Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary written in 1856 by Gustave Flaubert, is a novel of a young women Emma who is raised in a convent and later moves to live in the countryside with her father. While in the convent Emma reads several romance novels and collects this perception of the way life should be outside the convent walls. After moving out of the convent to her father’s farm she meets Charles Bovary who she ends up settling down with and having a daughter, Berthe. While this seems like a typical life for any women of that time many women also have the same expectancy of this romantic life similar to that of Emma’s. As Emma gets jaded with her mundane country life she begins to have affairs with people who she believes are higher ups than her own husband and she even collects a rather enormous debt to live this lifestyle. This novel is a story of the life of Emma and Charles Bovary and it gives specific details and actions of these characters’ lives. Gustave Flaubert was on the forefront of the realistic literature movement that was taking place in Europe in the middle to end of the nineteenth century. Realistic fiction, by definition, encompasses writing that represents life as it really exists to the reader and tells the story and gives specific details of one’s life without judgment. Madame Bovary is a prime example of one of the early realistic literary works from this time being that these works are complicated, complex, and with conflicting feelings that replicate everyday human life.

In Madame Bovary, Flaubert gives the reader insight into the daily life of mid to late nineteenth century life in France. Flaubert goes through great length and detail of every little aspect of rural life in that time which Realism often does. Boyd Carter a literary critic describes Flaubert’s Madame Bovary’s text, “What impresses one in reading Madame Bovary is the compact- ness and solidity of the book. Every word and every sentence has a function. The complete artistic emotion,...