There were a several theories as to who the character was based on. Flaubert achieved this verisimilitude to such a degree that readers and critics tried to find out which real person Madame Bovary was modeled after. One of the biggest characteristics of realist fiction is that it has verisimilitude – it has the appearance of being real. Nevertheless, Madame Bovary has quite a few elements – both in terms of style and content – that make it a realist or anti-romantic novel. “ Madame Bovary c’est moi,” Flaubert declared – Madame Bovary is me. His romantic leanings are evident in the fact that he openly stated that he personally identifies with Madame Bovary, a character who was decidedly romantic. And while Madame Bovary, which was the resultant novel, was immediately heralded as a realist work – Emile Zola said that it “dealt romanticism its first blow” – Flaubert was powerfully influenced by the Romantic Movement and did not take kindly to the novel being considered realist. Flaubert’s French contemporaries Stendhal and Balzac had already written novels that were considered realist, and Flaubert was persuaded by his friends to tackle a realistic, down-to-earth subject in a novel too. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary in 1856, the age of Romanticism was winding down and the notion of realism in contrast to the idealism of Romanticism was gaining traction. In terms of stylistic technique, the realist novel’s approach to its subject matter is straightforward and detached, almost analytic in its description of characters and events. It focuses on characters in a social setting and delves deep into their psyche. According to the twentieth-century scholar Rene Wellek, the aim of realist literature is “the objective representation of social reality.” The realist novel is concerned with contemporary life and everyday, commonplace scenes. Literary realism is the attempt of literature to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality or elaborate artistic conventions and implausible or supernatural elements. In order to understand why Madame Bovary is hailed as an anti-romantic, realist piece of literature, and to what extent such a classification is true, it is first important to understand what realism in literature means.
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