Madame Bovary

9 Pages 2179 Words

res. He has no worldly ambition or status. There was nothing striking about him: he played during recess, worked in study hall, paid attention in class, slept soundly in the dormitory, ate heartily in the refectory (Flaubert 854).
Flaubert purposely gives Charles Bovary such characteristics in order to transform him into a character that is realistic and that people can relate to. In Realist literature, readers begin to witness dull, unimaginative and unremarkable characters like Charles, instead of heroes and mythological figures once seen from the Romanticism. In addition, Charles’s relationship with Emma begins when he first meets her at her house. At first glance, he thinks that “the finest thing about her [is] her eyes” (Flaubert 858) and noticed that “her lips [are] full” (Flaubert 859). Hence, Charles, like many other men, allows a women’s physical aspect drive him. This is also an example of how Charles is representative of a Realist character.
In addition to Charles’s character, Flaubert also emphasizes Realist values through the plot of Madame Bovary. Because Flaubert is trying to represent life as it is really lived as opposed to how it should be lived, he pays much attention to detail. In literature, Realists like to write as if they are writing a documentary, with objective and concrete facts, without idealized fantasies. When Emma and Charles Bovary arrive to Yonville-l’Abbaye, the narrator describes the houses by stating that:
[They] are surrounded by hedges, and their yards are full of scattered outbuildings—cider presses, carriage houses, and distilling sheds standing here and there under thick trees with ladders and poles leaning against their trunks and scythes hooked over their branches. The thatched roofs hide the top third or so of the low windows like fur caps pulled down over eyes, and each windowpane,


Eckardt 3
thick and convex, has bull’s-eye in its center like the bottom of a b...