Two months later, the novel became a bestseller. Even so, the text immediately generated scandal: Flaubert was accused of infringement upon public and religious morality, only to be acquitted in February 1857. Madame Bovary first appeared in October 1856, published as a serial in La Revue de Paris, heavily cut with entire passages censured to the public. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. Concerned with the rhythm and musicality of his sentences, he repeated them to himself out loud, and emended them, often referring back to his early drafts which served as blueprints for his manuscripts (cf. Likely inspired by a local news story (perhaps about Eugène Delamare, a medical doctor who found himself buried in debt in the wake of his young adulterine wife’s suicide), Flaubert began the five-year project of writing Madame Bovary, the ultimate precursor to the modern novel.įlaubert, the novelist who wanted “a book without exterior attachments a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible”, meticulously worked and reworked his chapters.
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