Amazon.com description: Product Description: Synopsis:

Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

Spoiler Ahead:

Emma is a rather silly, very passionate ( too much so), bored, uneducated to the reality of the real world, young woman, who believes in the romantic novels she reads, moonlight walks, eerie, forbidding castles, dangerous flights into unknown, and strange lands, always trying to escape their frightening captors... brave, handsome men, that are faithful to their beautiful, virtuous women, fighting the evil, monstrous, corrupt, but attractive libertines , and the hero rescuing them in the nick of time. She is dramatic and sensitive in the egoistic sense. Her happiness is entirely dependent on outside sources and she is ruled by her desires and longings.

Emma lives on a farm, in mid nineteenth century France, her widower, remote, still gentle, father, Monsieur Rouault, anxious to get rid of his useless daughter, and though he enjoys the work, is not very good at it ( farming), but a considerably better businessman, being an only child, she wants excitement. Hating the monotonous country, dreaming about the titillating city, Paris , and the fabulous people and things there. Yet meeting and marrying the dull, common , hardworking, good doctor, Charles Bovary, who fixed her father's broken leg, he adores his pretty wife, life has to be better elsewhere, she thinks, so agreed to the marriage proposal.

Moving to the small, tedious village of Tostes , Emma regrets soon, her hasty marriage. Even the birth of her daughter, Berthe, who she neglects, not a loving mother, the maid raises her, has no effect on her gloomy moods.

She craves romance, her husband is not like the men in her books, ordinary looking, not fearless, or intelligent, words do not inspire , coming out of his mouth, he lacks the intense feelings, she wants. After moving to another quiet village, Yonville (Ry), clueless Bovary, thinks the change of scenery, will lift his listless wife, out of her funk.

The local, wealthy landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger, sees the pretty Emma, senses her unhappiness, and seduces her, a veteran at this sort of thing, he has had many mistresses, in the past. At first the secret, quite perilous, thrilling, rendezvous behind the back of Emma's house, clandestine notes, reckless walks in the predawn mornings, to his Chateau, reminds Emma of her novels... but everything becomes routine, no better than married life. Rodolphe gets annoyed, unexcited, he also doesn't feel like the beginning, sends a letter breaking off the affair.

The emotional Emma, becomes very ill, her husband fears that she may die, puzzled at the sudden sickness. A slow recover ensues, Emma still has the same husband, starts another affair with a clerk, shy Leon Dupuis, younger than she , more grateful too, not like the previous lover, the erratic Madame Bovary is in control. In the nearby town, Rouen, in Normandy, they meet every week, until this becomes uninteresting, the spendthrift woman, behind her trusting, loving, naive , husband's back, drive them, to ruin, through her unreasonable buying sprees . Emma Bovary learns much too late, that the only person who loves her, is the unremarkable man she married.

The descriptions of the Normandy countryside are vivid, and actually very accurate even today.

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