Karakterler

Charles Bovary

Charles Bovary is a man with no ambitions, slow-witted and shallow, who works as a health officer/doctor in rural towns. For years, he lived under the guardianship of a dominant mother and his first wife. He falls in love with Emma at first sight and worships her. Emma's beauty and elegance provided everything he could want in life. Happy with his own shallowness and content with his situation, Charles is tragically oblivious to Emma's inner storms, her depressions, and ultimately the illicit affairs and debts she enters into.

Emma Bovary

Emma is a farmer's daughter who builds massive illusions about life under the influence of chivalric romances, lyrical poems, and melancholy love stories she read secretly during her education at a convent. She marries Charles Bovary with the dream of escaping the countryside and living a life full of passion. However, when she fails to find the nobility and romance she hoped for in her marriage, she falls into deep boredom and hysterical crises. To escape her monotonous life in Yonville, she first forms a spiritual intimacy with Léon, and then embarks on a physical and intense illicit affair with Rodolphe. When she is abandoned by Rodolphe, she suffers a severe breakdown. Increasingly clinging to luxury consumer goods and expensive fantasies, Emma falls into the cunning web of the moneylender Mösyö Lheureux, dragging her household into economic ruin. She is a tragic figure who brings herself, step by step, to suicide while caught between the lies of romanticism and the ruthlessness of real life.

Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen on 12 December 1821. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was chief surgeon at the city's Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and the family lived in an apartment inside it; the boy grew up seeing illness and death as ordinary features of the day. He was already writing while still at school. At his family's wish he studied law in Paris, until a nervous seizure in 1844 — read by the doctors of the time as epilepsy — put an end to his studies. He withdrew to Croisset near Rouen and spent the rest of his life there at his desk. In 1849 he read The Temptation of Saint Anthony aloud to his friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp over four days; their verdict was that he should throw the manuscript in the fire and never mention it again. He left almost at once with Du Camp on a long journey through Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. When Madame Bovary was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856, the prosecution charged him with an offence against public morals; the trial opened in January 1857 and ended in acquittal in February, and the book became a bestseller when it appeared later that year. Salammbô and Sentimental Education, which followed, met a cold reception. Prussian soldiers moved into his house at Croisset in 1870, his mother died in 1872, and in 1875 the bankruptcy that struck his niece Caroline's family swallowed his fortune. He read his sentences aloud and rewrote them for months until he found the right word, le mot juste; by pulling the narrator back and letting a character's voice seep into the third person, he gave the modern novel one of its basic instruments. Three Tales, published in 1877, won his readers back, and Zola and Maupassant took him for their master. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Croisset on 8 May 1880, leaving Bouvard and Pécuchet unfinished.

Léon Dupuis

A law clerk in Yonville, Léon is a young man who, much like Emma, hungers for literature, the piano, landscapes, and the excitement of Paris. When they meet, a pure, platonic, and silent love initially blossoms between them. Léon, due to his timidness, cannot confess his feelings and flees to Paris. Later in the novel, when they meet again in Rouen, he is more experienced and corrupted, and he seduces Emma without hesitation.

Mösyö Homais

The pharmacist of the town of Yonville, who pretends to be enlightened but is actually shallow, bigoted, opportunistic, and extremely talkative. He has an opinion on everything; he worships newspapers, the press, and science (while emptying them of meaning). He uses everyone for his own personal ambitions. He is the architect of many external events—such as Charles taking on the failed clubfoot surgery in the name of science—that reinforce Emma's disappointment with Charles. He constantly flatters Charles to avoid being punished for having received a warning against practicing pharmacy without a license.

Mösyö Lheureux

The haberdasher of the town of Yonville and an informal moneylender. Lheureux cleverly senses people's weaknesses (especially Emma's passion for splendor and shopping) and entraps them in debt with a fake amiability. At first, he seems to demand no payment and imposes goods; then, he binds his prey tightly with the promissory notes he makes them sign and the renewals of those notes. He is the chief architect of Emma's financial journey to suicide.

Rodolphe Boulanger

The owner of the La Huchette estate, he is 34 years old, a bachelor, and a wealthy heir. He is highly experienced in initiating relationships with women. He senses the void in Emma's marriage and considers seducing her a form of hunt. At first, he finds Emma's eccentricity and beauty attractive; he plays the role of a passionate lover for her. However, faced with Emma's dramatic demands, escape plans, and increasing attention, he realizes that his freedom is in jeopardy and that this affair is too 'troublesome,' so he abandons Emma with a heartless letter.