ABSTRACT
On 14 November 1850, the twenty-nine-year-old Gustave Flaubert wrote to his close friend Louis Bouilhet that he was planning to write a novel about 'a young girl who dies a virgin and mystic after living with her father and mother in a small provincial town'. Four years later, in Madame Bovary, Flaubert was to retain that provincial setting but introduce a new heroine, an adulteress. In writing Madame Bovary, he presented a narrative of tantalizing insolubility that was to install doubt and dissatisfaction within the bourgeois reader. Flaubert's command of cliche is staggering, and it is worth pausing on the facet of Madame Bovary a little longer. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert also explores ennui, but within a rather less exquisite modality. His heroine is strung between an ordinariness raised to grotesquerie and the sad desperation of unfulfilled aspirations. The nature of ennui consists in the nausea of repetition, and Madame Bovary is built upon repetition.
