Emma Bovary is the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel Madame Bovary, a doctor's wife in provincial Normandy whose head has been filled with the romantic ideals of the sentimental novels she read as a girl. Bored and disillusioned by the ordinariness of her marriage to the dull, well-meaning Charles Bovary, Emma pursues a succession of love affairs and an increasingly reckless accumulation of debt in a doomed effort to live out the passionate, glamorous life she believes she is owed, until the ruin she has brought on herself becomes inescapable. Flaubert's clinically precise, deeply ironic portrait of Emma's self-deception, desire and eventual suicide by arsenic scandalized contemporary readers and established the novel as a founding text of literary realism. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Narrative RoleSourced to the subject's own accountProtagonist and title figure (as Madame Bovary), a provincial wife whose romantic fantasies drive the novel's tragedy 1 Defining TraitSourced to the subject's own accountInsatiable longing for the romance and luxury of the novels she reads, pursued through adultery and debt until it destroys her 1 Narrative role (class)Sourced to the subject's own account FAQs
Did Flaubert really say, Madame Bovary, c'est moi?
Almost certainly not in those words. The line is the most famous thing ever attributed to Flaubert about the novel, but it appears in none of his surviving letters, notebooks or manuscripts.
The quotation surfaces only in a 1909 biography by Rene Descharmes, secondhand, reporting that an acquaintance of one of Flaubert's correspondents recalled him saying it. It does not appear anywhere in Flaubert's own correspondence or working notes for the novel, where a remark this quotable would be expected to turn up. Modern Flaubert scholarship treats the line as apocryphal, a literary legend that stuck because it captures something true about the book's clinical intimacy with Emma even though Flaubert most likely never said it.
Connections
Character In
Source Emma Bovary (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Emma Bovary (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
The eponymous character, Emma Bovary, lives beyond her means in order to escape the ennui of provincial life.
- Character In: Madame Bovary
View the Source Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.