Madame Bovary
For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its
contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried
for "offenses against morality and religion." What shocks us today
about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed
by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the
poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose
(marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis
Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as
vital as its doomed heroine.
In reading Madame Bovary, one experiences a
work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half
after its creation.
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