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Publications Pages Publications Pages. Search my Subject Specializations: Classical, Early, and Medieval World History: Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. The Paul De Man Notebooks. Print Save Cite Email Share. Rodolphe Boulanger is a wealthy local man who seduces Emma as one more to a long string of mistresses. Though occasionally charmed by Emma, Rodolphe feels little true emotion towards her. As Emma becomes more and more desperate, Rodolphe loses interest and worries about her lack of caution.
After his decision to escape with Emma, he resigns and feels unable to handle it, especially the existence of her daughter, Berthe. He leaves Yonville when he despairs of Emma reciprocating his feelings, however the two reconnect after Emma's affair with Rodolphe Boulanger collapses. They begin an affair, which is Emma's second. Monsieur Lheureux is a manipulative and sly merchant who continually convinces people in Yonville to buy goods on credit and borrow money from him. Having led many small businesspeople into financial ruin to support his own business ambitions, Lheureux lends money to Charles and plays Emma masterfully, leading the Bovarys so far into debt as to cause their financial ruin and Emma's suicide.
Monsieur Homais is the town pharmacist. He is vehemently anti-clerical and practices medicine without a license. Though he pretends to befriend Charles, he actively undermines Charles's medical practice by luring away his patients and by setting Charles up to attempt a difficult surgery, which fails and destroys Charles's professional credibility in Yonville. Justin is Monsieur Homais' apprentice and second cousin. He had been taken into the house from charity and was useful at the same time as a servant.
He harbors a crush on Emma. At one point he steals the key to the medical supply room, and Emma tricks him into opening a container of arsenic so she can "kill some rats keeping her awake".
She, however, consumes the arsenic herself, much to his horror and remorse. The setting of the novel is important, first as it applies to Flaubert's realist style and social commentary, and, second, as it relates to the protagonist, Emma. Francis Steegmuller estimated that the novel begins in October and ends in August This corresponds with the July Monarchy — the reign of Louis Philippe I , who strolled Paris carrying his own umbrella as if to honor an ascendant bourgeois middle class.
Much of the time and effort that Flaubert spends detailing the customs of the rural French people shows them aping an urban, emergent middle class. Flaubert strove for an accurate depiction of common life. The account of a county fair in Yonville displays this and dramatizes it by showing the fair in real time counterpoised with a simultaneous intimate interaction behind a window overlooking the fair.
Flaubert knew the regional setting, the place of his birth and youth, in and around the city of Rouen in Normandy. His faithfulness to the mundane elements of country life has garnered the book its reputation as the beginning of the movement known as literary realism.
Flaubert's capture of the commonplace in his setting contrasts with the yearnings of his protagonist. The practicalities of common life foil Emma's romantic fantasies. Flaubert uses this juxtaposition to reflect both setting and character.
Emma becomes more capricious and ludicrous in the light of everyday reality. Yet her yearnings magnify the self-important banality of the local people.
Emma, though impractical, and with her provincial education lacking and unformed, still reflects a hopefulness regarding beauty and greatness that seems absent in the bourgeois class. The book was in some ways inspired by the life of a schoolfriend of the author who became a doctor. Flaubert's friend and mentor, Louis Bouilhet , had suggested to him that this might be a suitably "down-to earth" subject for a novel and that Flaubert should attempt to write in a "natural way," without digressions. While writing the novel, he wrote that it would be "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style," [3] an aim which, for the critic Jean Rousset , made Flaubert "the first in date of the non-figurative novelists," such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
The "realism" in the novel was to prove an important element in the trial for obscenity: The realist movement was, in part, a reaction against romanticism. Emma may be said to be the embodiment of a romantic: Although in some ways he may seem to identify with Emma, [6] Flaubert frequently mocks her romantic daydreaming and taste in literature. The accuracy of Flaubert's supposed assertion that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" "Madame Bovary is me" has been questioned. To Edma Roger des Genettes, he wrote, "Tout ce que j'aime n'y est pas" "all that I love is not there" and to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie, "je n'y ai rien mis ni de mes sentiments ni de mon existence" "I have used nothing of my feelings or of my life".
Madame Bovary has been seen as a commentary on bourgeois, the folly of aspirations that can never be realized or a belief in the validity of a self-satisfied, deluded personal culture, associated with Flaubert's period. For Vargas Llosa, "Emma's drama is the gap between illusion and reality, the distance between desire and its fulfillment" and shows "the first signs of alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies. Charles is also unable to grasp reality or understand Emma's needs and desires.
Long established as one of the greatest novels, the book has been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Ever since Madame Bovary , the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For related uses, see Madame Bovary disambiguation. Retrieved 5 December Archives de France in French. Le Centre Flaubert in French. Archived from the original on 28 October Incontro con Giorgio de Chirico. See excerpt on Fondazionedechirico. Retrieved 1 July Works by Gustave Flaubert.
Gustave Flaubert 's Madame Bovary. Louise Colet Delphine Delamare. New Woman of the late 19th century born before
Soon after they are married, she becomes bored by the monotony of their life together. Critics such as Michal Peled Ginsburg see Emma's downfall more in her inability to narrate than in her immersion in literary reverie. He casts his eye over Emma and imagines she will be easily seduced. Although I have attributed to her certain masculine traits, she is decidedly female. One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg and meets his patient's daughter, Emma Rouault.