Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Contains spoilers for the entire book.
Discussion topics
Topic 01 of 08
Emma’s reading
How have the novels and keepsakes Emma read at the convent shaped what she expects from life and love?
Keep the conversation going
- Is Flaubert mocking romantic fiction, or the way Emma reads it?
- Which of your own expectations, from books or films, did Emma’s make you think of?
There is no single right answer. Bring your own reading.
Discussion topics
How have the novels and keepsakes Emma read at the convent shaped what she expects from life and love?
Keep the conversation going
- Is Flaubert mocking romantic fiction, or the way Emma reads it?
- Which of your own expectations, from books or films, did Emma’s make you think of?
What did you make of Charles Bovary, who loves Emma faithfully and never understands her?
Keep the conversation going
- Why do you think the novel opens and closes with Charles rather than with Emma?
- Is his blindness a kind of innocence, or a failure of its own?
Why does a single evening at the Marquis’s ball affect Emma so deeply?
Keep the conversation going
- What does she keep from that night, and why does it matter to her?
- How does the ball change the way she sees her home in Tostes?
Why do you think Flaubert interweaves Rodolphe’s declarations of love with the speeches and prize-giving at the agricultural show?
Keep the conversation going
- Whose language comes off worse, the official’s or the lover’s?
- What does the scene suggest about how people in Yonville use words?
What part does Homais play in the novel, as Yonville’s voice of progress and good sense?
Keep the conversation going
- Which of his opinions did you find funniest, and which most alarming?
- What does his handling of Hippolyte’s operation reveal about him?
How does Lheureux draw Emma into debt, and how much of her ruin is about money rather than love?
Keep the conversation going
- What do the things Emma buys tell us about what she wants?
- Why does no one in Yonville stop what is happening?
How does Emma’s relationship with Léon change between their first meeting in Yonville and their meetings in Rouen?
Keep the conversation going
- What did you make of the cab ride through Rouen, and of the way Flaubert tells it?
- What do you think Flaubert means when he writes that Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage?
How did you respond to Emma’s death, and to what follows it for Charles and Berthe?
Keep the conversation going
- Does the novel ask us to pity Emma, to judge her, or simply to see her?
- Why do you think the novel ends not with Emma but with Homais receiving the cross of the Legion of Honour?
There is no single right answer. Bring your own reading.