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Dec 31, 2012 | ISBN 9780451418500 Buy *This format is not eligible to earn points towards the Reader Rewards program
Dec 01, 2001 | ISBN 9781101143773 Buy
Sep 17, 2008 | 174 Minutes Buy
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Dec 31, 2012 | ISBN 9780451418500
Dec 01, 2001 | ISBN 9781101143773
Sep 17, 2008 | ISBN 9781598876949
174 Minutes
Both embodiment and victim of the self-satisfied nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie, Emma Bovary lives in pursuit of something more, like the world depicted in the romance novels that have come to define her. Emma is oblivious to the realities of life, and her romantic delusions and search for transcendence through sex, money, and social position serve only to drive the increasingly troubled woman into an irreversible moral, emotional, and spiritual decline. That the author depicted his heroine in neutral terms, without condemnation, resulted in obscenity charges from the French courts, which likened the “lascivious” Madame Bovary’s “lack of restraint” to “a woman who throws off all garments.” Exactly. Madame Bovary remains one of the most daring and liberating novels ever written. Includes The Trial of Madame Bovary Translated by Mildred Marmur With an Introduction by Robin Morgan and a New Afterword by Frederick Brown
For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shocks us today about Flaubert’s devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary, one experiences a work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half after its creation.
Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen, France, and did not leave his birth city until he was 19 when he went to study law in Paris. After three years, however, Flaubert abandoned law and began writing. His first finished work was… More about Gustave Flaubert
“Possibly the most beautifully written book ever composed [and] the most important novel of the century.”—Frank O’Connor“Perhaps we identify with Emma because we too feel an emptiness at the center of things—an emptiness we try to fill with books, with fantasies, with sex, with things. Her yearning is nothing more or less than the human condition in the modern world. Her search for ecstasy is ours.”—Erica Jong
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