Le bovarysme gustave flaubert biography

1857 novel by Gustave Flaubert

For related uses, see Madame Bovary (disambiguation).

Madame Bovary (;French:[madambɔvaʁi]), originally published as Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (French: Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province[madambɔvaʁimœʁ(s)dəpʁɔvɛ̃s]), is a novel by French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1857. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

When the novel was first serialized in Revue de Paris between 1 October and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, and one of the most influential literary works in history.

Plot synopsis

Charles Bovary is a shy, oddly dressed teenager who becomes an Officier de santé in the Public Health Service. He marries the woman his mother has chosen for him, the unpleasant but supposedly rich widow Héloïse Dubuc. He sets out to build a practice in the village of Tostes.

One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg and meets his patient's daughter, Emma Rouault. Emma is a beautiful, poetically dressed young woman who has a yearning for luxury and romance inspired by reading popular novels. Charles is immediately attracted to her, and when Héloïse dies, Charles waits a decent interval before courting Emma in earnest. Her father gives his consent, and Emma and Charles marry.

Emma finds her married life dull and becomes listless. Charles decides his wife needs a change of scenery and moves his practice to the larger market town of Yonville. There, Emma gives birth to a daughter, Berthe, but motherhood proves a disappointment to Emma. She becomes

Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary was more than just an exciting novel, it set a standard for novels, and created a buzzword about having a glamorized, exaggerated conception about oneself. The novel first appeared in serial form in 1857, and the morality of the tale quickly entered into public debate. Flaubert persevered, and the work became a classic.  A few years ago, some 4,500 omitted pages that Flaubert originally penned were released online, in the original French, at bovary.fr. 

In 1934, T.S. Eliot added the -ism suffix to Emma's last name and coined a new word. In Essays, he wrote: "I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare."

Modern writers and artists have put their spin on Bovarism. Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl has Charles Bovary in the form of the character of Ricardo. (Fun fact: The Bad Girl was reported to be one of Madonna's favorite books.) Authors Raymond Carney and Leonard Quart mentioned it in their nonfiction book The Films of Mike Leigh as "'talking-to-hear-yourself-talk' to impress yourself and your listener with a depth of feeling and thought that doesn't refer to anything outside itself." Publisher's Weekly suggested that Emma Bovary is the "feminine incarnation of Don Quixote de la Mancha: he lost his mind reading novels of chivalry while she lost hers reading romance novels" and then things get even more muddled in their review of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot in their article "10 Books Based on Other Books." Barnes also writes about the statue of Flaubert in Rouen, France, which, although not the original statue, bears testament to the passage of time. NYPL's digital collection has a few images of the statue.

Author A.S. Byatt calls Madame Bovary "the least romantic book I have ever read."

Author Julie Kavanagh examines the portrayals of Emma Bovary, including one based on the graphic novel Gemma Bov

"Bovarysme Beyond Bovary: From the Psyche to the Text," centers on examining the notion of bovarysme as a particular stance on literature, as well as a specific literary technique, and seeks to establish the emergence of a textualized bovarysme in selected works by Gustave Flaubert. Jules de Gaultier's 1902 definition of bovarysme as "le pouvoir départi à l'homme de se concevoir autre qu'il n'est," while useful as a point of departure, focuses largely on the psychology of the fictional character and does not extend the notion's implications further, such as into the realm of literary art. I therefore investigate if Gaultier's definition of bovarysme could apply to writing. Can language also conceive of itself other than what it is?

Working from this key question, I organize my study into four chapters that address the textualization of bovarysme. In Chapter One, "Madame Bovary and `La Maladie de la lecture'," I trace the development of bovarysme in relation to the desire to transpose reading onto reality, a transposition that exhibits contaminating effects that posit bovarysme as a "textually transmitted disease" (in the words of Daniel Pennac), as a condition that originates from the fictional realm, but extends also into the real, and influences not just Emma Bovary's comportment, but equally that of future generations of readers.

Chapter 2, "Bouvard et Pécuchet: The Caging of the Parrot," examines the mimetic properties of bovarysme as a textualized stance against the infectious power of clichés and idées reçues. Here, I argue that Flaubert's skillful use of italics and quotation marks seem to "quarantine" the linguistic properties of clichés, and yet simultaneously participate in their usage. Through the (mis)reading of linguistic signs, imbued with received ideas or linguistic platitudes, I argue that not only do Bouvard and Pécuchet read--and, especially, misread clichés--but also, readers of Bouvard et Pécuchet often perform a similar fun