Madame Bovary

'Oh; why; dear God; did I marry him?'

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored; trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels; she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance; in voracious spending and; eventually; in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment; and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations; the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary; c'est moi.'