Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)
by Gustave Flaubert
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gustave FlaubertTranslator: Margaret Mauldon
Introduction: Malcolm Bowie
Contributor: Mark Overstall
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-06-02
ISBN: 0192840398
Number of pages: 358
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)
Book Review: A Vivid Portrayal of Adultery
Summary: 5 Stars
Titles of books such as "Anna Karenina","David Copperfield" and "Julius Caesar" are always interesting and very much misleading. They forever tend to narrow the scope of imagination of the reader as he decides to deduce the story of the book by reading the title. If you thought that "David Coppefield" would be a convulated tale of a man's life,then you would've been massively surprised at the end of it all. "Anna Karenina" tells more about the society's vainness during Count Leo Tolstoy's time than just the naive saga of a woman and "Julius Caesar" is mostly about Marcus Brutus and politics.
"Madame Bovary" follows a compatible paradigm. On seeing the name "Madame Bovary" written largely over the cover of the book,we're invariably taken by the nose to make our conclusions about the structure of the plot. "Madame Bovary" could be the story of a French woman as she transfigures from a young girl to a mature woman;it could even be the story of a woman in distress,or following in the vein of "Anna Karenina",it could reflect a woman's ruin in the context of a society's malice. Indeed the French author Gustave Flaubert's novel comprises all these and more that shatter the fetters of convention and paints the bourgeois boredom that had become a common evil in the 19th. century France as well as in Europe.
Emma Rouault is a peasant girl living with her moderately well to do father in a farm in Les Bertaux and agrees to marry Charles Bovary,a physician in Tostes who has lost his first wife,Madame Dubuc. The most tragic notion that Emma pets in her confinrd intellect is that she loves Charles but no sooner is the mariage completed than the stark realisation breaks upon Madame Bovary that she's not in love with this inambitious,worksholic,self-contained,unromantic,inimaginative and naive man after all.....she can never be in love with such a breed of man really. It is at this junction that the most important passage of the novel occurs,a pasage that would be enacted and reverberated throughout the next 335 or so pages. "Before the wedding,she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resuilted from that love,she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by the words'bliss','passion','ecstasy',which had looked so beautiful in books".
Indeed for a woman so deeply soaked in romantic literature and highly imaginative complex love-plots,life was always going to be a bore with an utterly naive husband. works of balzac,Bernardin de Saint-pierre and Sir walter Scott had embedded a lust for real life adventures,romance and clandestine afairs in Emma Bovary's fickle-minded heart and the inability to perceive the harshness and deceit of the world perfectly harmonised with her blind faith in even the remotest of touch of love to take her to a tragic end,as so vehemently frequent with such depressing women.
The Bovary family moves to Yonville-l'Abbaye and here Emma Bovary first fancies herself in love with the young lawyer Leon Dupuis who has an uncertain future and a limited finance but a "real gentleman". The love on Leon's side is a genteel,placid,innocent and unassuming one with nosuspicion of sexual desires combined with a sublime devotion that on certain occasions tend to be hopeless submission. But he soon leaves for Paris to make his mark on the world and his absence wipes off the slight shadow of an unbloosoming love in no time. Madame bovary then turns to Rodolphe Boulanger,a deceptiveman of wealth living in nearby La Huchette whose love for Emma is more sensual,imediate and desire than eteral,quiet and sacrifice. His appearance,and pesonality and slippery words cast a mischievous shadow of romanticisn and non-conventionalism over Madame bovary's fluing heart. Rodolphe provides the wind beneath her wings andshe flies high up in the sky of love amidst the bounteous clouds of passion. Then Rodolphe becomes bored,decides to leave her and does so. All too abruptly. All too artfully.
Madame Bovary's spirit is crippled and her health breaks down under a tense and stressful life. Debts recurr again and again and despite getting a jolt in her love life,she retuns to her former beau Leon. But lavish prodigality of the eponymous protagonist of the marvellous French writer's novel directs her towards financial and emotional catastrophe and her misgivings terminate in the inevitable tragic doom. It was all too easily coming.
The theme of "Madame Bovary" is indeed the ruin of a woman consumed in her own absurd fancies,a woman who blurs the dividing line between reality and imagination,a woman demolished by the myriad forces she herself raised up. Gustave Flaubert has subtlely and explicitly gifted literature lovers a fair reflection of 19th. century gentry class France in awork of fiction that the society at the time simply refused to accept. Flaubert was even put on trial for this "scandalous" writing and it's not that tough to decipher the reasons. he openly censures the Church for employing priests who "dress up in ordinary clothes to go and watch show-girls kicking their legs",he questions the legitimacy of honours bestowed upon eminenty personlities,undermines the petty journalists and the newspapers at the time and lays bare the skeleton of social and personal life in his time. applying a condensced,intricate language to make the read a pacy one,Gustave Flaubert blends narration with dialogue and brings forth a book that is a vivid portrayal of adultery and tragic love affairs in a mesmerising rhetoric replete with an overtone of fun and sarcasm poked at society and very vaguely underlined by a very,very gentle humour. Cojugated with the central idea of romantic complexity is the fashion in which people extract advantages from a dilapidated person. Monsieur Lheuruix is the villain of the plot who uses Madame bovary to quench his own thirst and Monsieur Homais is the chemist who's eternally seeking fame and prestige. Other characters too fall into separate departments and aid the author's cause of painting a realistic picture of the society.
The intensity of a tragedy is measured by the protagonist's conceivement of his own doom as well as by the way in which innocents are overlapped by dark forces. emma's unrestrained imagination and unrealistic life-style calls upon decay to embrace her husband Charles,who too meets a similar end and her little daughter Berthe is rendered an orphan. But nevertheless the reader the reader cannot resist feeling for Emma,just as one cannot help conveying sympathy for Brutus in william Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar". Gustave flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is a fascinating novel that leaps over all hurdles posed by convention and fulfills the ambition that it aims at from the very beginning:to explore a vast landscape of human tragedies and social turmoil.
Summary of Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)
One of the acknowledged masterpieces of 19th century realism, Madame Bovary is revered by writers and readers around the world, a mandatory stop on any pilgrimage through modern literature. Flaubert's legendary style, his intense care over the selection of words and the shaping of sentences, his unmatched ability to convey a mental world through the careful selection of telling details, shine on every page of this marvelous work. Now the award-winning translator Margaret Mauldon has produced a modern translation of this classic novel, one that perfectly captures the tone that makes Flaubert's style so distinct and admired.Madame Bovary scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857. And the story itself remains as fresh today as when it was first written, a work that remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. It tells the tragic story of the romantic but empty-headed Emma Rouault. When Emma marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is an ordinary country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, Rodolphe, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair. And Flaubert captures every step of this catastrophe with sharp-eyed detail and a wonderfully subtle understanding of human emotions.
Malcolm Bowie, a leading authority on French literature, explores Flaubert's genius in his masterly introduction to this must-have book for all lovers of great literature.
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