Madame Bovary

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*Madame Bovary* is Gustave Flaubert's realist masterpiece, transforming an everyday story of provincial adultery into a landmark study of bourgeois mentality and human disillusionment The novel follows Emma Bovary, a farm girl who marries country doctor Charles Bovary to escape rural monotony, only to find middle-class domesticity unbearable and pursue ruinous romantic affairs Its unrelenting narrative objectivity and poetic prose cadence established the European realist movement in 19th-century literature Flaubert spent approximately five years composing and relentlessly rewriting *Madame Bovary*, guided by his conviction that there was "no such thing as a synonym"