When Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary was first published in 1857, the author was brought to trial on charges that his novel had offended "public and religious morality" (LaCapra 726). The story is concerned with the character of Emma Bovary, a country doctor's wife who has passionate desires for both romance and material things. These desires cause her to commit adultery and lead her into a hopeless state of debt. In the end, when she is rejected for the second time by one of her lovers, she commits suicide by eating a handful of arsenic. In this tragic tale, Flaubert did not seek to simply create a blatant characterization of immorality. Rather, he used Emma's character as a means of expressing his own views on society. In particular, Flaubert was making a commentary on the excesses of the middle class.
Flaubert was critical of the superficial and mundane values of the "bourgeois" middle class. As noted by Russell, the author had great contempt for the mannerisms of this social group. In fact, "the bourgeois that dull, graceless animal, petty, materialistic, cliche ridden could make him feel physically ill" (Russell 6). Ironically, Flaubert himself came from a middle class background. Because of this, it is apparent that he was making a highly personal statement in his condemnation of the characters in Madame Bovary. Flaubert once claimed: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("that's me"). Thus, the author was expressing a recognition of his own middle class desires through his tragic characterization of Emma. Flaubert's personal impact on the development of the novel can be seen in the fact that Emma's romantic dreams of a better life "had its place in his own history" (Russell 9). However, as Levi notes, Emma Bovary represents not only Flaubert's desires but also those of humanity as a whole. In other words, "there is something of the dreamer looking for escape from the real world in all of us" (Levi 236). Thus, ...