What is the name of the main character Madame Bovary? Emma Bovary from the novel Madame Bovary. The image of Emma Bovary (characterization). The image of the province: the morals of the petty-bourgeois province as typical circumstances of personality formation

The novel “Madame Bovary” is the most famous work of the French prose writer Gustave Flaubert, a classic example of realism in literature and, according to critics of the 21st century, one of the most significant novels of all times.

“Madame Bovary” (in some translations “Madame Bovary”) was published in 1856 in the pages of the thematic literary magazine “Revue de Paris”. For its naturalism, the novel was criticized and declared “immoral,” and its author was sent to trial. Fortunately, Flaubert and Madame Bovary were acquitted. A modern reader is unlikely to find anything provocative, much less immoral, in Flaubert's novel. The work is a textbook and is included in the required list of literature for school and university courses.

The great love of Charles Bovary

France. Rouen. 1827 The young doctor Charles Bovary drags out a joyless married life next to his ugly, grumpy wife, whom he agreed to marry at the instigation of his mother. Charles’s mother was attracted by the substantial dowry of her future passion; Madame Bovary, as usual, was not worried about her son’s happiness.

But one day the gray everyday life of Charles Bovary sparkled with unknown colors. For the first time in his life he fell in love! His heart was once and for all captured by the daughter of Father Rouault, a patient of Charles, whose farm was located next door. Emma (that was the name of Rouault's young daughter) was smart and beautiful - dark smooth hair, a slender figure in the girth of sophisticated dresses, she was a pupil of the Ursuline monastery, a wonderful dancer, a needlewoman and a master of performing touching tunes on the piano.

Charles's visits to Rouault are becoming more frequent, and the nagging of his legal wife is even more persistent and caustic. Charles Bovary's love story risked turning into a tragedy, but the grumpy wife died suddenly, giving way to the young and beautiful. Having barely endured the time allotted for marital mourning, Charles marries Emma.

Blissful times are coming in Charles's life. He idolizes his wife and is ready to drown in the folds of her dress. The same cannot be said about Emma. When the solemn excitement subsided and the wedding dress was tightly locked in the closet, the young Madame Bovary began to languish. Her husband now seemed to her boring, mediocre, weak-willed, married life gray and dull, and provincial existence gloomy and joyless. Madame Bovary was frankly bored.

Reading romance novels, young Mademoiselle Rouault imagined marriage completely differently. She imagined herself as the mistress of an ancient castle, waiting in the chambers for her husband. Here he is returning from a dangerous military campaign, she rushes towards him, clings to his broad, courageous chest and melts in his strong arms... The reality of the cruel disappointed Madame Bovary. Little by little she began to waste away and get sick. Frightened Charles blamed everything on the unfavorable climate of the town of Tost, where the young family moved after the wedding. It is decided - he and Emma move to Yonville and start life anew.

Emma was inspired by the move, but after a short acquaintance with Yonville, the girl realized that this town was the same hopeless hole as Rouen. The Bovary couple meet a few neighbors - the narcissistic pharmacist Homais, the merchant and part-time moneylender Mr. Leray, the local priest, the innkeeper, the policeman and others. In a word, with a provincial and narrow-minded audience. The only bright spot for Emma was the notary's assistant Leon Dupuis.

This blond young man with long, girlishly curled eyelashes and a timid blush on his cheeks stood out positively among the entire Yonville society. Emma could talk with him for hours about literature, music, and painting. Dupuis really liked Emma, but he did not dare to show his feelings towards a married woman. Moreover, Bovary just had a daughter. True, madam wanted a boy. When the girl was born, she named her Bertha, gave her to the nurse and completely forgot about the child, always remaining cold towards this strange little creature. All her thoughts were occupied by the forbidden Leon Dupuis. Leon's departure to Paris was a real tragedy for Madame Bovary. She almost went crazy with grief, but then Rodolphe Boulanger appeared.

The neighboring landowner Rodolphe Boulanger brought his servant to be examined by the doctor Bovary. Rodolphe was a well-built thirty-four-year-old bachelor. Confident, assertive, courageous, he quickly fell in love with the inexperienced Emma. At every opportunity, the couple went on horseback rides, indulging in lovemaking in a house on the edge of the forest.

Emma was beside herself with a new feeling. She painted romantic continuations of her love adventure and elevated the landowner Boulanger to the rank of a medieval knight. Over time, Rodolphe began to become alarmed by the pressure of his new mistress. Emma was too desperate and could compromise both of them. Moreover, Bovary demanded from him absurd vows of eternal love and devotion.

Rodolphe did not want to leave pretty Emma, but when she started talking about escaping, Boulanger gave up. Promising to take her with him, at the last moment he sent Emma a letter in a basket of apricots. The note said that he would go on the trip himself, no longer wanting to continue his relationship with the married Emma Bovary.

Another love disappointment caused Emma a serious illness. She lay in bed for more than a month. Her first appearance after illness took place in Rouen. Her husband bought Emma tickets to the opera Lucia de Lemermoor. Poor Bovary did not suspect that his wife would meet Leon Dupuis there.

This time the lovers no longer held back their feelings. From that day on, under the guise of attending music courses, Emma went to Leon’s Rouen apartment. However, Madame Bovary's happiness was not destined to last long. For many years, Emma had one weakness - wastefulness. Bovary spent crazy sums on jewelry, outfits, gifts for her lovers and hobbies, which she abandoned as quickly as she became passionate about them. To hide the waste from her husband, Emma took out a loan from the moneylender Leray. At the time of the Rouen affair, the amount of her debt was so great that it was possible to pay off the bills only by taking a complete inventory of her property.

Desperate Emma turned to Leon for help, but he, showing cowardice, refused to help Bovary. He was already beginning to be burdened by the too-frequent visits of his married lady. Leon dreamed of making a brilliant career and getting married successfully, and therefore a disgraceful relationship with a married lady was extremely inconvenient for him.

Betrayed, Bovary rushes to her former lover Rodolphe Boulanger, but here again she is refused. Then Emma decides to take a desperate act. She sneaks into a pharmacy and takes a huge dose of arsenic.

The closest person

Emma died for several days in terrible agony. All this time, faithful Charles did not leave her bed. After the death of his wife, a terrible truth was revealed to the widower - he was ruined and betrayed.

However, this is no longer important. Charles would forgive Emma all her betrayals if she opened her eyes again. Heartbroken, he wanders around the garden like a ghost and dies of grief after his wife.

Little Bertha moves to her grandmother (the elder Bovary). Soon the grandmother dies and the poor orphan goes to work in a factory. Leon, meanwhile, successfully marries. Moneylender Leray opens a new store. The pharmacist receives a Warrant of Honor. Life in Yonville and other small towns in France continues as usual.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary had a very real prototype. The girl's name was Delphine Couturier. She was the daughter of a wealthy farmer. At the age of 17, the romantic pupil of the Ursuline monastery was married to the provincial doctor Eugene Delamare. Delamare once studied medicine with Father Flaubert. He was a very diligent, but, alas, a mediocre student. Having failed the decisive tests, Eugene lost the opportunity to make a successful career in the capital, so he ended up in one of the godforsaken provincial towns that abound in France.

Subsequently, the story of Couturier-Delamar developed in the same way as described in Flaubert’s novel, and ended with the tragic death of Delphine Delamar, mired in debt. They even wrote a note about it in the local newspaper. True, the reasons that provoked the suicide were not made public.

Inspired by the tragic history of the family, Flaubert created his Delamares - Charles and Emma Bovary. Vladimir Nabokov, in a series of lectures dedicated to the work of Gustave Flaubert, focused on the originality of the plot and problematics of Madame Bovary: “Don’t ask whether the novel or the poem (read “fiction”) is true... Emma Bovary’s girlfriend never existed; the book "Madame Bovary" will remain forever. Books live longer than girls.”

The novel is quite simple and even banal; the true value of the novel lies in the details and forms of presentation of the plot. Flaubert as a writer was known for his desire to bring each work to perfection, always trying to find the right words.

Encyclopedic YouTube

1 / 5
The novel was published in the Parisian literary magazine Revue de Paris from October 1 to December 15, 1856. After the publication of the novel, the author (as well as two other publishers of the novel) was accused of insulting morality and, together with the editor of the magazine, was brought to trial in January 1857. The scandalous fame of the work made it popular, and the acquittal on February 7, 1857 made it possible for the novel to be published as a separate book that same year. It is now considered not only one of the key works of realism, but also one of the works that had the greatest influence on literature in general. The novel contains features of literary naturalism. Flaubert's skepticism towards man manifested itself in the absence of positive heroes typical of a traditional novel. Careful portrayal of the characters also led to a very long exposition of the novel, which allows us to better understand the character of the main character and, accordingly, the motivation for her actions (in contrast to voluntarism in the actions of heroes of sentimentalist and romantic literature). Strict determinism in the actions of heroes became a mandatory feature of the French novel in the first half of the 19th century.

The thoroughness of the portrayal of characters, the mercilessly accurate depiction of details (the novel accurately and naturalistically shows death from arsenic poisoning, the efforts of preparing a corpse for burial, when a dirty liquid pours out of the mouth of the deceased Emma, etc.) were noted by critics as a feature of the writer's style Flaubert. This was reflected in the cartoon, where Flaubert is depicted in an anatomist's apron dissecting the body of Emma Bovary.
According to a 2007 survey of contemporary popular authors, Madame Bovary is one of the two greatest novels of all time (right after Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). Turgenev at one time spoke of this novel as the best work “in the entire literary world.”
According to the literary critic Alexei Mashevsky, there are no positive characters in the novel: there is no hero who could be perceived by the reader as a hero. We can say that the “death of the hero,” heralded by Richard Aldington’s novel of the same name, occurred back in the 19th century - in Madame Bovary.

Plot

Charles Bovary, having graduated from college, by his mother’s decision, begins to study medicine. However, he turns out to be not very smart, and only natural diligence and the help of his mother allow him to pass the exam and get a position as a doctor in Tost, a provincial French town in Normandy. Through the efforts of his mother, he marries a local widow, an unattractive but wealthy woman who is already over forty. One day, while on call to a local farmer, Charles meets the farmer's daughter, Emma Rouault, a pretty girl to whom he becomes attracted.
After the death of his wife, Charles begins to communicate with Emma and after some time decides to ask for her hand. Her long-widowed father agrees and arranges a lavish wedding. But when the young people begin to live together, Emma very quickly realizes that she no longer loves Charles and that before that she did not even know what love was. However, he loves her deeply and is truly happy with her. She is burdened by family life in a remote province and, in the hope of changing something, insists on moving to another (also provincial) city of Yonville. This does not help, and even the birth of a child from Charles does not cause trembling feelings in her (the scene when she, despondent from the burden of life, in a fit of indignation pushes her daughter, and she hits, which does not cause regret in the mother).
In Yonville, she meets a student, assistant notary Leon Dupuis, with whom they talk for a long time about the delights of metropolitan life at dinners in a tavern, where Emma comes with her husband. They have a mutual attraction. But Leon dreams of life in the capital and after a while leaves for Paris to continue his studies. After some time, Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy man and famous womanizer. He begins to court her, saying words about love that she so lacked from Charles, and they become lovers in the forest, “under the nose” of an unsuspecting husband in love, who himself bought Emma a horse so that she would take useful horse rides with Rodolphe into that very forest. Wanting to please Rodolphe and give him an expensive whip, she gradually gets into debt, signing promissory notes to Lera, a nosy shopkeeper, and spending money without her husband’s permission. Emma and Rodolphe are happy together, they often meet secretly and begin to prepare to escape from their husband. However, Rodolphe, a single man, is not ready to do this and breaks off the connection by writing a letter, after reading which Emma falls ill and goes to bed for a long time.
She gradually recovers, but she finally manages to recover from her depressed state only when in Rouen, a fairly large city near Yonville, she meets Leon, who has returned from the capital. Emma and Leon first come into contact after visiting the Rouen Cathedral (Emma tries to refuse, not to come to the cathedral, but in the end she doesn’t get over herself and comes) in a carriage they hired, which rushed around Rouen for half a day, creating a mystery for the local residents. In the future, her relationship with her new lover forces her to deceive her husband, saying that on Thursdays she takes piano lessons from a woman in Rouen. She becomes entangled in debts incurred with the help of the shopkeeper Leray. Having deceived Charles into giving him a power of attorney to dispose of the property, Emma secretly sells his estate, which was generating a small income (this will be revealed to Charles and his mother later). When Leray, having collected the bills signed by Emma, asks his friend to file a lawsuit, which decides to seize the property of the spouses to pay off the debt, Emma, trying to find a way out, turns to Leon (he refuses to take risks for the sake of his mistress, stealing several thousand francs from the office), to the Yonville notary (who wants to have a relationship with her, but is disgusted by her). In the end, she comes to her former lover Rodolphe, who treated her so cruelly, but he does not have the required amount, and does not intend to sell the things (which make up the furnishings of his interior) for her sake.
Desperate, she secretly takes arsenic at Mr. Homais's pharmacy, after which she comes home. Soon she becomes ill and lies in bed. Neither her husband nor the famous doctor invited can help her, and Emma dies. After her death, the truth is revealed to Charles about the number of debts she incurred, even about betrayals - but he continues to suffer for her, breaks off relations with his mother, and keeps her things. He even meets Rodolphe (having gone to sell a horse) and accepts Rodolphe's invitation to have a drink with him. Rodolphe sees that Charles knows about his wife’s betrayal, and Charles says that he is not offended, as a result of which Rodolphe recognizes Charles as a nonentity in his soul. The next day, Charles dies in his garden, he is found there by his little daughter, who is then handed over to Charles’ mother. A year later she dies, and the girl has to go to a spinning mill to earn food.

History of creation

The idea for the novel was submitted to Flaubert in 1851. He had just read for his friends the first version of another of his works - “The Temptation of St. Anthony” - and was criticized by them. In this regard, one of the writer’s friends, Maxime du Can, editor of La Revue de Paris, suggested that he get rid of the poetic and pompous style. To do this, du Can advised choosing a realistic and even everyday plot related to events in the lives of ordinary people, French philistines contemporary with Flaubert. The plot itself was suggested to the writer by another friend, Louis Bouillet (the novel is dedicated to him), who reminded Flaubert of the events related to the Delamarre family.

I sat on one page for five days...

In another letter he actually complains:

I struggle with every sentence, but it just doesn’t work out. What a heavy oar my pen is!

Already in the process of work, Flaubert continued to collect material. He himself read the novels that Emma Bovary loved to read, and studied the symptoms and consequences of arsenic poisoning. It is widely known that he himself felt bad while describing the scene of the heroine’s poisoning. This is how he recalled it:

When I described the scene of the poisoning of Emma Bovary, I so clearly tasted the arsenic and felt so truly poisoned that I suffered two attacks of nausea, very real, one after the other, and vomited the whole dinner from my stomach.

During his work, Flaubert repeatedly reworked his work. The manuscript of the novel, currently kept in the municipal library of Rouen, amounts to 1,788 corrected and rewritten pages. The final version, stored there, contains only 487 pages.

The almost complete identity of the story of Delphine Delamare and the story of Emma Bovary described by Flaubert gave reason to believe that the book described a real story. However, Flaubert categorically denied this, even claiming that Madame Bovary did not have a prototype. He once declared: “Madame Bovary is me!” Nevertheless, now on the grave of Delphine Delamare, in addition to her name, there is the inscription “Madame Bovary”.

The main character of the novel is Emma Bovary, a doctor's wife who lives beyond her means and starts extramarital affairs in the hope of getting rid of the emptiness and ordinariness of provincial life. Although the plot of the novel is quite simple and even banal, the true value of the novel lies in the details and forms of presentation of the plot. Flaubert as a writer was known for his desire to bring each work to perfection, always trying to find the right words.

The novel was published in the Parisian literary magazine " La Revue de Paris"from October 1 to December 15, 1856. After the publication of the novel, the author (as well as two other publishers of the novel) was accused of insulting morality and, together with the editor of the magazine, was brought to trial in January 1857. The scandalous fame of the work made it popular, and the acquittal on February 7, 1857 made it possible for the novel to be published as a separate book that same year. It is now considered not only one of the key works of realism, but also one of the works that had the greatest influence on literature in general.

According to a 2007 survey of contemporary popular authors, Madame Bovary is one of the two greatest novels of all time (right after Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). Turgenev at one time spoke of this novel as the best work “in the entire literary world.”

Plot

Wedding of Emma and Charles.

Charles Bovary, having graduated from college, by his mother’s decision, begins to study medicine. However, he turns out to be not very smart and only natural diligence and the help of his mother allows him to pass the exam and get a position as a doctor in Tost, a provincial French town in Normandy. Through the efforts of his mother, he marries a local widow, an unattractive but wealthy woman who is already over forty. One day, on a call to a local farmer, Charles meets the farmer's daughter, Emma Rouault, a pretty girl to whom he becomes attracted.

After the death of his wife, Charles begins to communicate with Emma and after some time decides to ask for her hand in marriage. Her long-widowed father agrees and arranges a lavish wedding. But when the young people begin to live together, Emma very quickly realizes that she does not love Charles. However, he loves her and is truly happy with her. She is burdened by family life in a remote province and, in the hope of changing something, insists on moving to another city. However, this does not help, and even the birth of a child, a girl, does not change anything in her attitude to life.

However, in a new place she meets a fan, Leon Dupuis, with whom she begins a relationship, which is still platonic. But Leon dreams of metropolitan life and after a while leaves for Paris. After some time, Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger, a very wealthy man and a famous womanizer. He begins to court her and they become lovers. During this relationship, she begins to get into debt and spend money without her husband's permission. The relationship ends when she begins to dream and prepare to escape from her husband abroad with her lover and daughter. Rodolphe is not satisfied with this development of events and he breaks off the connection, which Emma takes very hard.

She manages to finally recover from her depressed state only when she again meets Leon Dupuis, who has returned from the capital, and resumes his courtship. She tries to refuse him, but cannot. Emma and Leon make their first connection in a carriage they have hired for a tour of Rouen. In the future, her relationship with her new lover forces her to deceive her husband, weaving more and more lies into her family life. But she becomes entangled not only in lies, but also in debts incurred with the help of the shop owner, Mr. Leray. This turns out to be the worst of all. When the moneylender no longer wants to wait and goes to court in order to seize the spouses’ property to pay for the debt, Emma, trying to find a way out, turns to her lover, to other acquaintances, even to Rodolphe, her former lover, but to no avail.

Desperate, she secretly from the pharmacist, Mr. Homais, takes arsenic from the pharmacy, which she immediately takes. Soon she becomes ill. Neither her husband nor the famous doctor invited can help her, and Emma soon dies. After her death, the truth is revealed to Charles about the amount of debt she incurred, and then about the existence of relationships with other men. Shocked, he is unable to survive it and soon dies.

History of creation

The idea for the novel was submitted to Flaubert in 1851. He had just read for his friends the first version of another of his works, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” and was criticized by them. In this regard, one of the writer’s friends, Maxime du Cane, editor of La Revue de Paris, suggested that he get rid of the poetic and pompous style. To do this, du Can advised choosing a realistic and even everyday plot related to events in the lives of ordinary people, French philistines contemporary with Flaubert. The plot itself was suggested to the writer by another friend, Louis Bouillet (the novel is dedicated to him), who reminded Flaubert of the events related to the Delamare family.

Eugene Delamare studied surgery under the guidance of Flaubert's father, Achille Clephoas. Possessing no talents, he was able to take the position of a doctor only in a remote French province, where he married a widow, a woman older than him. After the death of his wife, he met a young girl named Delphine Couturier, who then became his second wife. Delphine's romantic nature, however, could not stand the boredom of provincial bourgeois life. She began to spend her husband's money on expensive clothes, and then cheat on him with numerous lovers. The husband was warned about his wife's possible infidelities, but he did not believe it. At the age of 27, entangled in debt and losing attention from men, she committed suicide. After Delphine's death, the truth about her debts and the details of her infidelities were revealed to her husband. He could not bear it and a year later he also died.

Flaubert was familiar with this story - his mother maintained contact with the Delamare family. He seized on the idea of the novel, studied the life of the prototype, and in the same year began work, which, however, turned out to be painfully difficult. Flaubert wrote the novel for almost five years, sometimes spending entire weeks and even months on individual episodes. There is written evidence of this from the writer himself. So, in January 1853 he wrote to Louise Colet:

I sat on one page for five days...

In another letter he actually complains:

I struggle with every sentence, but it just doesn’t work out. What a heavy oar my pen is!

Already in the process of work, Flaubert continued to collect material. He himself read the novels that Emma Bovary loved to read, and studied the symptoms and consequences of arsenic poisoning. It is widely known that he himself felt bad while describing the scene of the heroine’s poisoning. This is how he recalled it:

When I described the scene of the poisoning of Emma Bovary, I so clearly tasted the arsenic and felt so truly poisoned that I suffered two attacks of nausea, very real, one after the other, and vomited the whole dinner from my stomach.

During his work, Flaubert repeatedly reworked his work. The manuscript of the novel, currently kept in the municipal library of Rouen, amounts to 1,788 corrected and rewritten pages. The final version, stored there, contains only 487 pages.

Illustration from the French edition of the novel

The almost complete identity of the story of Delphine Delamare and the story of Emma Bovary described by Flaubert gave reason to believe that the book described a real story. However, Flaubert categorically denied this, even claiming that Madame Bovary did not have a prototype. He once declared: “Madame Bovary is me!” Nevertheless, now on the grave of Delphine Delamare, in addition to her name, there is the inscription “Madame Bovary”.

Notes

Links
- A.G. Dostoevskaya. Diary. 1867, p. 214.
Wikimedia Foundation.

2010.
The post was inspired by reading Gustave Flaubert’s novel “Madame Bovary” (or “Madame Bovary” in some translations) (Gustave Flaubert " Madame Bovary" ).

Summary of Gustave Flaubert's novel "Madame Bovary"
Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary takes place in the mid-19th century in France.
Main characters:
- Charles Bovary is a provincial doctor, a good but unremarkable person.
- Emma Bovary is Charles's second wife.
- Rodolphe Boulanger is a wealthy man who lives not far from the Bovary couple, Emma’s lover.
- Leon Dupuis is a young notary's assistant, Emma's lover.
- Mister Leray is a businessman and moneylender who has entangled the Bovary family with his shackles.
Charles Bovary, an unremarkable young man, received a medical education and became a doctor in the small French town of Tost. He marries a wealthy widow of a bailiff, a woman older than him, but who had a good annual income. Charles began to work well and earned fame in the area as a good doctor. One day he was called to the landowner Ruo, who had broken his leg. He cured Mr. Rouault and began to visit him from time to time. In addition to his good relationship with Ruo, he began to be attracted to Emma Ruo, the daughter of Father Ruo.
Charles's wife, who doted on him, unexpectedly dies. Charles, a little later, asks Emma's hand from her father. Father didn't mind, and Emma didn't mind either. This is how the wedding of the young people took place. Emma, infatuated with Charles, quickly realizes that Charles, despite all his good sides, is a colorless and uninteresting person. Family life with him is just as uninteresting. Madame Bovary passionately desires luxury, life in the capital, balls and dresses, but instead, a rather modest existence in the provinces. Charles, on the contrary, is happy and peaceful: he loves his wife and thinks that she is happy with him.
Having attended a luxurious ball, Emma clearly understands the difference between that life and her existence. They soon move to another city in the hope that it will shake up Emma, but this does not happen. The birth of her daughter Bertha also does not awaken any special feelings in Emma.
In the new city of Yonville, the Bovarys become acquainted with local society. The notary's assistant Leon falls in love with Emma and they begin to communicate. Emma loves him too, but they never admit it to each other. Leon leaves for Paris to finish his education, and Emma begins to waste away again. Soon the wealthy landowner Rodolphe Boulanger appears on Emma's path. He decided to have Emma at all costs and achieved this. They become lovers. Emma begins to become entangled in matters of the heart and money, owing money to the local moneylender Leray. The lovers are so passionate about each other that they decide to elope and plan an escape. On the day of the supposed escape, Rodolphe's common sense (and some weariness with Emma) prevailed, and he decides to abandon the escape and break off the connection with Emma. Emma falls ill after receiving his letter. She has been sick for many months. Caring for her costs a lot of money, Charles also borrows money from the same Leray.
Emma finally gets better and tries to find solace in church. She thinks she finds him, but in reality she only drives her feelings and passions deeper. One day the Bovarys go to the theater and meet Leon there, who has returned after finishing his education. Emma and Leon were once again inflamed with passion for each other. They become lovers. Emma comes up with more and more new tricks to date Leon, she spends a lot of money on him, getting more and more entangled in Leray’s web. Lera, tired of waiting for money, protests the bills through a figurehead, the court seizes the property of the spouses and schedules an auction for its sale.
Emma is trying to find money to pay off her huge debts, turning to her acquaintances and former lovers, but everyone refuses her. In desperation and madness, she swallows arsenic. Charles unsuccessfully tries to save her, resorting to the help of the best doctors in the area. Nevertheless, Emma dies in great agony. Heartbroken, Charles gradually learns the truth about Emma's financial and heartfelt affairs, but still loves her and honors her memory, not allowing her things to be sold. One day he meets with Rodolphe and tells him that he is not angry with him. On the same day he dies in his garden. Charles's mother takes her daughter Bertha, but she also dies quickly. Bertha is taken in by her aunt, they are in great need, so Bertha is forced to go to work at a spinning mill.
The novel “Madame Bovary” ends like this: the rest of the characters in the story very quickly forget Bovary and arrange their lives in the best possible way: Leon marries, Rodolphe lives as before, the pharmacist Homais prospers, Leray prospers. And Bovary is no more.
Meaning
The desire for intense feelings and strong passions and rejection of simple provincial life led the Bovary family to a sad ending: Emma was poisoned, Charles died early, and daughter Bertha had a harsh future ahead of her. Ordinary life, which completely suited Charles, killed Emma, who wanted a bright and luxurious life. Attempts to escape from ordinary life led to a tragic ending.
Conclusion
The narration is very naturalistic and very difficult. The drama is off the charts, so it’s hard to read the denouement, which, without a doubt, should be tragic. I, as a reader, only wish that such stories happened in novels, and not in real life. The product is magnificent!Madame Bovary is a must read!

Gustave Flaubert
French realist prose writer, considered one of the greatest European writers of the 19th century. He worked a lot on the style of his works, putting forward the theory of the “exact word”. He is best known as the author of the novel Madame Bovary.
Gustave Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821 in the city of Rouen into a petty bourgeois family. His father was a surgeon at the Rouen hospital, and his mother was the daughter of a doctor. He was the youngest child in the family. In addition to Gustave, the family had two children: an older sister and a brother. Two other children did not survive. The writer spent his childhood joylessly in the dark apartment of a doctor.
The writer studied at the Royal College and Lycée in Rouen, starting in 1832. There he met Ernest Chevalier, with whom he founded the publication Art and Progress in 1834. In this publication he published his first public text for the first time.
In 1849, he completed the first edition of The Temptation of St. Anthony, a philosophical drama on which he subsequently worked all his life. In terms of worldview, it is imbued with ideas of disappointment in the possibilities of knowledge, which is illustrated by the clash of different religious movements and corresponding doctrines.
"Madame Bovary" or "Madame Bovary» – the history of the creation of the novel

Madame Bovary
Flaubert became famous due to the publication in the magazine of the novel Madame Bovary (1856), work on which began in the fall of 1851. The writer tried to make his novel realistic and psychological. Soon after, Flaubert and the editor of the Revue de Paris magazine were prosecuted for “outrage of morality.” The novel turned out to be one of the most important harbingers of literary naturalism.
The novel was published in the Parisian literary magazine Revue de Paris from October 1 to December 15, 1856. After the publication of the novel, the author (as well as two other publishers of the novel) was accused of insulting morality and, together with the editor of the magazine, was brought to trial in January 1857. The scandalous fame of the work made it popular, and the acquittal on February 7, 1857 made it possible for the novel to be published as a separate book that same year. It is now considered not only one of the key works of realism, but also one of the works that had the greatest influence on literature in general.
The idea for the novel was presented to Flaubert in 1851. He had just read for his friends the first version of another of his works - “The Temptation of St. Anthony” - and was criticized by them. In this regard, one of the writer’s friends, Maxime du Cane, editor of La Revue de Paris, suggested that he get rid of the poetic and pompous style. To do this, du Can advised choosing a realistic and even everyday plot related to events in the lives of ordinary people, French philistines contemporary with Flaubert. The plot itself was suggested to the writer by another friend, Louis Bouillet (the novel is dedicated to him), who reminded Flaubert of the events related to the Delamare family.

Flaubert was familiar with this story - his mother maintained contact with the Delamare family. He seized on the idea of the novel, studied the life of the prototype, and in the same year began work, which, however, turned out to be painfully difficult. Flaubert wrote the novel for almost five years, sometimes spending entire weeks and even months on individual episodes.
The main characters of the novel
Charles Bovary
A boring, plodding slow-witted man, without charm, wit, or education, but with a full set of banal ideas and rules. He is a bourgeois, but at the same time he is also a touching, pathetic creature.
EMMA ROO
The daughter of a wealthy peasant from the Berto farm, the wife of Dr. Charles Bovary. A married couple arrives in the small provincial town of Yonville. Emma, who was raised in a monastery, has a romantic and sublime view of life. But life turns out to be completely different. Her husband is an ordinary provincial doctor, a mentally narrow-minded man, “whose conversations were as flat as a street panel.” This becomes the reason that Emma rushes in search of love and romantic adventures. Her lovers - Rodolphe Boulanger and clerk Leon Dupuis - are vulgar, selfish, abandoning Emma for personal gain.
The real prototype is Delphine Dela Mar, the wife of a doctor from the city of Ry near Rouen, who died at the age of 26 from arsenic poisoning. However, the writer himself assured that “all the characters in his book are fictional.” The theme of a woman becoming bored in her marriage and discovering "romantic" longings appears in Flaubert's early story "Passion and Virtue" (1837), then in his first novel, entitled "Sentimental Education."
"Madame Bovary" summary of the novel
Charles Bovary, having graduated from college, by his mother’s decision, begins to study medicine. However, he turns out to be not very smart, and only natural diligence and the help of his mother allow him to pass the exam and get a position as a doctor in Tost, a provincial French town in Normandy. Through the efforts of his mother, he marries a local widow, an unattractive but wealthy woman who is already over forty. One day, while on call to a local farmer, Charles meets the farmer's daughter, Emma Rouault, a pretty girl to whom he becomes attracted.
After the death of his wife, Charles begins to communicate with Emma and after some time decides to ask for her hand. Her long-widowed father agrees and arranges a lavish wedding. But when the young people begin to live together, Emma very quickly realizes that she no longer loves Charles and that before that she did not even know what love was. However, he loves her deeply and is truly happy with her. She is burdened by family life in a remote province and, in the hope of changing something, insists on moving to another (also provincial) city of Yonville. This does not help, and even the birth of a child from Charles does not cause trembling feelings in her (the scene when she, despondent from the burden of life, in a fit of indignation pushes her daughter, and she hits, which does not cause regret in the mother).
In Yonville, she meets a student, assistant notary Leon Dupuis, with whom they talk for a long time about the delights of metropolitan life at dinners in a tavern, where Emma comes with her husband. They have a mutual attraction. But Leon dreams of life in the capital and after a while leaves for Paris to continue his studies. After some time, Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy man and famous womanizer. He begins to court her, saying words about love that she so lacked from Charles, and they become lovers in the forest, “under the nose” of an unsuspecting husband in love, who himself bought Emma a horse so that she would take useful horse rides with Rodolphe into that very forest. Wanting to please Rodolphe and give him an expensive whip, she gradually gets into debt, signing promissory notes to Lera, a nosy shopkeeper, and spending money without her husband’s permission. Emma and Rodolphe are happy together, they often meet secretly and begin to prepare to escape from their husband. However, Rodolphe, a single man, is not ready to do this and breaks off the connection by writing a letter, after reading which Emma falls ill and goes to bed for a long time.
She gradually recovers, but she finally manages to recover from her depressed state only when in Rouen, a fairly large city near Yonville, she meets Leon, who has returned from the capital. Emma and Leon first come into contact after visiting the Rouen Cathedral (Emma tries to refuse, not to come to the cathedral, but in the end she doesn’t get over herself and comes) in a carriage they hired, which rushed around Rouen for half a day, creating a mystery for the local residents. In the future, her relationship with her new lover forces her to deceive her husband, saying that on Thursdays she takes piano lessons from a woman in Rouen. She becomes entangled in debts incurred with the help of the shopkeeper Leray.
Having deceived Charles into giving him a power of attorney to dispose of the property, Emma secretly sells his estate, which was generating a small income (this will be revealed to Charles and his mother later). When Leray, having collected the bills signed by Emma, asks his friend to file a lawsuit, which decides to seize the property of the spouses to pay off the debt, Emma, trying to find a way out, turns to Leon (he refuses to take risks for the sake of his mistress, stealing several thousand francs from the office), to the Yonville notary (who wants to have a relationship with her, but is disgusted by her). In the end, she comes to her former lover Rodolphe, who treated her so cruelly, but he does not have the required amount, and does not intend to sell the things (which make up the furnishings of his interior) for her sake.
Desperate, she secretly takes arsenic at Mr. Homais's pharmacy, after which she comes home. Soon she becomes ill and lies in bed. Neither her husband nor the famous doctor invited can help her, and Emma dies. After her death, the truth is revealed to Charles about the number of debts she incurred, even about betrayals - but he continues to suffer for her, breaks off relations with his mother, and keeps her things. He even meets Rodolphe (having gone to sell a horse) and accepts Rodolphe's invitation to have a drink with him. Rodolphe sees that Charles knows about his wife’s betrayal, and Charles says that he is not offended, as a result of which Rodolphe recognizes Charles as a nonentity in his soul. The next day, Charles dies in his garden, he is found there by his little daughter, who is then handed over to Charles’ mother. A year later she dies, and the girl has to go to a spinning mill to earn food.
The reason for Emma's death lies not only in the discord between dream and reality, but also due to the oppressive bourgeois environment in which Flaubert's characters live. The image of the main character of the novel is complex and contradictory. Her monastic education and her rigid bourgeois environment determined her limited horizons.
Sources – Wikipedia, rlspace.com, Vsesochineniya.ru, Literaturka.info.

Gustave Flaubert – “Madame Bovary” – summary of the novel (world classic) updated: December 8, 2016 by: website