Madame Bovary

Through the writing and publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, Flaubert became renowned for incorporating realism into literature. Literary realism is a literary movement that represents reality through the mundane details of everyday life, thus presenting these mundane details as representative of humanity without added dramatization. Literary realism seeks to be objective about characters and often deals with ethics, virtue, and extremely morally gray characters without judgment.

Madame Bovary is an exemplary piece of literary realism. Emma Bovary’s life is relatable because it is mundane. It captures the experience of thousands of women in the 19th century. Emma’s conflicts, both internal and external, are realistic and yet significant precisely because they are common. Everyone endures boredom and, to varying extents, it is a human universal to question the course of life and mull over the roads not taken. Many people fall into traps of unhappy marriages and financial struggles. There is nothing notable about Emma Bovary, and this relatability makes her a tragic heroine whose struggles are worth close analysis. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert incorporates imagery to depict the world around Emma, emphasizing the simple setting of provincial life in France. What’s more, Flaubert creates a novel that is objective about its characters: He allows the reader to form their own judgments. Flaubert does this by making Emma, Charles, Rodolphe, Léon, Monsieur Homais, and even Monsieur Lheureux simultaneously problematic and utterly human. It is difficult to judge any of these characters as either “good or bad” because they all have flaws, and they all have reasons for being the way that they are. Through these realistic depictions, Flaubert creates complexity in the mundane.

Gustave Flaubert’s contributions to early literary realism inspired authors such as Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee. Flaubert is also attributed with helping to establish the importance of symbolism in literature and literary positivism, in which facts are presented without judgment. In turn, this helped to develop the shift toward psychological analysis in literature and away from overt morality tales: Because Flaubert tells Emma’s story in a matter-of-fact, non-judgmental way, readers are able to project their own psychology onto the characters and analyze Emma through the many internal and external forces that influence the development of the psyche.