Nature & Animals Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert’s line doesn’t just insult women; it indicts men’s imagination as a kind of aesthetic violence. Calling “woman” a “vulgar animal” is provocation in the key of 19th-century realism: the deliberate refusal of the perfumed, porcelain feminine that Romantic culture kept selling. But the real target is in the second clause, where “man has created” turns the gaze back on the male maker. Woman isn’t merely degraded; she’s used as raw material for an “excessively beautiful ideal” that exists to flatter male desire, male artistry, male control.

The phrase “excessively” is doing the heavy lifting. It suggests not beauty but overproduction, an ideal so inflated it becomes brittle, tyrannical, and false. The subtext is familiar to anyone who’s read Flaubert’s portraits of longing: men don’t fall in love with women as people, they fall in love with a projection, then punish the real person for failing to match it. That dynamic fuels the tragedy engine of Madame Bovary, where fantasies marketed as “refinement” and “passion” curdle into disappointment and cruelty.

Context matters: Flaubert is writing amid bourgeois moralism, patriarchal law, and a literary culture that idolized “the Eternal Feminine.” His cynicism is less a timeless truth than a snapshot of a male writer watching his society manufacture saints and sirens out of ordinary bodies - then calling the bodies “vulgar” for refusing to stay symbolic.