Flaubert Versus the World

The last time I tried to “teach” Madame Bovary was in an advanced undergraduate course at a London university, and I had expected better results. The students either hated it or found it “boring,” and even when they did “sort of like” it, they hated the central character and said things like: “How can I like someone who cheats on their husband?” Or “That woman had everything and she was never happy.” They found Emma completely unsympathetic—a problem I never had teaching other novels about adulterous women, such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (which was, of course, inspired by Flaubert’s earlier and much better novel).