Madame Bovary (1856) is Gustave Flaubert's first
published novel and is considered by many critics to be a masterpiece. 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 right word").
The power of “Madame Bovary”
stems from Flaubert’s determination to render each object of his scrutiny
exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes. Not his talent to
do so — that would not have been enough — but his determination, which he never
relaxed. “Madame Bovary” advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have,
given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right
word, of which there could be only one. Flaubert's artistic sensibility veered
most naturally to gaudy excess, not to say a voyeuristic passion for the
fleshy, sanguinary and transgressive. A little too much was hardly enough for
him.
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