The story
Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (Moeurs de province) by Gustave Flaubert was published in installments in the Revue de Paris from October to December 1856 and as a book in April 1857. Emma Bovary, the wife of a dull country doctor in Normandy, dreams of romance and luxury drawn from the novels she read as a girl. She takes lovers, runs up huge debts to a merchant and finally poisons herself with arsenic. The story is told with a cool, ironic distance.
Flaubert (1821 to 1880) spent about five years on the book, obsessively searching for the 'right word' (le mot juste) in each sentence. The novel appeared in the France of Napoleon III, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, and it turns on a society of small ambitions and illusions. Emma is a female Don Quixote, ruined by reading romances. Flaubert pioneered 'free indirect style', in which a character's thoughts merge with the narrator's voice. The state prosecuted Flaubert and the Revue's editors in January 1857 for offending public morals, and a court acquitted them in February.
The trial made the book famous. Within months it was a bestseller, and it became a model of realism and of the idea that a novel is a work of art made through style. Writers from Henry James to Nabokov admired it. Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal was prosecuted in the same year, but he was convicted.
Why it mattered
- The novel made style and form a central concern of the novel, influencing Henry James, Joyce and Nabokov.
- The trial became a landmark in the fight over censorship and the freedom of literature.
- Free indirect style, which Flaubert refined, is now a basic tool of fiction.
Sources
- Madame Bovary Britannica
- Gustave Flaubert Britannica
- Censorship in the 2nd Empire: A Double Standard Indiana University
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