5/24/2023 0 Comments Madame bovary![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ("If my book is good," Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet, "it will gently caress many a feminine wound: More than one woman will smile as she recognizes herself in it.") How a 30-year-old bachelor-one who led a mostly hermetic existence with his widowed mother in provincial Rouen in nineteenth-century France, agonized over every word, and read his work-in-progress aloud to himself as well as to a small audience of attentive male friends-came to invent a woman who is recognizably one of us, whose every gesture and passing thought strikes us as quintessentially female, is among the great artistic mysteries, a literary act of gender-bending if ever there was one. ![]() She is every woman who has felt that prosaic reality isn't quite what she bargained for, that marriage is a letdown, and that her specialness goes unappreciated. Madame Bovary," the writer Gustave Flaubert famously said of his most indelible creation, Emma Bovary, the very desperate housewife of Yonville, " c'est moi." The truth is that Emma, with her visions of a grander life and resplendent passions, is me, as well-and you, too, no doubt. ![]()
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