaves her and her husband with crippling debts. To escape the mundanity of small-town life, the novel’s married heroine, Emma Bovary, takes a lover.Madame Bovary is one of the most influential novels of the 19th century and a prime example of French Realism.The novel is a social study and the beginning of the age of Realism in literary history. He did this by taking the role of an omniscient and impersonal narrator, who describes the romantic inner life of the main character, and contrasting it with the hopeless and rather dismal reality of her life. With Madame Bovary, Flaubert created one of the first truly modern novels and pre-empted some of the innovative narrative forms of the 20th century. What upset the public most about Flaubert’s novel was that at no point did he take sides or condemn his protagonist’s actions. Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor’s wife whose passions and romantic notions drive her to start an affair, accumulate debts, entangle herself in lies and, in the end, commit suicide. In 1856, the relatively unknown French author Gustave Flaubert caused outrage with what was to become one of the most influential novels of literary history.
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