Madame Bovary was greeted with no little controversy on its release, the French government going so far as to charge the author with having “offen public and religious morality and decency.” After a day-long trial, Flaubert was acquitted, the court noting that although “the work referred to court deserves a harsh rebuke, for the task of literature must be to embellish and to amuse the mind, by elevating understanding and by refining morals,” Flaubert had “declare his respect for the accepted standards of good behavior and all that relates to religious morality ” and had “only. These ultimately leave her unfulfilled and heavily in debt, and in an act of desperation she swallows arsenic, from which she meets her death. The story is well-known: Emma Bovary finds herself in a surprisingly loveless marriage (albeit one she freely consented to) to her conventional but devoted husband, Charles, and seeks passion and fulfillment in material luxuries, a bourgeois social status, and eventual adulteries with two men. These struggles are reflected in Gustave Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, published as a complete text in 1857. The nineteenth century was a difficult and dynamic period for the French nation, as citizens of all classes and philosophical persuasions struggled to come to terms with modernity.
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