Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives (Penguin Classics)

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I won't waste any more of my precious reading time on this. It's about a self-absorbed young wife who longs for anyone else's life except her own. When she's in the city, she dreams of the farm. When she's in the country, she dreams of the city. When she's at a social gathering she imagines that everyone else's life is so much more exciting than her own. Blah, blah, blah. Emma’s debts grow larger and larger, and one day she receives an official notice stating that she must pay a very large sum of money or forfeit all her possessions. In desperation, Emma tries to get the money from Léon, who is noncommittal; from the town lawyer, who propositions her; and finally from Rodolphe, who refuses her coldly. Emma is wild with confusion and fear. She convinces Justin, the pharmacist’s assistant, to lead her into Homais’s laboratory, and she eats a fistful of arsenic. She dies horribly later that night.

Madame Bovary: Study Guide | SparkNotes Madame Bovary: Study Guide | SparkNotes

Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.” Pierre Assouline (25 October 2009). "Madame Bovary, c'est qui?". La République des Livres. Archived from the original on 28 October 2009.

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The novel was loosely adapted in the Christian video series VeggieTales under the name Madame Blueberry. [21] Before she is Madame Bovary, Emma is keeping house for her father on a remote farm. I wonder what would have happened to her if Doctor Charles Bovary had not been summoned to set her father’s broken leg? It is inconceivable to think of her married to a farmer or a tradesman or being swept away by a travelling peddler. She is beautiful enough to be a duchess or a marquise, a pretty bobble for the dance floor, or an elegant adornment for the dinner table, and certainly, the perfect fine drapery for a night at the theatre. The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things. [17] As such it prefigures the work of the great modernist novelists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Charles’s thoughts of profit also introduce a central theme in the novel: the entanglement of love and money. Money is inscribed in most of the marriages in the novel. When Charles’s first wife dies and her legacy is discovered to be a fraction of what was promised, the Bovary parents are outraged. Later Emma’s father accepts Charles as a suitor because, inter alia, he “would probably not haggle too much over the dowry” (p. 21). Flaubert even hints at this relationship in his choice of name. Bovary with its echo of “bovine” suggests that Emma, or any marriageable woman, is akin to a dairy cow to be traded and bartered with. Readers should remember that Madame Bovary was written in the mid-nineteenth century when marriage was more of an economic contract than a relationship based on love or emotional compatibility. The tension between the claims of conventional marriage and amorous love has been exploited by poets and novelists since the Middle Ages but it was the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century that first challenged conventional assumptions for a wide reading public. Emma, demonstrably part of that reading public, spends most of her life rebelling against societal expectations and searching for an enduring passionate relationship. These designs, alas, end in disappointment when her lovers show as much petty concern with money and status as any of the ordinary townsfolk. The most poignant twining of love and money is the fact that Emma is quite literally killed by broken promissory notes: those promises of a new life in Italy betrayed by Rodolphe, and those lines of credit she is unable to repay the evil merchant Lhereux. Both betrayals of trust converge at the novel’s end leaving Emma seemingly without any hope. Siniscalco, Carmine (1985). Incontro con Giorgio de Chirico. Matera–Ferrara: Edizioni La Bautta. pp.131–132. See excerpt on Fondazionedechirico.org

Madame Bovary - Project Gutenberg

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.” I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.” Her frustrations, once contained in a heavy ball beneath her heart, begin to unravel like many hissing snakes, and her docile nature becomes viperous. ”She no longer hid her scorn for anything, or anyone, and she would sometimes express singular opinions, condemning what was generally approved, and commending perverse or immoral things: which made her husband stare at her wide-eyed.” you hate to see a man win a situation...women are so much better at deception and deviousness...it looks odd on a man.

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Vargas Llosa quoted in Zuzanna Krasnopolska (November 2010). "Lectures d'Emma Bovary et Teresa Uzeda: deux cas de boulimie littéraire". Le Centre Flaubert (in French). l'Université de Rouen . Retrieved 5 December 2015.

Madame Bovary - this book is so slow--worth finishing Madame Bovary - this book is so slow--worth finishing

I read this once in my early 20's and found I couldn't identify with Madame Bovary at all. I recently re-read it 10 years later, and found it to be much better.Q. Among the many previous translations of the novel, was there one in particular you had hoped to surpass in accuracy and readability?My aim was simply to stay as close as possible to the original and at the same time to write an English version that would be fully alive. I admired many of the previous translations at many moments, and did not actively want to surpass any one in particular. In the case of the Proust, the situation was different, since there was really only one available previous translation, the C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and its style was quite different from, and unrepresentative of, the original-thus terribly misleading to the Anglo-American reader who wanted to experience Proust. I felt it was very important that it be replaced by a version closer to Proust. Aw, come on, Gustave. Why do you want to make those of us with irrevocably not-size-0 rears, who can’t get from Q to R, cry? Yet, even your complaining makes me want to hug you.