In the Historical Fiction novel Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert details the tumultuous
love story between a depressed wife and an unparalleled loving husband to highlight the evil
inherent in the upper classes. The wife, Madame Bovary, is a farm girl who has spent her life
trying to be a maiden like in her childhood fairy tales and marries a country doctor, Mister
Bovary, who will do anything to satisfy her. This includes doing whatever she wants, being
completely trusting and forgiving, and sacrificing everything for her. On the other hand, Madame
Bovary is blind to the love she receives and instead will do anything to find the passion she feels
in her stories, no matter how detrimental. Being ignorantly led on by people who only want to
use and abuse her, she slowly loses everything in a series of progressively more disturbing
tragedies that leave her farther than ever from her dreams.
The novel, Madame Bovary, is a heart-wrenching tragedy that details the collapse of a
beautiful yet misguided woman at the hands of “friends.” This book is one of the best I have
read, the emotion, the realism, and the themes are hard to beat and have engraved themselves
on me; however, this is also what I hate about the book. Being a tragedy, merely the thought of
this book brings back all the feelings of sorrow that only serve to ruin my day. I loved reading
and digesting this book, but the more I love it the more I can’t forget it. I have to give this book a
five out of five, but I must warn those who decide to pick it up that it comes with some baggage.