En los 150 años de Madame Bovary, 1857-2007. Diseño de un personaje: Madame Bovary

Abstract

Madame Bovary is the literary work that gave immortality to Gustave Flaubert. And 150 years later, it is fully in vogue. The outstanding feature of this article is the author’s mastery to create his heroine, with all the strength taken from Romanticism and Realism, as well as the free indirect style techniques used, and the perfect synchronization between the text and Emma Bovary changing moods.

Madame Bovary’s behavior, her bourgeois status, her ambitions nourished by all kind of frivolous readings, her unsatisfying marriage, as well as her wish to change just for change, have created a new paradigm into the collective imaginary. That paradigm has become Bovarism or a psychical illness that pushes Emma to settle a distance between what she is, and what she thinks she is. As a victim of a bunch of delusions, her death becomes the final one. Emma assumes she will die in a quiet romantic place, but a heroic rapture boosts her towards suicide.