Madame Bovary

The publication of Gustave Flaubert’s MADAME BOVARY in mid-nineteenth century France marked a new era in literary history. So sensational was public reaction that the author was brought to trial for obscenity. Flaubert, however, was acquitted. The novel became an immediate bestseller—one that soon gathered the praise of the notable masters of his day. Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric in his rendering of it. — from FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES, by Arthur Symons