“It’s a completely invented story. None of my own feelings or experiences are in it.” And yet Flaubert also wrote, in his youth, “There are days when one would like to be an athlete, and others when one longs to be a woman. In the first case it is because our muscles are aquiver; in the second, because our flesh is yearning and ablaze” (Intimate Notebook, p. 47).

In fact, the word “realism” was initially applied to Madame Bovary by its first publishers, who also acted as censors. After agreeing to issue the book in six installments, Flaubert’s friends at the Revue de Paris asked him to cut several scenes that its readers would find much “too real.” At the top of the list was one of the book’s strongest and funniest scenes (part three, chapter one), in which Emma finally yields to Leon’s advances. Having made no prior arrangements, they take an eight-hour ride in the back of a cab. “Where to, sir?” asks the cabman. “Where you like!” answers Leon, and they’re off on a fornicator’s grand tour past all of provincial Rouen’s doubtful attractions. “Real” in this case was a euphemism. They meant obscene.

When the final installment appeared, Flaubert, and the editors and printer of the Revue de Paris were subpoened to court for of fenses against public morals and religion. (Installed via a coup five years previously, the government of Napoleon III had begun to enforce its draconian laws of political censorship.) Public prosecutor Ernest Pinard (who later, hilariously, would be exposed as the anonymous author of self-published pornography) denounced the book’s “realism.” Attorney for the defense Jules Senard argued persuasively that this very “realism,” and Emma’s meticulously described and horrible death, served as caution against the dangers awaiting young women like Emma, when they are educated and exposed to certain ideas beyond their comprehension and station (“Appendix: Speech for the Defense”). The charges were dropped, and Madame Bovary was published in book form by Michel Levy.

“Everyone thinks I am in love with reality,” Flaubert protested, at the pitch of the controversy, “whereas I actually detest it. It was in hatred of realism that I undertook this book. But I equally despise that false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present age” (Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary, p. 377).

In a sense, Emma Bovary’s dreaminess is not so very different from Flaubert’s own; he simply adapted it to the limits of her situation. The only child of a prosperous peasant, Emma Rouault is sent to a convent school in Rouen at the age of thirteen. Here she excels, until the nuns realize it is the erotics of Catholicism that Emma embraces. Emma has a particular talent for recognizing and responding to the sexual subtext of the religio-romantic ideas of her time as taught to young ladies. She swoons at the mortification of Jesus, practices fasting, and senses the pressing of flesh guarded over by golden-winged cherubs. She yearns along with the virgin hearts who aspire toward heaven. After the premature death of her mother, she abandons herself to more secular forms of soft-core pornography, devouring popular romances written by viscounts and counts. Like Flaubert, she is a child of the Romantic era, in which Great Men of Letters like Lamartine and de Musset concocted washes of sentiment in the noble verse form of Alexandrine couplets.

Charles Bovary is the first and last suitor she meets after returning from the convent to her family’s isolated farm. Flaubert has already told us a great deal about Charles before their first meeting. Awkward and bumbling throughout his youth, he was a mediocre student who barely managed to pass despite hard work and discipline. He attends medical school but never achieves the full status of doctor. Instead he becomes a public health officer, a job that was roughly equivalent to physician’s assistant. Charles knows his limits: His treatments are as noninvasive as possible. He fears killing his patients. The two meet when Charles is summoned to treat Pere Rouault’s broken leg. He rides eighteen miles through desolate countryside from the small town of Tostes to the Rouault family farm.