Madame Bovary

Literary fiction · Satire · Tragedy

Print length: 342 pagesViking, 2010

Description

Emma Bovary enters marriage expecting the passion, elegance, and luxury she has absorbed from popular novels. Instead, life with Charles, a provincial doctor, brings domestic routine, disappointing motherhood, and a deepening sense that her real existence is happening elsewhere. A move to a larger town does little to satisfy her. Emma turns toward romantic attachments, first through her infatuation with Léon and then through an affair with Rodolphe, while her contempt for Charles grows after a disastrous medical procedure. She also tries to purchase the splendor she cannot find at home, relying on credit until a merchant demands repayment. Flaubert traces how fantasy, desire, and consumer debt close around a woman determined to escape ordinary life.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Ornate · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Dark · Detached · Melancholic · Satirical

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 5 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

ClassFreedomLoveMarriageObsessionWealth

About Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist whose exacting prose helped define literary realism, though his fiction ranges well beyond a single mode or setting. He worked painstakingly and pursued le mot juste, treating each sentence as an aesthetic problem; that discipline produced writing marked by dense description, precision, and close scrutiny of character. Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education examine longing as it collides with provincial routine, social ambition, and political change, often through irony rather than overt judgment. Yet Flaubert also turned to the ancient world in Salammbô, religious vision and intellectual temptation in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and the comic futility of accumulated knowledge in Bouvard and Pécuchet. Three Tales shows another register, moving among sharply different settings with compression and lyricism. Across these works, romantic desire repeatedly meets material circumstance, borrowed ideas, and failures of self-understanding. Flaubert’s distinction lies in joining realist observation to formal rigor while allowing satire, tragedy, historical spectacle, and spiritual fable to test the range of his method.

Series

His Works, v. 1 · Book 2

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Viking
Language: English
ISBN: 9780670022076

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.