Flaubert, Gustave

Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the precise word"). Madame Bovary takes place in provincial northern France, near the town of Rouen in Normandy. The story begins and ends with Charles Bovary, a stolid, kindhearted man without much ability or ambition. As the novel opens, Charles is a shy, oddly dressed teenager arriving at a new school amidst the ridicule of his new classmates. Later, Charles struggles his way to a second-rate medical degree and becomes an officier de santé in the Public Health Service. His mother chooses a wife for him, an unpleasant but supposedly rich widow named Heloise Dubuc, and Charles sets out to build a practice in the village of Tostes (now Tôtes).One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg, and meets his client's daughter, Emma Rouault. Emma is a beautiful, daintily dressed young woman who has received a "good education" in a convent and who has a latent but powerful yearning for luxury and romance imbibed from the popular novels she has read. Charles is immediately attracted to her, and begins checking on his patient far more often than necessary until Heloise's jealousy puts a stop to the visits. When Heloise dies, Charles waits a decent interval, then begins courting Emma in earnest. Her father gives his consent, and Emma and Charles are married.

Madame Bovary

Novel Ideas

…She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart..

Zainab 

Künftiges Glück wirft, wie ein tropisches Gestade, auf die unermeßliche Weite, die davorliegt, seine weichen Lockungen voraus, eine düfteschwere Brise, und man ergibt sich willenlos diesem Rausch, ohne sich Gedanken über den Horizont zu machen, der dem Auge unsichtbar ist.

Trotz allem war sie nicht glücklich, war es nie gewesen. Woher kamn es nur, daß sie mit dem Leben so gar nicht zurechtkam, daß alles, worauf sie sich verließ, so rasch verweste?... 

So ist das irdische Leben. Nichts kann uns vollkommen glücklich machen. Kein Vergnügen ist vollkommen. Flaubert hat es auf dem Punkt gebracht. Diejenigen die nur nach dem weltlichen streben werden irgendwann untergehen in der Unzufriedenheit. 

Alles war eitel Lug und Trug! Jedes Lächeln verbarg ein Gähnen der Langweile, jede Freude einen Fluch, jeder Genuß den unausbleiblichen Ekel, und die glühendsten Küsse hinterlassen auf unseren Lippen nur die unerfüllbare Sehnsucht nach einer höheren Wollust.

Bethany Jenkins

They were invariably about love affairs, lovers, mistresses, harassed ladies swooning in remote pavilions. Couriers were killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page; there were gloomy forests, broken hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, skiffs in the moonlight, nightingales in thickets; the noblemen were all brave as lions, gentle as lambs, incredibly virtuous, always beautifully dressed, and wept copiously on every occasion. For six months, when she was fifteen, Emma begrimed her hands with this dust from old lending libraries. Later, reading Walter Scott, she became infatuated with everything historical and dreamed about oaken chests and guardrooms and troubadours. She would have liked to live in some old manor, like those long-waisted chatelaines who spent their days leaning out of fretted Gothic casements, elbow on parapet and chin in hand, watching a white-plumed knight come galloping out of the distance on a black horse. At that time she worshipped Mary Queen of Scots, and venerated women illustrious or ill-starred. In her mind Joan of Arc, Héloise, Agnès Sorel, La Belle Ferronière and Clémence Isaure stood out like comets on the shadowy immensity of history; and here and there (though less clearly outlined than the others against the dim background, and quite unrelated among themselves) were visible also St. Louis and his oak, the dying Bayard, certain atrocities of Louis XI, bits of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the plumed crest of Henri IV, and, always, the memory of the hotel plates glorifying Louis XIV.

“It yet seems to me,” said Emma, “that you have little to complain about.”

“Because in the end …” she went on, “you are free.”

Madame Bovary quotes

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