Madame Bovary Summary: Plot, Characters and Themes of Flaubert's Novel
What Madame Bovary is about
Madame Bovary is the debut novel of the French writer Gustave Flaubert. Its full title is Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners. It first appeared in instalments in the Revue de Paris in late 1856. It came out as a book in two volumes in April 1857. The story is set in the towns and villages of Normandy. It follows Emma Bovary, a young wife who lives beyond her means to escape the boredom of provincial life.
The book opens with Charles Bovary rather than Emma. He is a shy, oddly dressed young man who does poorly at medical school. Rather than becoming a full physician, he qualifies as an officier de santé in the Public Health Service. He marries a widow his mother has chosen for him and sets up a practice in the village of Tostes. While setting a broken leg at a local farm, he meets the farmer's daughter, Emma. She was educated in a convent. Her ideas of life come from popular novels, and she longs for luxury and romance. When Charles's first wife dies, he courts Emma and they marry.
Married life does not match the books Emma has read. After a grand ball where she dances with a Vicomte, she finds her days dull and grows listless. Charles moves the household to the larger market town of Yonville-l'Abbaye, hoping a change of scene will help. There Emma has a daughter, Berthe, but motherhood disappoints her. She becomes infatuated with Léon Dupuis, a law student who shares her love of literature and music. She does not fully act on her feelings before he leaves for Paris.
Emma hopes Charles will make his name when he tries a new operation to cure the clubfoot of Hippolyte, a servant at the local inn. The operation goes disastrously wrong and the leg has to be amputated. From then on, Emma holds her husband in contempt. She begins an affair with a rich landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger, and later a second affair with Léon. All the while she buys clothes and luxury goods on credit from a merchant named Lheureux. The debts keep growing.
The main characters
Emma Bovary is the centre of the book. She is beautiful and restless. She judges her own life against the romances she has read, and it always falls short.
Charles Bovary is her husband. He is devoted to Emma but dull and limited in her eyes. His failed operation on Hippolyte marks a turning point in how she sees him.
Rodolphe Boulanger is a wealthy, rakish landowner. His affair with Emma lasts four years. When she insists they run away together, he ends things with a letter hidden at the bottom of a basket of apricots. The shock leaves her gravely ill and she turns briefly to religion.
Léon Dupuis first appears as a young law student. Years later Emma meets him again at the opera in Rouen, where he now works, and the affair begins.
Lheureux is the merchant who sells Emma goods on credit. He arranges for her to gain power of attorney over Charles's estate.
Homais is the pharmacist in Yonville. He is a corrupt social climber who competes with Charles's medical practice.
The themes
Love sits at the heart of the novel. Emma wants the kind of passion she found in fiction. Each relationship promises it and then lets her down.
Identity runs alongside this. Emma keeps trying to become someone else, whether a society lady at a ball or a heroine in a love affair. Her spending on clothes and luxuries is part of that effort.
Class and money shape everything. The book is subtitled Provincial Manners, and it shows small-town ambition and the pull of a grander world. Credit lets Emma reach for that world, but only for a while.
Morality is the most debated theme. The novel shows adultery and debt without pausing to lecture. That plainness is what put it on trial.
How it ends (spoilers)
Stop here if you want to avoid the ending. Lheureux calls in the debt. Emma begs several people for money and is turned away by all of them, Rodolphe included. In despair she swallows arsenic and dies in agony. Charles is broken by grief. He stops working and lives by selling his possessions until he dies. Berthe goes to her grandmother, who soon dies. She then lives with a poor aunt, who sends her to work in a cotton mill. Meanwhile Homais thrives. The final line of the novel reveals that he has been awarded the Legion of Honour.
Why it still matters
The book was notorious before it was even finished. While it was being serialised, public prosecutors attacked it as obscene. Flaubert stood trial in January 1857 and was acquitted on 7 February. When the two-volume edition appeared that April, it became a bestseller. Eleanor Marx translated it into English in 1886.
It is now seen as a key work of literary realism. It is ranked among Flaubert's masterpieces and among the most influential literary works in history. It suits readers who like close character studies and stories about the gap between dreams and ordinary life. It also rewards anyone curious about how a novel could once be put on trial.
