Madame Bovary and its Cinematic Adaptation in English
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Abstract
Madame Bovary, a classic novel by Gustave Flaubert in 1856 already created a stir in the society so its Film Adaptation whether in Hindi or English. Already filmed by Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol and Vincente Minnelli, Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 classic Madame Bovary does another neurotic tango through the villages of Normandy in this latest adaptation of the seminal French classic about the ambitious wife of a simple country doctor whose adulterous affairs and mounting debts to escape the boredom of a dead-end life destroy her husband’s career, her reputation and eventually her life. The results are realistic and refined, but uneven and disappointing. When Gustave Flaubert's first novel came out, there was a very French reaction they put the language of the book on trial. The ostensible charge was obscenity, but the trial went much deeper. The prosecutor argued that the novel's realism was itself immoral: an offence against art. Flaubert was acquitted but they were dead right about his aims. Madame Bovary was a bomb thrown at romanticism.
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References
Philippe Ariès. The Hour of Our Death. translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Vintage Books, 1982 [1977]), 602-14.
Mary Donaldson-Evans. “Teaching Madame Bovary through Film,” Approaches to Teaching Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. (ed) Laurence M. Porter and Eugene F. Gray. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995. 114-21.
On the range of adaptations of Madame Bovary, see Mary Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 13-21, 166-81.
See William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 190-91.
“Cinquante-quatreans de service! Unemédailled’argent! Vingt-cinq francs!” Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 141.
http://screenwriterscolony.org/sophie-barthes-06-takes-on-madame-bovary/ Accessed February 2, 2017
Ibid.
Barthes specifically refers to the relationship between Emma’s states of mind and the clothes she wears. See “Madame Bovary: Interview de Sophie Barthes” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7zClxXI9eY. Accessed February 6, 2015.
Frederic Raphael, "'Introduction'", Two for the Road. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967.
DeWitt Bodeen, "'The Adapting Art'", Films in Review. 14/6 (June-July 1963), 349.
Jan Dawson, “The Continental Divide: Filming Henry James", Sight and Sound. 43/1 (Winter 1973-4), 14; repr. in part as 'An Interview with Peter Bogdanovich' in G. Peary and R. Shatzkin (eds.). The Classic American Novel and the Movies. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1977.
Christian Metz. The Imaginary Signifier. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. 12.
Anthony Burgess, "'On the Hopelessness of Turning Good Books into Films'", New York Times. p. 15
21 Donaldson-Evans, Mary. Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.
Flaubert, Gaustave. Madame Bovary. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994.
Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and Art of Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.