Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary

My three favorite women in history are Cleopatra, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary.

What do these three females who will all meet an atrocious death by suicide have in common? Seduction, intrigue, love, power over men—characteristics that even today society cannot accept, especially from three mothers. For all three, emotional defeat, societal condemnation, and subsequent isolation became so unbearable that they preferred death.

While Cleopatra and Anna Karenina experienced love, Emma Bovary lived only on illusions, and that is why I relate her story!

The book was published in 1857, a very simple yet incredibly modern story. A poor, beautiful, and frivolous woman marries a provincial doctor. She doesn’t love him, and despite being a mother, she enters a whirlwind of adultery, reckless spending, and audacity. Emma Bovary is the exact opposite of our women who run with the wolves; she is bored and does not adjust or settle for her condition as a wife and mother.

Throughout the book, we will find a woman fleeing from the mediocrity but security she is in, toward adventure and the pursuit of romance, sought in men who desire her only as a lover and then leave her. We must chase her throughout the book, on every page, the slow decline... Everything starts with a party where she arrives with her husband, where she discovers she is beautiful, flirtatious, and charming. Although she is already a mother, she begins to whirl from one bed to another, living beyond her means, to the tragic end.

How does Flaubert speak about me, you, many of my friends, or acquaintances? Because "Madame Bovary" is an autobiographical book. "Madame Bovary c'est moi," says Gustave. He simply molded, sculpted, and crystallized himself into a timeless character. Flaubert stops having a gender when he perfectly outlines the turmoil, the anticipation, the blush, the audacity.

I have been an adulteress, I have issues with compulsive shopping—I am also a "Madame Bovary," as are many of my acquaintances and friends... Emma is a modern and frightening woman, and she could be read at any moment or era, always reflecting reality!

There is a word in the dictionary that defines all of this, namely, bovarism;

"spiritual dissatisfaction, psychological tendency to build a fictive personality and to play a role not corresponding to one's social condition, frantic desire to escape reality, especially in reference to particular environmental and sociological situations."

I highlight the best Madame Bovary ever, who is Isabelle Huppert in the respective film by Chabrol.