Flaubert: Madame Bovary

Book excerpt: Madame Bovary was one of the most influential literary achievements of the nineteenth century and gained immediate notoriety through its questioning of marriage, sex, and the role of women. Stephen Heath shows how this landmark text captures and articulates a fundamental experience of the post-romantic, commercial-industrial, emotional-democratic period. He explains how Madame Bovary represents Flaubert's intense personal engagement with the tragedy of bourgeois culture, while at the same time exemplyfying the author's commitment to the impersonality of Art and the transcendence of style. The novel is set in its literary and historical context and there is a guide to further reading.