نقد و بررسی رمان Madame Bovary نوشته ی Gustave Flaubert

[*زهره*]

[h=3]Context[/h] Gustave Flaubert once remarked, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”). On the surface, this comment seems ridiculous; the circumstances of Flaubert’s life have nothing in common with those he created for his most famous character. Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, France. Emma Bovary’s father is an uneducated farmer, whereas Flaubert’s father was a respected and wealthy doctor. In addition, Emma dreams of becoming sophisticated and cosmopolitan, while Flaubert moved in the highest literary circles in Paris. Finally, Emma endures an unhappy marriage and seeks out lovers. On the contrary, the reclusive Flaubert spent most of his time living in solitude.

Since their biographies are so strikingly dissimilar, Flaubert’s comment probably meant that he and his character shared many of the same struggles and desires. Emma Bovary becomes obsessed with an idealized vision of romantic love. Similarly, Flaubert became fixated at a young age upon an older woman named Elisa Schlessinger, with whom he fantasized about having a romantic relationship for many years. Emma suffers from ill health and a nervous condition; Flaubert also suffered from poor health and may have had epilepsy. Though he was an esteemed writer, Flaubert was afflicted with an abiding pessimism that caused him to sink into frequent depressions, just as Emma does when she realizes she never can have what she most desires.
Flaubert, too, could never attain what he most wanted. He remained lonely and bitter throughout his life as a writer. Though admired by his French contemporaries, Flaubert was deeply hurt by the moral outrage Madame Bovary provoked at its publication in 1857. The novel depicted extramarital *** in what were, for the time, graphic terms, and Flaubert and his publisher were put on trial for violation of public morals. They were acquitted, but the experience intensified Flaubert’s hatred of middle-class morality.
The hatred of middle-class values is strongly apparent in Madame Bovary. In Flaubert’s lifetime, France was caught in the throes of immense social upheaval. The Revolution of 1789 and the imperial reign of Napoleon were recent memories, and the collapse of the aristocracy was paralleled by the rise of a new middle class—or bourgeoisie—made up of merchants and capitalists with commercial, rather than inherited, fortunes. As a member of the educated elite, Flaubert found the moral conservatism, rough manners, and unsophisticated taste of this new class appalling. He attacked the merchant class in novels such as Madame Bovary, the story of a woman imprisoned by her middle-class surroundings, and in another novel, Sentimental Education.
In addition to criticizing the middle class, Flaubert’s novel also reacted against romanticism. Romantic writers, who were popular in France between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, wrote emotional, subjective novels that stressed feeling at the expense of facts and reason. When Flaubert began writing, a new school called realism had started challenging romantic idealism with books that focused on the harsh realities of life. This school included other French writers such as Stendhal and Honorè Balzac, as well as English writers like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Flaubert recognized a strong streak of romanticism in himself. In Madame Bovary, romanticism is present, but Flaubert always treats it with irony. Flaubert allows himself a few romantic moments but recognizes their flaws.
Though it was his first novel, Madame Bovary is Flaubert’s most accomplished and admired work. In many ways, the novel provides the blueprint for the genre of the modern novel. For example, Flau-bert was a pioneering stylist, matching the style of his prose to the action of his story in a remarkable new way. Where other realist novels of the mid-nineteenth century used detached, objective narration, Flaubert’s prose conveys the mood of his characters. When Emma is bored and restless, the prose plods dully; when she experiences sensual pleasure, it moves rapturously and swiftly. We frequently see this technique of communicating mood through language in novels today.

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[*زهره*]

[h=3]Plot Overview[/h] Madame Bovary begins when Charles Bovary is a young boy, unable to fit in at his new school and ridiculed by his new classmates. As a child, and later when he grows into a young man, Charles is mediocre and dull. He fails his first medical exam and only barely manages to become a second-rate country doctor. His mother marries him off to a widow who dies soon afterward, leaving Charles much less money than he expected.

Charles soon falls in love with Emma, the daughter of a patient, and the two decide to marry. After an elaborate wedding, they set up house in Tostes, where Charles has his practice. But marriage doesn’t live up to Emma’s romantic expectations. Ever since she lived in a convent as a young girl, she has dreamed of love and marriage as a solution to all her problems. After she attends an extravagant ball at the home of a wealthy nobleman, she begins to dream constantly of a more sophisticated life. She grows bored and depressed when she compares her fantasies to the humdrum reality of village life, and eventually her listlessness makes her ill. When Emma becomes pregnant, Charles decides to move to a different town in hopes of reviving her health.
In the new town of Yonville, the Bovarys meet Homais, the town pharmacist, a pompous windbag who loves to hear himself speak. Emma also meets Leon, a law clerk, who, like her, is bored with rural life and loves to escape through romantic novels. When Emma gives birth to her daughter Berthe, motherhood disappoints her—she had desired a son—and she continues to be despondent. Romantic feelings blossom between Emma and Leon. However, when Emma realizes that Leon loves her, she feels guilty and throws herself into the role of a dutiful wife. Leon grows tired of waiting and, believing that he can never possess Emma, departs to study law in Paris. His departure makes Emma miserable.
Soon, at an agricultural fair, a wealthy neighbor named Rodolphe, who is attracted by Emma’s beauty, declares his love to her. He seduces her, and they begin having a passionate affair. Emma is often indiscreet, and the townspeople all gossip about her. Charles, however, suspects nothing. His adoration for his wife and his stupidity combine to blind him to her indiscretions. His professional reputation, meanwhile, suffers a severe blow when he and Homais attempt an experimental surgical technique to treat a club-footed man named Hippolyte and end up having to call in another doctor to amputate the leg. Disgusted with her husband’s incompetence, Emma throws herself even more passionately into her affair with Rodolphe. She borrows money to buy him gifts and suggests that they run off together and take little Berthe with them. Soon enough, though, the jaded and worldly Rodolphe has grown bored of Emma’s demanding affections. Refusing to elope with her, he leaves her. Heartbroken, Emma grows desperately ill and nearly dies.
By the time Emma recovers, Charles is in financial trouble from having to borrow money to pay off Emma’s debts and to pay for her treatment. Still, he decides to take Emma to the opera in the nearby city of Rouen. There, they encounter Leon. This meeting rekindles the old romantic flame between Emma and Leon, and this time the two embark on a love affair. As Emma continues sneaking off to Rouen to meet Leon, she also grows deeper and deeper in debt to the moneylender Lheureux, who lends her more and more money at exaggerated interest rates. She grows increasingly careless in conducting her affair with Leon. As a result, on several occasions, her acquaintances nearly discover her infidelity.
Over time, Emma grows bored with Leon. Not knowing how to abandon him, she instead becomes increasingly demanding. Meanwhile, her debts mount daily. Eventually, Lheureux orders the seizure of Emma’s property to compensate for the debt she has accumulated. Terrified of Charles finding out, she frantically tries to raise the money that she needs, appealing to Leon and to all the town’s businessmen. Eventually, she even attempts to prostitute herself by offering to get back together with Rodolphe if he will give her the money she needs. He refuses, and, driven to despair, she commits suicide by eating arsenic. She dies in horrible agony.
For a while, Charles idealizes the memory of his wife. Eventually, though, he finds her letters from Rodolphe and Leon, and he is forced to confront the truth. He dies alone in his garden, and Berthe is sent off to work in a cotton mill.

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[*زهره*]

[h=3]Character List[/h] Emma Bovary - The novel’s protagonist, the Madame Bovary of the title. A country girl educated in a convent and married to Charles Bovary at a young age, she harbors idealistic romantic illusions, covets sophistication, sensuality, and passion, and lapses into fits of extreme boredom and depression when her life fails to match the sentimental novels she treasures. She has a daughter, Berthe, but lacks maternal instincts and is often annoyed with the child. Occasionally, guilt or a memory of her simple childhood causes her to repent, and she becomes devoutly religious and dedicates herself to her husband and child. Such fits of conscience are short-lived. Emma’s desire for passion and pleasure leads her into extramarital affairs with Rodolphe and Leon. In addition, she runs up enormous debts against her husband’s property and commits suicide when she realizes she will be unable to repay them.


Charles Bovary - A country doctor, kind, but simple, dull, and unremarkable. Charles is a terrible doctor who manages simple cases decently but is incapable of performing difficult operations. For example, when he tries to operate on Hippolyte’s leg, it develops gangrene and has to be removed. Charles dotes on his wife, Emma, who can do no wrong in his eyes. Only his mother holds as much sway over him as his wife, and even she loses control over him after his marriage. Despite his deep love for Emma, he doesn’t understand her. Her looks and dress captivate him, but he remains oblivious to her personality. His adoration of her often leads him to act with baffling innocence. He fails to detect her extramarital affairs with Rodolphe and Leon, which are so poorly concealed that they become the subjects of town gossip. When Emma begins to run up debts, he grants her power of attorney over all his property, an act that leads to his financial ruin. After Emma’s suicide, he learns of her infidelities and, soon after, dies a broken man.


Monsieur Homais - The apothecary at Yonville; a pompous, self-impressed man of the bourgeois class who helps Charles become established as a doctor in the town. Homais is superficial and obnoxious. He loves to hear himself talk, and his lengthy commentaries are filled with clichés. His pomposity can cause real harm, as when he encourages Charles to operate on Hippolyte to disastrous effect. An irreligious man, Homais often argues with Bournisien, the town priest, claiming that religion and prayer are useless. Homais is the perfect embodiment of all the bourgeois values and characteristics that so disgust Flaubert and bore his heroine, Emma.


Leon - Emma’s friend in Yonville, who later becomes her lover. When Leon is a law clerk in Yonville, he shares many of Emma’s romantic preconceptions and her love for sentimental novels. He falls in love with her but moves away to Paris to study law, partly because he considers their love impossible as long as she remains married. When Emma meets him later in Rouen, his time in the city has made him more sure of himself. He now perceives Emma to be unsophisticated and thinks he can win her love. Although Emma believes him to be cosmopolitan, Flaubert presents him as awkward and full of himself. Drawn to his newfound urban sophistication, Emma begins an affair with him. At first, they succeed in living up to one another’s romantic ideals. However, as the affair progresses, Emma and Leon grow increasingly bored and disgusted with one another. He cannot help her when she is in monetary distress and makes excuses for failing to help her financially. Leon marries shortly after Emma’s death.

Rodolphe Boulanger - Emma’s first lover, a wealthy landowner with an estate near Yonville. Rodolphe is shrewd, selfish, and manipulative. He has had scores of lovers and believes Emma to be no more sincere than any of them. He plots his seduction of Emma with strategic precision, begins an affair with her, and then abandons her when he becomes bored of her romantic fancies and emotional demands.

Monsieur Lheureux - A sly, sinister merchant and moneylender in Yonville who leads Emma into debt, financial ruin, and eventually suicide by playing on her weakness for luxury and extravagance. Lheureux is a bit of a devil figure who tempts people with luxuries they can’t afford and knows just when to appear with his requests for money and promises of more loans.

Abbé Bournisien - The town priest in Yonville, Bournisien tends to focus more on worldly matters than on spiritual ones. He often argues with Homais about the value of religion, but seems incapable of grasping deep spiritual problems.

Hippolyte - The crippled servant at the inn in Yonville. Under pressure from Emma and Homais, Charles attempts to operate on Hippolyte’s club foot. The operation fails, gangrene sets in, and Hippolyte loses his leg.

Berthe - Charles and Emma’s daughter, who is condemned to a life of poverty by her mother’s financial excesses and her parents’ deaths.

Binet - The tax collector in Yonville. Binet takes his meals regularly at the Lion d’Or inn. He is quiet, and amuses himself by making napkin rings on the lathe in his attic.

Guillaumin - Leon’s first employer, the well-to-do lawyer in Yonville. When Emma seeks his help with her financial hardship, he offers his assistance in return for ***ual favors—an offer she angrily declines.

Rouault - Emma’s father, a simple, essentially kindly farmer with a weakness for drink. He is devoted both to Emma and to the memory of his first wife, whom he loved deeply.

Lariviere - An esteemed doctor from Rouen who is called in after Emma takes arsenic at the end of the novel. He is coldly analytical and condescending to his inferiors, but he is brilliant and competent, and he feels a real sympathy for his patients.

The elder Madame Bovary - A bitter, conservative woman who spoiled her son Charles as a youth and disapproves of his marriage to Emma. She sees through Emma’s lies and tries to get Charles to rein in his wife’s excessive spending, but she rarely succeeds.

Justin - Homais’s assistant. Justin is young, impressionable, and simple. He falls terribly in love with Emma and unwittingly gives her access to the arsenic that she uses to commit suicide.

Heloise Dubuc - Charles’s first wife. She realizes that Charles is enamored with Emma. Soon after having this realization, she dies from the shock of having all her property stolen by her lawyer.


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[*زهره*]

[h=3]Analysis of Major Characters[/h]
[h=4]Emma Bovary[/h] In Emma Bovary, Flaubert uses irony to criticize romanticism and to investigate the relation of beauty to corruption and of fate to free will. Emma embarks directly down a path to moral and financial ruin over the course of the novel. She is very beautiful, as we can tell by the way several men fall in love with her, but she is morally corrupt and unable to accept and appreciate the realities of her life. Since her girlhood in a convent, she has read romantic novels that feed her discontent with her ordinary life. She dreams of the purest, most impossible forms of love and wealth, ignoring whatever beauty is present in the world around her. Flaubert once said, “Madame Bovary is me,” and many scholars believe that he was referring to a weakness he shared with his character for romance, sentimental flights of fancy, and melancholy. Flaubert, however, approaches romanticism with self-conscious irony, pointing out its flaws even as he is tempted by it. Emma, on the other hand, never recognizes that her desires are unreasonable. She rails emotionally against the society that, from her perspective, makes them impossible for her to achieve.

Emma’s failure is not completely her own. Her character demonstrates the many ways in which circumstance—rather than free will—determined the position of women in the nineteenth century. If Emma were as rich as her lover, Rodolphe, for instance, she would be free to indulge the lifestyle she imagines. Flaubert suggests at times that her dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society she lives in is justified. For example, the author includes details that seem to ridicule Homais’s pompous speechmaking or Charles’s boorish table manners. These details indicate that Emma’s plight is emblematic of the difficulties of any sensitive person trapped among the French bourgeoisie. But Emma’s inability to accept her situation and her attempt to escape it through adultery and deception constitute moral errors. These mistakes bring about her ruin and, in the process, cause harm to innocent people around her. For example, though dim-witted and unable to recognize his wife’s true character, Charles loves Emma, and she deceives him. Similarly, little Berthe is but an innocent child in need of her mother’s care and love, but Emma is cold to her, and Berthe ends up working in a cotton mill because of Emma’s selfish spending and suicide, and because of Charles’s resulting death.
We can see that Emma’s role as a woman may have an even greater effect on the course of her life than her social status does. Emma is frequently portrayed as the object of a man’s gaze: her husband’s, Rodolphe’s, Leon’s, Justin’s—even Flaubert’s, since the whole novel is essentially a description of how he sees Emma. Moreover, Emma’s only power over the men in her life is ***ual. Near the end of her life, when she searches desperately for money, she has to ask men for it, and the only thing she can use to persuade them to give it to her is ***. Emma’s prostitution is the result of her self-destructive spending, but the fact that, as a woman, she has no other means of finding money is a result of the misogynistic society in which she lives.

[h=4]Charles Bovary[/h] Charles represents both the society and the personal characteristics that Emma detests. He is incompetent, stupid, and unimaginative. In one of the novel’s most revelatory moments, Charles looks into Emma’s eyes and sees not her soul but rather his own image, reflected in miniature. Charles’s perception of his own reflection is not narcissistic but merely a simple, direct sensation, unmediated by romantic notions. The moment demonstrates his inability to imagine an idealized version of the world or find mystic qualities in the world’s physical aspects. Instead, he views life literally and never imbues what he sees with romantic import. Thus it is the physical aspects of Emma that delight Charles. When the narrative focuses on his point of view, we see every detail of her dress, her skin, and her hair. When it comes to her aspirations and depressions, however, Charles is at a loss. He nods and smiles dumbly as Emma conducts the same sorts of conversations with him that she does with her dog. Charles is too stupid to manage his money well or to see through Emma’s obvious lies, and he is a frighteningly incompetent doctor. In one scene, as he goes to repair Rouault’s leg, we learn that he is trying desperately to “call to mind all the fractures he [knows].” His operation on Hippolyte’s clubfoot, while it is not his idea, is a complete failure. Charles is more than merely incompetent, however. He is physically repulsive, though it’s hard to tell from Flaubert’s descriptions whether he is actually an ugly man or whether he appears disgusting only through Emma’s eyes.

Despite his unimaginative nature, Charles is one of the novel’s most moral and sincere characters. He truly loves Emma, forgiving her even when he finally recognizes her infidelities. He does everything he can to save her when she is ill, and he gives her the benefit of the doubt whenever her lies seem to fail her. Literal-minded, humble, free of temptations, and without aspirations, Charles is Emma’s opposite. While she possesses some beauty, sensitivity, and intelligence despite her moral corruption, Charles remains good-hearted despite his boorishness and stupidity.



[h=4]Monsieur Homais[/h] Although Homais is not central to the plot of Madame Bovary, he is an absolutely essential part of its atmosphere. He is a pompous speechmaker, endlessly rattling on about medical techniques and theories that he really knows nothing about. His presence serves, in part, to heighten our sense of Emma’s frustration with her life. Flaubert relates Homais’s speeches in full, forcing us to read them just as Emma is forced to listen to them. Homais is also an extremely selfish man. When the Bovarys first arrive in Yonville, we learn that he is only befriending Charles because he wants Charles to turn a blind eye to his disreputable medical practices.

In the last sentence of the book, Homais receives the Legion of Honor, a medal he has always dreamed of attaining, after Emma and Charles are both dead. Meanwhile, Charles—who loved his wife as deeply as he was capable—and Emma—who yearned to live an exceptional life—are both punished. By rewarding Homais, Flaubert does not advocate his kind of life. Instead, he shows us a realistic portrayal of one of the most disappointing aspects of the world—that the mediocre and the selfish often fare better than either those who live passionately and try to be exceptional or those who live humbly and treat others with kind generosity.


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[*زهره*]

[h=3]Themes, Motifs & Symbols[/h] [h=4]Themes
[/h]

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
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[h=5]The Inadequacy of Language[/h] Madame Bovary explores the possibility that the written word fails to capture even a small part of the depth of a human life. Flaubert uses a variety of techniques to show how language is often an inadequate medium for expressing emotions and ideas. The characters’ frequent inability to communicate with each other is emblematic of the fact that words do not perfectly describe what they signify. In the first chapter, for example, Charles’s teacher thinks he says his name is “Charbovari.” He fails to make his own name understood. This inadequacy of speech is something Emma will encounter again and again as she tries to make her distress known to the priest or to express her love to Rodolphe. It is also present when Charles reads the letter from Rodolphe and misinterprets it as a note of platonic affection.

The lies that fill Madame Bovary contribute to the sense of language’s inadequacy in the novel, and to the notion that words may be more effective for the purposes of obscuring the truth or conveying its opposite, than for representing the truth itself. Emma’s life is described as “a tissue of lies.” She invents story after story to prevent her husband from discovering her affairs. Similarly, Rodolphe tells so many lies about his love for Emma that he assumes her words are also insincere. Flaubert points out that by lying the lovers make it impossible for words ever to touch at the truth in things.
The strong sense of the inadequacy of language is in part a reaction against the school of realism. Although Flaubert was in some senses a realist, he also believed it was wrong to claim that realism provided a more accurate picture of life than romanticism. He deploys ironic romantic descriptions to establish a tension between various characters’ experience of events and the real aspects of life. By combining ironic romanticism and literal realistic narration, Flaubert captures his characters and their struggles mormore fully than a strictly literal or a wholesale romantic style would allow.
[h=5]The Powerlessness of Women[/h] Emma Bovary’s hope that her baby will be a man because “a woman is always hampered” is just one of the many instances in the novel in which Flaubert demonstrates an intimate understanding of the plight of women in his time. We see throughout Madame Bovary how Emma’s male companions possess the power to change her life for better or worse—a power that she herself lacks. Even Charles contributes to Emma’s powerlessness. His laziness prevents him from becoming a good doctor, and his incompetence prevents him from advancing into a higher social stratum that might satisfy Emma’s yearnings. As a result, Emma is stuck in a country town without much money. Rodolphe, who possesses the financial power to whisk Emma away from her life, abandons her, and, as a woman, she is incapable of fleeing on her own. Leon at first seems similar to Emma. Both are discontented with country life, and both dream of bigger and better things. But because Leon is a man, he has the power to actually fulfill his dream of moving to the city, whereas Emma must stay in Yonville, shackled to a husband and child.

Ultimately, however, the novel’s moral structure requires that Emma assume responsibility for her own actions. She can’t blame everything on the men around her. She freely chooses to be unfaithful to Charles, and her infidelities wound him fatally in the end. On the other hand, in Emma’s situation, the only two choices she has are to take lovers or to remain faithful in a dull marriage. Once she has married Charles, the choice to commit adultery is Emma’s only means of exercising power over her own destiny. While men have access to wealth and property, the only currency Emma possesses to influence others is her body, a form of capital she can trade only in secret with the price of shame and the added expense of deception. When she pleads desperately for money to pay her debts, men offer the money in return for ***ual favors. Eventually, she tries to win back Rodolphe as a lover if he will pay her debts. Even her final act of suicide is made possible by a transaction funded with her physical charms, which are dispensed toward Justin, who allows Emma access to the cupboard where the arsenic is kept. Even to take her own life, she must resort to ***ual power, using Justin’s love for her to convince him to do what she wants.
[h=5]The Failures of the Bourgeoisie[/h] Emma’s disappointments stem in great part from her dissatisfaction with the world of the French bourgeoisie. She aspires to have taste that is more refined and sophisticated than that of her class. This frustration reflects a rising social and historical trend of the last half of the nineteenth century. At the time Flaubert was writing, the word “bourgeois” referred to the middle class: people who lacked the independent wealth and ancestry of the nobility, but whose professions did not require them to perform physical labor to earn their living. Their tastes were characterized as gaudily materialistic. They indulged themselves as their means allowed, but without discrimination. The mediocrity of the bourgeoisie was frustrating to -Flaubert, and he used Emma Bovary’s disgust with her class as a way of conveying his own hatred for the middle class. Madame Bovary shows how ridiculous, stifling, and potentially harmful the attitudes and trappings of the bourgeoisie can be. In the pharmacist Homais’s long-winded, know-it-all speeches, Flaubert mocks the bourgeois class’s pretensions to knowledge and learning and its faith in the power of technologies that it doesn’t completely understand. But Homais is not just funny; he is also dangerous. When he urges Charles to try a new medical procedure on Hippolyte, the patient acquires gangrene and then loses his leg. Homais does even greater damage when he attempts to treat Emma for her poisoning. He tries to show off by analyzing the poison and coming up with an antidote. Later, a doctor will tell him that he should have simply stuck a finger down Emma’s throat to save her life.




[h=4]Motifs
[/h]

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.​

[h=5]Death and Illness[/h] There are many disturbing references to death and illness in Madame Bovary, and the novel can seem very morbid. These references emphasize Flaubert’s realistic, unflinching description of the world, and also act as physical manifestations of Emma’s moral decay. For example, Lestiboudois grows potatoes in the graveyard because the decomposing bodies help them grow, and Homais keeps fetuses in jars. Similarly, Hippolyte loses his leg to gangrene, the blind beggar with festering skin follows the carriage to and from Rouen, and, when Emma faints in Part Two, Chapter XIII, Homais wakes her up with smelling salts, saying, “this thing would resuscitate a corpse!” Such excessive corruption is a comment on the physical state of the world. Flaubert constantly reminds us that death and decay lurk beneath the surface of everyday life, and that innocence is often coupled very closely with corruption. This focus on the negative aspects of life is part of Flaubert’s realism.

[h=5]Windows[/h] Windows are frequently associated with Emma. We often see her looking out of them, or we glimpse her through them from the street as she waves goodbye to Charles or Leon. For Emma, these windows represent the possibility of escape. A shutter bangs open to announce her engagement, and she contemplates jumping out the attic window to commit suicide. But Emma never manages to really escape. She stays inside the window, looking out at the world and imagining a freedom that she never can obtain. Windows also serve to take Emma back to the past. At the ball, when the servant breaks the window and Emma sees the peasants outside, she is suddenly reminded of her simple childhood. Such a retreat to childhood also could be a kind of escape for Emma, who would surely be much happier if she stopped striving to escape that simple life. But, again, she ignores the possibility of escape, trapping herself within her own desires for romantic ideals of wealth she can’t obtain.

[h=5]Eating[/h] The quantity of food consumed in Madame Bovary could feed an army for a week. From Emma’s wedding feast to the Bovarys’ daily dinner, Flaubert’s characters are frequently eating, and the way they eat reveals important character traits. Charles’s atrocious table manners, magnified through Emma’s disgust, reveal him to be boorish and lacking in sophistication. When Emma is shown sucking her fingers or licking out the bottom of a glass, we see a base animal sensuality and a lust for physical satisfaction in her that all her pretensions to refinement cannot conceal. Finally, when Emma goes to the ball, the exquisite table manners of the nobles and the fine foods they consume signify the refinement and sophistication of their class. In each of these cases, what one eats or how one eats is an indicator of social class.




[h=4]Symbols
[/h]

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.​

[h=5]The Blind Beggar[/h] A picture of physical decay, the blind beggar who follows the carriage in which Emma rides to meet Leon also symbolizes Emma’s moral corruption. He sings songs about “birds and sunshine and green leaves” in a voice “like an inarticulate lament of some vague despair.” This coupling of innocence with disease relates to the combination of beauty and corruption that Emma herself has become. While her words, appearance, and fantasies are those of an innocent and beautiful wife, her spirit becomes foul and corrupt as she indulges herself in adulterous temptations and the deceptions required to maintain her illicit affairs. Later, when Emma dies, the blind man gets to the end of his song about a young girl dreaming. We then discover that what we thought was a song about an innocent woman is actually a bawdy, ***ual song. This progression from innocence to ***ual degradation mirrors the path of Emma’s life.

[h=5]Dried Flowers[/h] When Emma comes home with Charles, she notices his dead wife’s wedding bouquet in the bedroom and wonders what will happen to her own bouquet when she dies. Later, when they move to Yonville, she burns her own bouquet as a gesture of defiance against her unhappy marriage. The dried bouquet stands for disappointed hopes, and for the new promise of a wedding day turned sour and old. In another sense, Emma’s burning of her bouquet foreshadows the way her desires will consume her youth and, eventually, her life.

[h=5]The Lathe[/h] Binet’s habit of making useless napkin rings on his lathe is a symbol with several meanings. First, it represents the useless, nonproductive, ornamental character of bourgeois tastes. Second, it represents something more ominous—the monotony of the life that traps Emma. In the scene in which she contemplates throwing herself out the window, Emma hears the sound of the lathe calling her to suicide. Finally, the lathe represents the craftsman repeatedly making a simple, uniform work of art. Flaubert once compared himself as a writer to a craftsman working on a lathe.

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[*زهره*]

[h=3]Key Facts[/h] full title · Madame Bovary
author · Gustave Flaubert
type of work · Novel
genre · Realist fiction
language · French
time and place written · Croisset, France; 1851–1857
date of first publication · 1857
publisher · Revue de Paris
narrator · In the first chapter, Charles’s classmates narrate as a first-person plural “we.” It is unclear whether one person or the whole class is speaking. For the rest of the novel, an omniscient third-person narrator tells the story. Although the narrator appears to be objective, he often makes his opinion felt, especially regarding the ridiculous attempts of his characters’ efforts to appear sophisticated.
point of view · The first chapter is told from the perspective of one or all of Charles Bovary’s schoolfellows. After that, we see the world through Charles’s eyes momentarily before being introduced to Emma. The bulk of the novel recounts events as she experiences them, though always in the third person and sometimes giving us a brief glimpse into someone else’s mind. Despite the fact that the narrator limits most of his attention to Emma, however, there is a fairly even mix of objective observations of her behavior and subjective accounts of her thoughts and feelings. Flaubert also often uses free indirect discourse, the narrative integration of thoughts and feelings without quotation marks or attribution, to show what his characters are thinking. After Emma’s death, the narration is mostly objective.
tone · Flaubert’s attitude toward his story and his heroine is evenly divided between sympathy and ironic contempt. We know that he identified strongly with his heroine because he once said “Madame Bovary is me.” His sympathy for her is evident in the way he describes her passions and the circumstances that conspire against her. He is also, however, very much aware of how ridiculous attempts at sophistication by members of the bourgeoisie can be, and he portrays many of his characters as foolish, ridiculous and grotesque.
tense · Simple past
setting (time) · The mid-1800s
setting (place) · France, including the towns of Tostes, Yonville, and Rouen
protagonist · Emma Bovary
major conflict · Emma wishes for romantic love, wealth, and social status that she cannot attain because she is married to a middle-class doctor.
rising action · Emma begins borrowing money to pay for gifts for her first lover, Rodolphe. When he leaves her, she falls ill, and her husband, Charles, borrows even more money to pay for her care. Emma must now borrow more and more to pay off her debts and to indulge her extravagant tastes. She takes a second lover, Leon, but he soon grows tired of her.
climax · Emma’s primary creditor, Lheureux, insists that she pay him back and obtains a court order to seize all her property.
falling action · Driven to despair, Emma seeks financial help everywhere, but can find none; she eats a handful of arsenic and dies. After Emma’s death, Charles loses everything. He finds out about his wife’s infidelities and dies a broken man. Emma’s daughter, Berthe, is sent to work in a cotton mill.
themes · The inadequacy of language; the powerlessness of women; the shortcomings of the bourgeois class
motifs · Death and illness, windows, eating
symbols · The blind beggar, dried flowers, the lathe
foreshadowing · Emma’s financial ruin is foreshadowed as early as the novel’s first chapter, when Flaubert introduces the danger of poorly handled finances by describing the incompetent money management of Charles’ family members. The appearance of Lheureux, coupled with his early efforts to tempt Emma, foreshadows the eventual nature of her downfall: she will get herself further and further into debt with the moneylender. Emma’s romantic disappointments are foreshadowed as well; with both Rodolphe and Leon, we see early on that their feelings for Emma are neither as strong nor as durable as she might wish. Finally, the arsenic with which Emma commits suicide is shown to us six chapters before she ends her life.


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