Rating: 
Summary: Ahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: When I read this book I felt as if time had stopped. It was so, so boring. Emma Bovary was a psycho. I hate this book so much. I never been to hell ,and I don't planon ever going. However, I think I know what it must feel like after reading that book. Oh the horrors!!!! The memories are coming back. I must stop now before I experience that hell once again. Please stop the madness. No more Madame Bovary!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Madame Bovary exemplifies the essence of XIX century realism
Review: Flaubert's Bovary is perpetual, pervasive. Through her eyes, we see the world as it is: filled with universal virtues and vices that lead to either happiness or self-
destruction. Madame Bovary captures the crystallized essence of the human spirit: unpredictable and changing, yet
tangible and real. Her passions are those that move the
soul, but not the mind; she never considers,she simply
acts. Beautiful and uncanny, Emma Bovary's view of the
world eventually becomes the harbinger of her own destiny,
one that she always fails to accept. But, her own actions
never deviate from reality; her character is the very re-
presentation of human life. Immersed into a world that
affects her own personality, Emma conquers a realism that
is always perceptible, that reflects the nature of her own
fortune. In effect, she becomes the product of Tolstoi's Anna Karenina and Shakespeare's Juliet, for her own destiny
is controlled by passions that are never satisfied, never
fulfilled. With Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert presents the strange
reality of life. He moves through her his own vision, his
own perception. In the process, he joins Dickens,Tolstoi,
and Dostoyevski, thus becoming not a writer, but a window
that enables us to see face to face what lies behind the
apparencies of life,a gateway that connects us with all
that moves us to and from our ambitions, our own desires.
Rating:
Summary: In Love With Love and Doomed From the Start
Review: In this masterpiece of French literature, Gustave Flaubert tells the tale of Emma Bovary, née Roualt, an incurably romantic woman who finds herself trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage in a prosaic bourgeois French village, Yonville-l'Abbaye. Her attempts to escape the tedium of her life through a series of adulterous affairs are thwarted by the reality that the men she chooses to love are shallow and self-centered and thus are unable to love anyone but themselves.
In love with a love that can never be and dreadfully overstretched financially, Emma finds herself caught in a downward spiral that can only end in tragedy.
Part of the difficulty, and the pleasure, of reading Madame Bovary comes from the fact the Flaubert refuses to embed his narrative with a moral matrix; he refuses, at least explicitly, to tell the reader, what, if any, moral lesson he should draw from the text.
It is this lack of moral viewpoint that made Madame Bovary shocking to Flaubert's contemporaries, so much so that Flaubert found himself taken to court for the novel's offenses to public and religious decency. Although today's readers will find no such apparent scandals in the book, they will still be challenged to make sense of both Emma and her story.
It is quite common to see Emma Bovary as silly, extravagant and much too romantically inclined. An avid consumer of romantic literature (a habit into which the heroine was indoctrinated in her convent school upbringing), Emma has made the morbid mistake of buying into the notion of romantic love in its fullest sense, and the mortal mistake of believing she can reach its fulfillment in her own life.
As such, Emma Bovary becomes a tragic figure of almost mythic proportion. Far from being foolish and self-indulgent, Emma is the victim of her own fecund imagination. A lesser woman would have been satisfied in the constrained world Emma inhabits, a world of sewing and teas and parties. But Emma is possessed of both splendid passions and tremendous energy; an artist and a rebel in her challenge to the priorities and ideals of her age.
Madame Bovary is an unusual novel in the sense that it has given its name to its own psychological condition: bovarysme, the condition in which we delude ourselves as to who and what we really are and as to life's potential to fulfill.
In this sense, Madame Bovary becomes the story of one woman's faulty perception of reality. In an early version of the novel, Flaubert included a scene at the ball at La Vaubyessard in which Emma is seen looking out at the landscape surrounding the house through colored panes of glass, a scene clearly meant as a representation of Emma's projection onto the world of an illusory and faulty model of reality.
Emma cannot, or will not, see the world as it is, since she is constantly imposing onto it, and herself, the criteria of romantic literature. Flaubert has thus written a supremely romantic novel about the dangers of reading supremely romantic novels!
Romantics, Flaubert seems to be saying, have no reasonable hope of ever seeing their fondest dreams come to fruition.
This is, indeed, a recurrent pattern in the novel: Emma dreams of one thing but gets something else entirely. Marriage, motherhood, and ultimately, adultery, all fall short of Emma's expectations and she appears to be a woman doomed to one disappointment after another.
Although Emma believes her marriage will fulfill her romantic expectations, Charles certainly fails to live up to Emma's hopes, and even Rodolphe, with his expensive riding boots, gloves and substantial income is eventually considered coarse and vulgar by Emma. Léon, the very essence of the young, romantic artist, leaves Emma when he is made premier clerc, and Emma finds she much come to the realization that even adultery contains "toutes les platitudes du mariage."
The foregoing certainly begs the question: are Emma's expectations too high or is life fundamentally deficient?
The society portrayed in Madame Bovary is one stratified in terms of class, and this is a book about the bourgeoisie, a portrait of class in the process of finding and defining itself and its role in society.
The novel is filled with scenes of buying and selling and even personal relationships fall under the sway of financial considerations.
What is particularly notable about Emma is her extravagance: she spares no thought for expense and consumes far beyond her means. Rejecting good economic management, thrift and hard work, Emma dedicates herself to style extraordinaire and lavishes expensive presents on her "man of the moment."
The world described in Madame Bovary is an extremely enclosed and restricted one and images of entrapment are abundant throughout the book. Emma's first marital home is described as "trop étroite;" her marriage to Charles is likened to "l'ardillon pointu de cette courroie complexe qui la bouclait de tous les côtes."
These restrictive images clearly demonstrate how confining Emma finds her world. Trapped in the dusty and damp home with its "éternel jardin," the highly imaginative Emma sees no escape.
It is interesting to note that when Emma does attempt to escape the confines of femininity, society and marriage through adultery, many of the scenes take place al fresco. (The first act of adultery with Rodolphe takes place in a forest and her later relationship with Léon contains a scene on a river.)
Later scenes, however, reveal the degradation inherent in Emma's acts and she finds herself confined to bedrooms that are sorely reminiscent of the restrictions of her married life. The fiacre ride with Léon in Rouen, in particular, is anticipatory of entrapment. For Emma, adultery eventually becomes as much of a prison as is marriage and family life.
Another recurrent image is that of the window. This can be interpreted as Emma's desire for escape or as a reaffirmation of her entrapment and powerlessness. The window opens onto a space of which poor Emma can only sit and dream; it serves as a frame for both her dissatisfaction and her fantasies.
In order to enjoy Madame Bovary to the fullest extent, it must be read in the original French. This is an absolute for Flaubert was an author who made full use of the potential offered by his native tongue. Although many translations are superb, nothing can match the original French in its poetic prose and lush descriptions.
Many interpretations of this wonderful and timeless novel are possible and all, no doubt, hold some validity. Therein lies the book's genius. Of one thing, though, we have no doubt: luscious Emma Bovary was, indeed, a victim. Whether of herself or of a repressive society matters little.
Rating:
Summary: Madame Bovary is us
Review: I read the Oxford (Gerard Hopkins) translation which I didn't actually think was very good. Despite its 1981 copyright date the language had a stilted, perhaps "nineteenth century" feel to it. If you have to translate something anyway, may as well translate it into the modern idiom! The good news is that the book itself is so good, it shines through a few odd English words or confusing sentences.
Madame Bovary is wonderful precisely because Madame Bovary is so very unheroic and even despicable. Who hasn't wanted to escape his or her own life at one time or another? Madame Bovary is a woman deeply unhappy with her lot in life, and while we may sympathize with her alienation at times, she most certainly does not achieve the wisdom or heroism so often found in tragic characters. Flaubert describes a world in which all the characters are a little ridiculous (the book is frequently witty) and sometimes horrible and yet, very unusually, there seemed to be no character or even authorial voice that was somehow "above" this world, rather we are all intimately of it.
