Madame Bovary

Introduction

Flaubert started working on his novel, “Madame Bovary” in 1851 and he continued to work on it till five years until 1856. Flaubert has subtitled for his novels as portraying the work habits of the province, referring to the nomenclature of the Comedie Humaine.

Madame Bovary contains realistic aspects and romantic aspects which oscillates the novel constantly to the gray color, which is the dull reality to the splendor of imagination. We can say that the novel has gained an in-depth personality and universality in the world of literature. Attaching great importance to aesthetics, particularly in Madame Bovary, Flaubert remains a loner, an independent artist whose work will act as a leaven literature.

Discussion and Analysis

Having turned his hand to writing at an early age, Flaubert was thirty-five years old when he published his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, a novel that has been variously interpreted and characterized. For every just claim that Flaubert undertook this novel to purge himself of the Romantic disease, there are equally cogent claims that the work is a Romantic novel, though different in kind from its predecessors (Curry, 80).

Flaubert has described in the novel social, cultural and aesthetic norms of the society of France in the 19th century. A person, who wants to know about the cultural and social values of France in 19th century, must read this novel. Emma Bovary, the heroine, was surely the victim of her own Romanticism and, like the legions of Romantic heroes and heroines, is one who longs for absolutes and seeks after something that either does not exist or exists but imperfectly. Her aspirations are completely out of proportion to her capacities and her situation in life. Thus, while Madame Bovary may be seen as a literary tour de force that makes superb use of organization and of great virtuosity in the handling of structure and text, it remains essentially a novel that both eschews the received objective of entertainment and sets forth an argumentative analysis of society as that society encourages Emma's folly, blames her for it, and triumphs over it (Nabokov, 136).

The work is divided into three unequal parts that correspond to the three stages of the lives of Emma and her husband, Charles. Before turning to the story itself, however, it is essential to look closely at the novel's title: Flaubert called the novel not “Emma Bovary” but Madame Bovary. The emphases on her married name, on the marriage itself, on her role as wife (and as mother) are paramount. They are the very things that she will betray and that, in her betrayal, will precipitate her ruin. Moreover, Emma can have no place in the work separate from Charles; one particularly important clue to the nature of the work is the narrative device that opens the novel and then disappears as the objective narrator replaces the first voice that the reader hears. This voice belongs to one of Charles's young classmates at the Lycée, a classmate who begins casually enough (“We were in class”) ...