"Madame Bovary is myself"
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Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary is myself” is less a confession of autobiography than a flex of authorial possession: the claim that a novelist can inhabit a consciousness so completely that the boundary between maker and made becomes irrelevant. Coming from the man prosecuted for obscenity after publishing Madame Bovary in 1857, it also reads like a strategic dare. If Emma’s adultery and appetite for romance are scandalous, then indict the craftsman too; he’s insisting that “immorality” is a problem of imagination, not merely behavior.
The subtext is sharper than the sentimental misreading (“Emma is just like me”). Flaubert, the great realist and fanatic of le mot juste, is defending impersonality by stating it in the most personal way possible. He disliked the idea of the author preaching from the margins, yet he knew that realism only works when the writer’s nerves are wired into the character’s sensations. Emma’s hunger for a more cinematic life is, in Flaubert’s hands, not a woman’s flaw to be punished but a modern condition: consumer desire, narrative addiction, the ache of living inside other people’s stories.
Context matters: mid-19th-century France, where bourgeois morality wanted novels to be moral instruction. Flaubert replies with a provocation disguised as intimacy. By identifying with Emma, he protects her complexity, refuses to let readers reduce her to a cautionary tale, and quietly reminds them that the true transgression is the novel’s power to make you feel what you’re not supposed to.
The subtext is sharper than the sentimental misreading (“Emma is just like me”). Flaubert, the great realist and fanatic of le mot juste, is defending impersonality by stating it in the most personal way possible. He disliked the idea of the author preaching from the margins, yet he knew that realism only works when the writer’s nerves are wired into the character’s sensations. Emma’s hunger for a more cinematic life is, in Flaubert’s hands, not a woman’s flaw to be punished but a modern condition: consumer desire, narrative addiction, the ache of living inside other people’s stories.
Context matters: mid-19th-century France, where bourgeois morality wanted novels to be moral instruction. Flaubert replies with a provocation disguised as intimacy. By identifying with Emma, he protects her complexity, refuses to let readers reduce her to a cautionary tale, and quietly reminds them that the true transgression is the novel’s power to make you feel what you’re not supposed to.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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