Madame Bovary (1856 (serialised); 1857 (book))
A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy seeks escape from boredom in adultery and debt, and poisons herself
Literature · Novelists
Gustave Flaubert
1821–1880 · French
Realism
Gustave Flaubert was the master of French literary realism, famed for his painstaking search for "le mot juste" (the exact word). His first novel, Madame Bovary (1857), led to his prosecution for offending public morals, ending in acquittal. He also wrote Salammbô, Sentimental Education and Three Tales, and mentored the young Guy de Maupassant.
How to spot them
- ▸Madame Bovary: Emma and Charles Bovary, Rodolphe, Léon, the pharmacist Homais, Yonville, death by arsenic
- ▸Obscenity trial of 1857, ending in acquittal
- ▸'Le mot juste'; 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' (attributed)
- ▸Lived at Croisset near Rouen; mentor of Maupassant; friend and correspondent of George Sand
- ▸A stuffed parrot (Loulou in A Simple Heart) inspired Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot
Key works
Salammbô (1862)
Historical novel set in ancient Carthage during the Mercenary War
Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) (1869)
Frédéric Moreau's aimless life and love for Madame Arnoux, set around the 1848 Revolution
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (La Tentation de saint Antoine) (1874)
Dramatic prose-poem of the hermit's visions, reworked over decades
Three Tales (Trois contes) (1877)
A Simple Heart (the servant Félicité and her parrot), The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitator, and Herodias
Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881 (posthumous, unfinished))
Two copy-clerks try and fail to master every branch of knowledge; linked to his Dictionary of Received Ideas
Key ideas
- Impersonal, objective narration: the author should be present everywhere and visible nowhere
- Pioneered free indirect style, blending narrator's voice with a character's thoughts
- 'Bovarysme' names romantic self-delusion and dissatisfaction, after Emma Bovary
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Rouen, son of the chief surgeon of the city's hospital
- •Madame Bovary was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856; Flaubert, the editor and the printer were tried and acquitted in February 1857
- •Travelled through Egypt and the Near East with Maxime Du Camp, 1849–1851
- •Had a long affair with the poet Louise Colet, to whom he wrote many of his best-known letters
- •Suffered from a nervous illness, often described as epilepsy, from 1844
- •Died at Croisset in 1880
- •Madame Bovary's subtitle is 'Mœurs de province' (Provincial Manners)
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Sources
- Frederick Brown — Flaubert: A Life
- Lydia Davis — Madame Bovary (trans. Lydia Davis), introduction