The 1857 publication of Madame Bovary, with its vivid depictions of sex and adultery, incited a backlash of immorality charges. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor’s wife bored and unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. She embarks upon a series of affairs in search of passion and excitement, but is unable to achieve the splendid life for which she yearns. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a downward spiral that inexorably leads to ruin and self-destruction.
Along with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s tragic novel stands as a brilliant portrayal of infidelity, an incisive psychological portrait of a woman torn between duty and desire. Written with acute attention to telling detail, Madame Bovary not only exposes the emptiness of one woman’s bourgeois existence and failure to fill that void with fantasies, sex, and material objects. Emma’s thirst for life mirrors the universal human impulse for idealized fulfillment.
Introduction and Notes by Chris Kraus
Translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling
About the Author
Hailed as the originator of the modern novel, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was a pioneer of literary realism. He was painstaking in his creative process, spending as much as an entire week on a single page. Flaubert's masterpiece, Madame Bovary, was five years in the writing; upon its 1857 publication, the author was charged with obscenity. With his acquittal, Madame Bovary became a bestseller, and it remains among the most frequently taught works of French literature.
Chris Kraus is the author of the novels I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, and Torpor, and a collection of essays, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. She is co-editor, with Sylvere Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti, of the independent press Semiotext(e). She teaches in the graduate program of the San Francisco Art Institute.
