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Rating: 
Summary: A woman of your dreams?
Review: A beautiful, brilliant book with one large flaw: it was too easy for Emma to cheat on Charles. Charles is a good-hearted, well-meaning but stupifyingly boring person. The book would have been better (and more believable) if the choice to cheat on him would have been more difficult. I love Flaubert, but Charles Bovary is possibly the most uninteresting person in all of literature.
Rating: 
Summary: A beautifully written romantic fantasy that still surprises.
Review: Although a romantic fantasy, this book is a psychological masterpiece. This book caused quite a stir in its day (translated to English in 1886). The way Flaubert portrayed a spoiled adulteress had not been seen in England, and was shocking to many. The genius of the book is Flaubert's plotting, characterization and its vivid descriptions. This takes the novel far past a simple romantic fantasy. The realism that speaks out from these pages, and the unique points of view that Flaubert uses when describing Madame Bovary's scandalous behaviour are what set this novel apart from others. Make no mistake - this book is a masterpiece, and should not be dismissed as just a good story.
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Summary: Victims of Circumstance
Review: As noted by many previous reviewers Flaubert's style is stark and direct, he simply tells us a story in chronological order of events without any moral judgement. Morality in this novel is left open to the reader's judgement and interpretation. Set in the 19th century French countryside it is a tragic tale of a marriage between Emma Rouault and Charles Bovary told in three parts.
Begins with a brief but thorough look at the early life of Charles - his education, career as a "health officer", first marriage, his wife chosen by his mother for her money, a sickly unappealing widow much older than he, then meeting Emma through a call to her father, his wife's timely death. Emma is young and inexperienced, her head filled with romantic fantasies and an active imagination. Their courtship is brief and the story really begins with the marriage of Emma and Charles. Quickly Emma finds herself stuck in a dead existence, not only does Charles lack imagination he is as dull as a post. Flaubert explicitly tells us just how stupid Charles is such as when he goes to a ball and stands for 5 hours watching a card game not knowing what else to do or in the case of the horrible operation on the man with the club foot. Doomed from the start by incompatibility the relationship spirals downward from disillusionment, to an unrequited attraction, a nervous breakdown, move to another town to get away, affairs, child neglect, debt and suicide.
Still a timeless classic worth reading for anyone who feels trapped in circumstances beneath their capacities, in a world too small for them. There was little choice for a woman in the 19th century countryside as Emma reminds her lover, she cannot make her own living in the world or choose to court who she wants. Her great imagination and feeling nature with no outlet for it dooms her to eternal loneliness, controlled by passions that are never satisfied and eventually leads to delusions and debauchery.
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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.
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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.
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Summary: Emma Bovary is closer than you think. (Check the mirror.)
Review: It's amusing to read the few negative reviews of this book. One wonders what the readers would possibly consider GOOD literature! As soon as I finished reading it the first time, I promptly started again from the beginning - something I've never done before. The bare plot is deliberately banal. It's Flaubert's execution, his insight into some of the more complex aspects of human nature and society, and the creation of Emma that mark this as one of the finest (and most engrossing) novels ever written. What makes Emma tick is perhaps more relevant to our own culture and society - revolving, as it does, so entirely around consumerism, escapist entertainments and a credit-based economy - than it was even to Flaubert's. And I have to wonder about anyone who could get through this book and miss that point entirely. To be sure, Emma is an extreme case - but there are plenty like her walking around. (I even saw myself in her, to some extent.) The syndrome is common, but seldom described as lucidly as here. I can see Emma, Mastercard in her hot little hand, fitting right into contemporary American society.
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Summary: The cognitive dissonance of the reader
Review: Madame Bovary is considered one of the greatest of novels. It has called by many the most perfectly done example of the form. Flaubert is considered to be the most painstaking and conscienscious of artists whose search for the right word, the mot juste is legendary. And many have said that Madame Bovary is such a perfectly constructed work that not a single paragraph or even a line can be removed.
The novel is too praised for its precision in description and its symbolic evocation of deeper levels of meaning. The scene- construction is considered superb.
The story of adultery and misplaced passion is one which has echoes in other great works, the Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina and it too has some of the tragic quality of those works. Madame Bovary who Flaubert later said ' c'est moi' about is the provincial woman bored to death by her staid conventional husband and longing in part like Don Quixote through her romantic reading for some great passion. The story of her seduction and of her losing herself to that passion is set against the conventional boundaries of the society in which she lives. The description of how that passion turns into a weariness, and how she becomes for her lover simply another cast- off conquest is in some sense a morality fable about the human heart's inability to realize itself fully in loving and intimate relationship. This side of it I believe reveals a certain kind of limitation in Flaubert, in his understanding of life and love.
The novel has always struck me in its cool, ironic tone as being like the characters themselves fundamentally cruel and selfish. There are books we love I think of 'War and Peace' and ' Don Quixote' and even many far lesser works because we love their main characters , and somehow take hope in them. The unsympathetic nature of Emma Bovary and in fact of all the main characters have always meant for me that despite all the critics praise and all the talk of formal brilliance this work does not have a deep or great place in my heart. There is that is a certain cognitive dissonance between the knowledge of what this book is critically , and to so many readers and what it is to me. If I cannot love the characters I cannot love the book fully however brilliant it be.
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Summary: The Original Desperate Housewife
Review: This book will never make it on the Oprah Classics Booklist...too dark--which is shame. It is an amazing story of a woman, and more amazing--it was written by a man. Where did he get this knowledge? How did he understand Emma? This was in the days before therapy groups and tell-alls. It is also a masterful book about lust and the cult of idols. Since I first read this book I remember what Flaubert warned us of...do not touch the gilt (the gold leaf) on our idols, it comes off on our hands. A warning as we worship at the altar of celebrity. This is a book for today.
Rating: 
Summary: buy the book...but buy a different edition
Review: With the emotional maturity of a fourteen or fifteen year old girl or possibly just the sociopathic tendencies, Emma (Madame Bovary) is at the same time fascinating and detestable. She is remarkably similar to many stories of ex wives I have heard over the years and, if living in this century would certainly have had a string of husbands, using and abusing each one while they loved her. This story does not have the repentant air of Moll Flanders (Defoe) and I would not recommend it to a young girl. That being said, it is not the `dirty' book I expected. Emma is the kind of person who idealizes what she does not have, expects love to come with thunderbolts and poetry and to stay that way for all time. From her education at the convent to her life on her father's farm, to her marriage to Charles Bovary and through two prolonged affairs with other men, reality can never live up to Emma's expectations of what it should be like. Once the novelty wears off, she thinks there is something wrong with where she is or who she is with. In her mind, she feels that she deserves this imagined ideal and directs her hatred on whomever she feels is standing between her and the experience of the ideal. This, unfortunately, is most often her loving husband, Charles (although her parents, lovers and money lenders are not immune from her contempt either). Charles continually gets a bad rap from reviewers for being stupid and cowardly. I found him to be neither extreme. Not a dullard, he is naïve and trusting. He is very much a middle of the road man in my eyes - not the cream of the crop but not the dregs either. Just your average everyday man making a living and supporting a wife who he thinks the absolute world of. There is a strong possibility that this is a fictionalized account of a real woman and this is an important point for me. If simply fictional, it is so realistic it is depressing. There is no author's invention to make the reader feel better about what has happened.
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