Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

April 23, 2006

I am sure that a rereading of Madame Bovary is going to release your imagination in all sorts of unexpected ways. It confronts us with a society marked by materialism, a lust for status and possessions, a bourgeois morality masking all sorts of licentiousness and sensuality. Adultery, gluttony, hypocrisy, malpractice: all are in this book. How much is a consequence of early capitalism? Of oppressive cultural codes? Of individual free choice? What could have been done? What can be done? Where can we move today?

"Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in."
–Gustave Flaubert

Portrait of Gustave Flaubert courtesy of Classical Library.

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