Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception by Gustave Flaubert

Published 1856 · 129,847 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

How hard is Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception to read?

Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Flaubert's sentences are plain, but period detail floods them: tilburys, barege, cambric, aspergillum, and Homais's pharmaceutical talk. Lydia Davis's endnotes help. It is richer than The Great Gatsby and less ornate than Lolita.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Long, balanced periods, comma splices and imperfect-tense sequences carry the narration, but clauses stay clear. The prose is rhythmic and controlled, like Fathers and Sons, with some longer, denser sentences.
Abstraction: 48 out of 100
The book grounds everything in objects, rooms and routines. Its ideas about romanticism, boredom and convention emerge through scenes rather than argument, as in The Great Gatsby.
Information density: 58 out of 100
Every paragraph packs in furniture, clothes, food, people and social detail, and the cast is large. It is more crowded than The Great Gatsby but easier to follow than Anna Karenina.
Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
The narrator withholds comment; readers infer Emma's delusions and Charles's blindness from juxtaposed details, indirect speech and small gestures. It asks for more inference than Gatsby but is more direct than Lolita.
Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
Butterflies, water and sealed vessels, the bouquet and the cigar case recur and accumulate meaning, but the surface stays realist. It is less allegorical than The Great Gatsby but still deliberate.
Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
Irony coats every detail: names like Lheureux, Homais's grand style, the manure prizes beside love talk. Pathos survives it, though. It is close to Dead Souls and Eugene Onegin in its cool commentary.
Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
The plot closes with Emma's death, while Flaubert gives no verdict and Homais is rewarded. The ending resolves events but leaves moral meaning open, as in The Great Gatsby.
Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
The three-part structure is clear, with chronological story and some flashbacks into Charles's and Emma's youth, and the frame shifts from a classmate to impersonal narration. It is simpler than Anna Karenina's parallel plots.

How Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception is regarded

Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception holds a literary regard score of 93 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (244 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception scores 70 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life.
Symbol: Formal
and the shriveled paper petals, hovering along the fireback like black butterflies, at last flew away up the chimney.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
He has just been awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
Homais, by that time of day, knew it almost by heart; and he would relay it in its entirety, including the editorials and the stories of each and every catastrophe that had occurred in France or abroad.

Where the story of Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception takes place

  • Normandy under the July Monarchy: Tostes, Yonville-l'Abbaye and Rouen, c. 1830s-1840s (1830 to 1846), the main setting

6 things that are true of Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception, with the passage for each

  1. The new boy Charles Bovary is made a laughingstock when he shouts his own name, which the class turns into 'Charbovari'.

    bawled at the top of his lungs, as though shouting to someone, the word Charbovari

  2. Homais's promoted clubfoot operation ends in gangrene and a midthigh amputation by Doctor Canivet.

    It was a considerable event in the village, this midthigh amputation by Doctor Canivet!

  3. After Rodolphe's letter ends the affair, Charles stays by Emma's bedside through a brain fever lasting forty-three days.

    For forty-three days, Charles did not leave her side.

  4. The court order served on Emma demands eight thousand francs within twenty-four hours.

    To pay the total sum of eight thousand francs.

  5. At Emma's poisoning the pharmacist drafts his urgent letters to the doctors more than fifteen times.

    He was flustered; he composed more than fifteen drafts.

  6. The novel's final sentence says the pharmacist Homais receives the Legion of Honor.

    He has just been awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor.

Scenes in Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception that Frye would name

28 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
A convulsion flung her down on the mattress. They all drew near. She had ceased to exist. Emma's death scene, after the sacrament and the Blind Man's song.
Alazon, untitled
Certainly I know something about it, since I am a pharmacist, which is to say a chemist! Homais is the self-inflating braggart who claims expertise in everything.
Hamartia, untitled
In her desire, she confused the sensual pleasures of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling. Emma's fatal misjudgment of what love and happiness are underlies her ruin.
Epos, untitled
who with a hand at once so firm and so wise guides the Chariot of State amid the unceasing perils of a stormy sea The Councilor's oration at the agricultural fair is a parodic spoken set piece.
Sparagmos, untitled
She was soon vomiting blood. Her lips pressed together more tightly. Her limbs were contracted, her body was covered with brown spots The poisoned body is racked and disfigured in agony.
Anagnorisis, untitled
All Léon’s letters were there. No possible doubt, this time! Charles at last discovers Emma's adulteries.

Books that share these scenes with Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception

About the author

Gustave Flaubert