Review of Madame Bovary and its symbolism

Madame Bovary is considered Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece and the most influential French novel of the nineteenth century. Often described as a satire on romantic beliefs and the rural bourgeois, Madame Bovary relates the story of Emma Bovary, a bored housewife whose dreams of romantic love (primarily gathered from popular romanticized novels) are unfulfilled through her marriage to a simple country doctor. She attempts to realize her fantasies through love affairs with a local landowner and …

…try to fill with literature, with fantasies, with sex, with things. Her yearning is nothing more or less than the situation in the modern world. Her search for ecstasy is ours. Flaubert once wrote in 1858- "One way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in perpetual orgy". If Madame Bovary can still move us today, all these years later, it is because she was both Flaubert's refuge - and his self-portrait.