Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Gustave Flaubert
Creators: Geoffrey Wall, Michele Roberts
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
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You Save: $10.00 (83%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 16335
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0140449124
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.8
EAN: 9780140449129
ASIN: 0140449124
Publication Date: December 31, 2002
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Product Description
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succes de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel.
Translated with an Introduction by Geoffrey Wall
New Preface by Michele Roberts
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 She insisted on being unhappy August 29, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This story really got me thinking. I couldn't decide whether to liked Madame Bovary or not.
She married a man she neither loved nor respected. She was trapped and trying to make the best of it. On the other hand her husband loved her and would do anything for her but she used him badly. Was she feeling sorry for herself? Was she just a spoiled little brat who could not accept the hand life dealt her?
I enjoyed this book but I finished it with a question mark.
 A book for these times May 9, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I admit that I would never have read Madame Bovary for it not being required reading in my Humanities class. We also had to write an essay, so Madame Bovary occupied my little free time trying to get through the novel. I admit, the prose was indeed different, and many times I had to read and re-read a sentence or paragraph several times before I could understand what was in front of me. After completing the novel, I realized that it was quite a simple story, yet a masterpiece. A true classic.
 An essential classic that left me cold March 9, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Madame Bovary is one of those books that I admire more than love. As fiction it is flawlessly written, and it's scathing viewpoint on French provincial society is delivered with style and aplomb. Call it the great anti-romance of literature. The problem I have with it lies in it's failure to touch me on any emotional level. Neither Emma, nor any of the male characters in Yonville create empathy with me. Charles, who is the least repulsive male, is far more to be pitied than admired. I really couldn't understand or relate much to anyone in this novel.
Comparing Madame Bovary to that other eponymous lady, Anna Karenina, I found Tolstoy's cuckolding wife to be a much more sympathetic character. Part of that lies in the fact that Anna's husband is a less sympathetic character than Emma's, but the greater reason is that Anna thinks and feels in a wounded, yet logical fashion. She struggles to come to terms with her life's choices, whereas Emma seems more a willing victim of her own addictive personality. There isn't the depth to the characters in Flaubert's novel, and though I acknowledge it to be a masterpiece, it is more a cold, stylistic exercise in literary realism, than a book that enlightens, exhilarates, or moves the reader.
That said, Madame Bovary is an essential book, and it certainly has influenced much literature that came after. Flaubert once famously remarked, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi". In her doomed search for beauty in an ugly world, she is the surrogate for the creative artist with the alchemic aim of fashioning the sublime from the dross.
Madame Bovary: Classic Novel of a Cinderella Dreamer whose Prince Never Arrived February 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Madame Bovary is the greatest novel written by Gustave Flaubert. The 1855
masterpiece portrays in searing detail the tragic tale of a young girl whose dreams turned into nightmares; whose sandcastles are swept away by unfulfilled passion; whose young life is ended in a tragic death. Years before Tolstoy limned the adultress woman in his Anna Karenina we see the consequences which ensue when a middle class wife and mother breaks the seventh commandment.
The novel takes place near Rouen in the north of France. There are actually three Madame Bovarys in the story. Madame Bovary Sr. who is the mother of Charles Bovary dominates her weak son. Madame Bovary I is an ugly but wealthy woman who dies allowing Charles to wed the lovely Emma
Bovary who is the the famed woman of the book's title. Emma has grown up on a farm coddled by her widower father. She has immersed herself in romantic tales and spent time in a French convent. Emma dreams of castles in the air and a charming prince to take her to paradise. Today she would be a reader of Harlequin Romances. She is a virgin plum ripe for picking!
Charles Bovary ("bovine" meaning cow-like; also think "ovary for his scandolous wife Emma) is a dull, stupid and lethargic public health inspector. He is a good man but is a total dullard! Charles weds Emma after treating her father. At first all goes well as the couple set up house in a French provincial town where little exciting ever occurs. They have a daughter Berthe with whom Emma has little to do. She never grows up to becoming a mature woman.
Emma carries on two affairs in the novel with the law student Leon and the wealthy but callous womanizing aristocrat Rodolphe. She is sucked into a cesspool of overwhelming debt being addicted to clothing, jewelry and furniture. Emma's lovers forsake her as her disillusionment with men and life itelf takes over life. Madame Bovary ends her life by committing suicide. The account of her horrific, painful and grotesque death from her fatal injection of arsenic rat poison will never be forgotten by the
reader. Despite her many sins she deserves pity at such a sad end. Her husband dies a few years later and her daughter has to be farmed out to a relative.
What makes this novel of adultery, satirical views of provincial life, mockery of the relgious hypocrisy in the French countryside and lacerating portraits of such types as the village atheist Homais so great? In my opinion the reasons this is such a landmark work must include:
a. A picture of a woman seeking to break out of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie view of females as placid wives and mothers with no aspirations of their own. Throughout the novel there are images of birds seeking freedom from cages. Emma is a modern feminist in the nineteenth century society she finds impossible to escape. Emma is an iconoclastic rebel.
b. A satirical and cynical view of human hypocrisy drawn with skill in the pictures Flaubert draws of such figures as the village priest, scientist, merchants and moneylenders. Society is concerned with money and social status to the detriment of more spiritual and ethical values.
c. Flaubert introduces a new realism to the novel which will influence such naturalist as Emile Zola and others. The novel reads as if it was written today instead of over 150 years ago.
d. Flaubert's descriptions of the beauty of nature (and its indifference to human suffering and troubles) are beautifully etched. His use of language and the level of suspense he maintains throughout the work are excellent.
e. Flaubert is not afraid to describe female sexual longings. His sex scenes are tasteful to our eyes but viewed as prurient reading in his own day.
Penguin editons are always a joy to read with their critical apparatus and excellent introductions. Enjoy this great work of literature as soon as you can!
A Compelling, Complex, Classic September 9, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ''What does a woman want?'" Sigmund Freud
This is one unforgettable classic! I don't even know how to begin describing it, mainly because of the complexity of the main character Emma Bovary. When I finished this novel (almost in tears, for the ending is both tragic and very distressing) I walked away from it feeling extremely fortunate to be born in a time and place in which I have complete freedom. For, in a nutshell, what plagued our heroine throughout her entire life was the simple fact that she was trapped being a woman in a man's world (the novel takes place during the mid 19th century in Normandy). You see, Madame B. is no common, run-of-the-mill mademoiselle. On the contrary this gal is blessed with it all - beauty, brains, passion, etc... You name it, she's got it! She is the true embodiment of femininity - possessing style, grace, and a keen eye for artistic beauty, on top of also being a great cook, excellent piano player, having a knack for home-decor, sewing, drawing, etc... There is seemingly nothing she can't do or isn't good at.
Her tragic mistake (which is usually the case with many talented people throughout history) is that she marries the wrong person. Her husband Charles Bovary is a man who 'knew nothing, taught nothing, desired nothing' the complete antithesis of his enlightened wife Emma. Flaubert further defines him early on in the novel: 'Charles's conversation was as flat as any pavement... rousing no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never ventured to the theatre... he couldn't swim, or fence or shoot...' In other words, he's boring as hell, and although he absolutely worships the ground his wife walks on, she, on the other hand, slowly begins to resent this servile, supine, sappy simpleton she finds herself tied down to. To complicate matters even further, she ends up pregnant and giving birth to a girl, Berthe (of course Emma was hoping and praying for a son, for 'a man, at least, is free...'). Depressed and engrossed with the eternal ennui, which inflicts so many women who marry men they feel no passion nor love toward, Emma embarks on her own personal crusade to find that happiness which always seems to be eluding her. A self-indulgent quest that in the end, only leads to catastrophic consequences for both her and her family.
What makes this masterpiece "Madame Bovary" such an interesting read is how totally modern this story is. Emma, desperately seeking an escape from being a lonesome, unfulfilled house-wife and mother, soon becomes a shopaholic, racking up debt all over town. When she is not shopping and spending money, she's having adulterous liaisons with men who... well, you shall have to see for yourself. While I was reading this, I kept thinking to myself, I know women like this! I see them all the time in the area (Silicon Valley, Northern California) in which I live. Beautiful women, who married their far from beautiful husbands for money and security. They don't work, have nannies taking care of the kids, while they cruise around in their new Mercedes or BMW shopping all day and hopping in the sack (although, like Emma, very discreetly) with one man after another. They hang out at upscale bars/restaurants with each other bitching about how difficult their lives are, how much they despise their husbands, their next trip to Europe, etc... while sipping on hundred dollar bottles of wine and comparing plastic surgeons. Talk about a sad, pathetic life... Just like Emma, these cougars are completely empty inside. They can find no happiness from within, and the more material things they possess, the more their insatiable appetites go unfed... There is no price that can be placed for love. No one material item or one night of unbridled, erotic passion can ever replace the true love of a spouse or child.
The first part (there are three parts in all) of this novel was a bit slow, but once you get to part two, be prepared to be totally enraptured with this beautiful story. I am so happy, after all of these years, to have finally read this excellent classic. Truly worthy of five stars!
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