With its rare formal perfection, Madame Bovary represents, as Frank O'Connor has declared, "possibly the most beautifully written book ever composed undoubtedly the most beautifully written novel.a gook that invites superlatives.the most important novel of the century. Adapted from Flaubert’s classic novel, Madame Bovary tells the tragic story of Emma, a young beauty who impulsively marries a small-town doctor to leave her father’s pig farm behind. Neither Emma, nor her lovers, nor Homais, the "man of sciend," escapes the author's searing castigation: and it is the book's final profound irony that only Charles, Emma's oxlike, eternally deceived husband, emerges with a measure of human grace through his stubborn and selfless love. She has a highly romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion, as well as high society. Set amid the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once and unsparing depiction of a woman's gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human shallowness and stupidity. Emma Bovary is the novels eponymous protagonist (Charless mother and his former wife are also referred to as Madame Bovary, while their daughter remains Mademoiselle Bovary). Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling." Thus Mary McCarthy, in her memorable Foreword to this Signet Classic edition, describes Emma Bovary, whose ill-starred pursuit of tawdry romantic dreams shapes Flaubert's great novel. "She is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings.
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