madame bovary
...mp, and even traveling to Egypt. On his return he began to write Madame Bovary, which took Flaubert five years to write. The first time his writing appeared was in the Revue in 1856 and then in the form of a book in 1857. Soon after writing Madame Bovary Flaubert was prosecuted but escaped conviction, which wasn’t very common during the official censorship of the Second Empire. In the 1860’s, Flaubert was a successful writer and intellectual at the court of Napoleon III. Later in 1862 he completed SALAMMBO which was an inspiration to the opera of Philippe Fenelon in 1998. In 1869 he wrote L’Education Sentimentale which was set in France during the Revolution of 1848. Just as in Flaubert’s own life the story depicted a love relationship between a young man and his older married lover. La Tentation De Saint Antoine in 1874 was a story he based on a fourth century Christian anchorite that lived in the Egyptian desert that suffered from philosophical and physical temptations. Flaubert’s next novel he began to write was Bouvard et Pecuchet, but the novel was never finished before he died. Before he died Flaubert lived a harsh life in relative poverty and was known as the “hermit of Croisset”. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage on May 8, 1880. The novel Madame Bovary started out with one of the main characters of the story Charles Bovary as a young boy who was unable to fit in at his new school. As a young man, he was very dull. He didn’t pass his first medical exam, but barely made it becoming a doctor. Charles Bovary was a country doctor, nice, but plain, dull, and average. He was an awful doctor who managed simple cases because he wasn’t capable of performing complicated operations. His mother, the elder Madame Bovary, was an angry traditional woman who spoiled Charles as a child. She married him off to a widow who died soon after, leaving Charles hardly any money. Charles fell in love with Emma, the daughter of a patient. Emma Bovary the novel's protagonist was the Madame Bovary of the stories title. A country girl who was schooled in a convent and married Charles Bovary at a young age, she believed in idealistic romantic illusions, of sophistication and passion. After the wedding, they set up a home in Tostes, where Charles had his practice. Unfortunately, marriage didn’t live up to Emma's expectations. Ever since she lived in the convent as a young girl, she dreamed of marriage as a solution to all her problems. She grew bored and depressed when she compared her dreams to the dull reality of village life, and eventually made herself ill. When Emma had become pregnant, Charles decided to move to a different town in hopes of restoring her health. So they moved to a town named Yonville. In the new town, the Bovary's met Homais, the town pharmacist. He was a snobbish, self-centered man of the bourgeois class who helped Charles become established as a doctor in the town. Homais was superficial and obnoxious. After Emma attended a ball at the home of a rich nobleman, she had begun to dream constantly of a different, more sophisticated life. Charles’ mother does not like Emma but he does not seem to care. Despite his deep love for Emma, he doesn't understand her. Her looks and the way she dressed fascinated him, but he remained ignorant to her personality. His adoration often led him to act with innocence. He failed to notice her affair with Leon Dupuis, a young lawyer. When Emma gave birth to her daughter Berthe, motherhood disappointed her, and she continued to be unhappy. Romantic feelings blossomed between Emma and Leon. She refused to sleep with him but regretted it after he left town. He fell in love with her but moved away to Paris to study law, partly because he believed their love was impossible for them to act on as long as she remained married. She then met Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy landowner who seduced Emma to pass the time. Rodolphe was selfish, and manipulative. He had many lovers and believed Emma was no more sincere than the rest of them. They had a brief and passionate affair which was poorly kept secret and had become the subjects of town’s gossip. Charles and Homais tried to operate on the leg of the crippled servant at the inn in Yonville, Hippolyte. His leg developed gangrene and had to be removed by another doctor. Disgusted with her husband's lack of skill, Emma threw herself even more passionately into...