Frau Bovary

It opens with a young man so unremarkable that his own father questions whether he's worth educating. By the novel's end, that man is dead, his wife is dead, and the reader understands why Gustave Flaubert was put on trial for obscenity. Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor's wife in provincial France who mistakes daydreaming for passion and consumption for taste. She reads too many Romantic novels and marries the first dull man who proposes, then spends the rest of her life trying to escape the gray reality of her circumstances through affairs, debts, and ever-grander fantasies. What makes this novel devastating is not what happens, but how Flaubert reveals the gap between what Emma believes life should be and the life she's actually living. The real scandal wasn't the adultery or the financial ruin. It was the precision with which Flaubert anatomized a woman's mind, and the cruelty his contemporaries saw in that clarity. More than a century and a half later, the novel retains its power because the disease Emma suffers from has not been cured.