Madame Bovary

About the book

Emma marries Charles Bovary hoping that adulthood and love will supply the excitement promised by her reading and imagination. The routines of provincial life soon seem painfully inadequate to those expectations. Flaubert follows the ways she seeks distinction through romance, possessions, and imagined alternatives, while surrounding her with people whose ambitions and certainties receive equally exacting attention. Charles's limitations do not make Emma's desires simple, and the novel's irony keeps sympathy and criticism in uneasy proximity. Money gives apparently private wishes practical consequences. Through precise scenes of conversation, ceremony, and domestic routine, the narrative examines how borrowed language can shape a person's understanding of happiness. Its pressure comes from the widening distance between an experience as it is lived and the story someone wants it to fulfil.

• Desire and illusion
• Marriage
• Consumption

Why read it

For exact social observation and a sustained examination of how imagined happiness can transform ordinary dissatisfaction.

English translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling