Madame Bovary (1856) is a story of hasty marriages and female independence. The title character is a young woman of some distinction living in provincial North France. Flaubert, renowned for his sense of le mot juste, creates a convincing portrait of Madame Bovary, the pressures put on her by her parents to find a suitable husband as well as her own consciousness that is skillfully blended into the narrative. This is Flaubert's first novel and perhaps best work, despite receiving criticism for its sexualised themes when it was published.
Emma Bovary marries a doctor who soon becomes a notable figure in society for his expertise, yet Emma does not find much fulfillment in this recognition and her mind soon wanders into vice and temptation. Charles Bovary, husband of Emma is oblivious to her frustrations and mistakes her reticence as a symptom of illness. This is where Flaubert is successful in portraying the male ignorance of complex female emotions. The novel is an exemplary work of gender portrayal in literature, Flaubert gives a convincing 3rd person narrative that does not cloud the work with sentiment but instead delivers a steady plot that is interspersed with revealing thoughts, most notably Emma's question of: 'Why, dear God, did I marry him?'
The decline of the Bovary family is caused by Emma's overspending on luxuries and later on a string of affairs, all brought on by the ennui she feels towards her marriage with Charles. Yet, Emma Bovary's frustration is the result of Charles' mundane, cyclic existence, the pair being unsuited to each other.
Emma is portrayed a beautiful young woman who has a host of admirers willing to marry her, yet her decision to marry Charles is due to both her fickle nature and her independent mindset. It is this attribute of the character of Emma Bovary that make the work revolutionary, in the same vein as Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Jane Eyre. The idea of female independence was controversial during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it is for this reason that Flaubert may be categorized as proto-Feminist. This being said, the novel still has dominant male characters who are in charge of money and business matters, yet behind this is the struggle of Emma Bovary as she submits to the temptations put before her.
Madame Bovary is written in lucid and at times beautifully poetic prose that is perhaps easier to digest than Proust's lengthy, digressive monologues. The plot has all the features of a Romantic novel, particularly in its tragic end, where the reader learns the consequences of an unhappy marriage and an incarcerated soul.
