![]() ![]() Later, Charles struggles his way to a second-rate medical degree and becomes an officier de santé in the Public Health Service. As the novel opens, Charles is a shy, oddly dressed teenager arriving at a new school amidst the ridicule of his new classmates. The story begins and ends with Charles Bovary, a stolid, kindhearted man without much ability or ambition. Madame Bovary takes place in provincial northern France, near the town of Rouen in Normandy. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the precise word"). Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Then, without missing a beat, she switches to smug, cynical satisfaction, as Rudolf admires the letter and congratulates himself on his close escape.Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. In a swoony, sighing voice full of noble suffering, Jackson reads his flowery letter of tears and regret, saying he loves her too much to ruin her life and her reputation. To Rudolf, Emma is just one in a long series of conquests, and he gets cold feet at the thought of being permanently responsible for her welfare and that of her child. Jackson is especially outstanding in the scene which takes place the night before Emma plans to run off with her lover, Rudolf. Emma's unrealistic dreams (she yearns for a perfect, romantic love that will sweep her away into perpetual bliss) lead her into one affair after another, and then to financial ruin and suicide. Her reading perfectly captures the restlessness of Emma Bovary, a character perpetually dissatisfied with her solid, steady husband and bourgeois life in provincial 19th-century France. Glenda Jackson hits the mark in this superb narration of Flaubert's classic novel. ![]()
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