Madame Bovary

Abstract

The critical condemnation of La Tentation by his trusted friends paralysed Flaubert’s creative processes for a year. Only in September 1850 did he begin to regain confidence. Bouilhet reminded him of an old project: a dictionary of bourgeois clichés and received ideas. He responded that it should have a preface so subtly ironic that the reader would be unsure whether the book contained valuable knowledge or a collection of stupidities (II, 237-8). But he soon turned to fiction, weighing up three possible ways of treating the theme of unsatisfiable desire: in Don Juan, in a woman longing to be loved by a God, in a modern Flemish girl whose quiet life hides inner turbulence and tortured mysticism.