Madame Bovary

4 Pages 1118 Words

As a young man, Flaubert was well aware of incompetence in the medical profession, and the middle class ‘lip service’, which her portrayed through Homais in Madame Bovary, and began to despise the mendacity of middle class all the more as he embraced the writings the likes of Rousseau, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. In Madame Bovary, Emma has a certain romantic aspect similar to Flaubert that is a longing for things to be perfect. This perfectionism was arguably an obsession for Flaubert as evidenced by the meticulous care and time he took to write this work. In college, Flaubert fell victim to excessive romantic ideals, such as those portrayed in Emma and had a failed marriage with an older woman. His personal attitudes about love are portrayed though Emma. After his divorce, he engaged in a relationship with the poetess Louise Colet that was mainly based on letter writing, just as Emma’s affairs with Rodolphe and Leon rely very much on written correspondence. This relationship with Miss Colet, in which the two saw each other only six times in the first two years, illustrates clearly the fact that Flaubert, like Emma Bovary, liked the idea of having a lover more than actually having one. In 1844, after developing a nervous disorder that required him to retire to his family estate, Through the isolation and boredom of this provincial life that Emma Bovary was created not only as a representation of Flaubert’s romantic longings, but as a universal example of a woman bored with a mediocre life. He created a type of character, not a specific individual. He claimed that Emma Bovary was “suffering and weeping at this very moment in twenty villages in France”. Flaubert is quoted as having said “Madame Bovary c’est moi”, “I am Madame Bovary”, meaning that he, himself was possessed the same romantic traits as Emma. Part of the character Emma Bovary, is also based off the true story of Eugene Delemare, who was ...