Emma Bovary
The reader whose education in longing has no object equal to it.
Realism & Victorian · Novel · 1857
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary reads, marries, spends, and tries to force provincial life to yield the feelings books promised. Style here is merciless: every cliché she lives is rendered with exactness.
Realist tragedy
Characters
Charles Bovary
The kind, limited husband: goodness as a form of missing the point.
Homais
The pharmacist of progress, chatter as a civic religion.
Themes
Bovarysme
The self invented from reading, then broken on the actual.
Money and desire
Credit as the material form of fantasy.
Motifs
Emma looking out: the provincial view as a jail.
Romance as a training in discontent.
Arsenic: the last purchase.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.