It is no accident that, except for matters of pacing, Madame Bovary reads like it was written yesterday its concerns reflect and in many ways anticipate our own. The book's ongoing renown, however, goes deeper, hinging on the fact that Flaubert succeeded in creating a new literary form: the realistic novel, the precursor to an entire genre of books that takes the commonplace as its subject.

All charges were eventually dismissed, but-as it has ever been-the novel's cachet was assured by the publicity generated by the trial. The publication of the novel, which first appeared in installments in La Revue de Paris in 1856, was initially contested by the French government, which charged Flaubert, his printer, and his publisher with blasphemy and offense against public morals. (Interestingly, the poet Charles Baudelaire, ever the perspicacious reader, also discerned some masculine qualities in Emma, which led him to characterize her as a 'bizarre androgyne.')Īlong the way to telling the story of a small-town girl, a love addict and shopaholic who dreamed big and ended up swallowing arsenic to escape her menacing creditors, Flaubert scandalized the cultural arbiters of his time. ('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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