The Literature Book

161

married to a rather dull doctor in

provincial Normandy, in northern

France. Influenced by the romantic

reading of her youth, she dreams

of a more exciting and fulfilling

life, but her attempts to force reality

to live up to her fantasies have

devastating results.

Life in the provinces

The novel is more complex than the

outline of its plot would suggest.

From its beginning, when the

reader is introduced to the young

Charles Bovary, to its tragic ending,

which supposedly had Flaubert

himself in tears, Madame Bovary is

deeply rooted in mid-19th-century

provincial France. Events in the

wider world were moving fast, and

for the newly emerging middle

classes, the center of sophistication

was Paris. But Flaubert chose to

focus on the petit bourgeois in the

provinces, whose lives he portrayed

with an acute—and not always

kindly—psychological perception.

Flaubert had begun his literary

career as a Romantic, working

on an exotic and mystical novel,

The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

However, some of his close friends,

particularly his mentor, author

Louis Bouilhet, reacted critically

to an early draft of this work and

urged him to attempt something

more realistic. Drawing on a real-

life event (the death of a doctor

whose wife had caused a scandal),

Flaubert began work on his new

book. His goal was to write about

the lives of ordinary people.

Creativity in detail

The project took Flaubert five

years and involved meticulous

research. He set his novel in the

region around Rouen, where he

spent most of his life and which

he knew in intimate detail; he

modeled places in his novel—the

villages of Tostes and Yonville—

on real country towns. He walked

around the region and even made

maps to ensure the greatest

accuracy; he drew up biographies

of his fictional characters, and set

out to create a prose style that was

totally stripped of all Romanticism,

laboring over every sentence.

Sitting in his room by the river

Seine at Croisset, near Rouen, he

constantly corrected and rewrote

every page of his manuscript, a

time-consuming process. His goal

was to write in an entirely new

and objective fashion, without

“a single subjective reaction, nor

a single reflection by the author.”

The result, as Flaubert had hoped,

was a “tour de force.”

Divided into three sections,

Madame Bovary contrasts the

hopelessness of sentimental ❯❯

See also: The Red and the Black 150 –51 ■ Old Goriot 151 ■ Germinal 190 –91 ■ A Sentimental Education 199 ■

Lolita 260–61

DEPICTING REAL LIFE

There was no fire in the

fireplace, the clock was still

ticking, and Emma felt vaguely

amazed that all those things

should be so calm when there

was such turmoil inside her.

Madame Bovary

Rouen, the capital of Normandy,

is the provincial setting of Flaubert’s

text—a perfect backdrop for his

skillful rendering of the lives and

preoccupations of the middle class.

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