Auerbach, in Mimesis, makes some astute comments about Flaubert’s style. Like Stendhal and Balzac, two other practitioners of modern realism, Flaubert takes seriously “real everyday occurrences in a low social stratum, the provincial petty bourgeoisie” and he sets these occurrences “in a definite period of contemporary history.” However, whereas Stendhal and Balzac tell us what they think of their characters, and their characters frequently tell us what they think and feel, “these things are almost wholly absent from Flaubert’s work.” The writer’s “role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language; and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do.” Auerbach contrasts Flaubert’s approach with the grandiloquent and ostentatious parading of the writer’s own feelings . . . of the type inaugurated by Rousseau and continued after him.” For example, in his description of husband and wife together at mealtime—she recoiling at the damp floor tiles and walls, the steam from the boiled beef; he, eating slowly, complacent—Flaubert captures perfectly the gulf between them and Emma’s sense of discomfort and disgust—which she herself would be unable to articulate. Flaubert gives us “pure pictures.”

Harry Levin (“Madame Bovary: The Cathedral and the Hospital”) discusses Flaubert’s influential use of le style indirect libre, “adapting the rhythms of his style to the movement of his character’s thoughts.” Madame Bovary begins in the first person, then switches from an anonymous classmate to Charles himself. Subsequently the point of view switches mainly to Emma, an exception being the pantomime interview with the tax collector near the end of the novel, which is witnessed and reported by a chorus of town gossips.

Levin also talks about the novel’s pictures or scenes, which often come in contrasting pairs. For example: the Bruegelesque peasant wedding of Emma and Charles in Tostes; the aristocratic gathering at the Chateau de Vaubyessard, where Emma gets her first taste of the life she feels she is missing; the shattering of the religious garden statuette on the move to Yonville, where she will break her marriage vows; the juxtaposition of the agricultural exhibition in the public square and the tryst of Rodolphe and Emma in the deserted town hall above; the operation, which destroys Charles professionally; the romantic opera at which Emma again encounters Leon; the lovers’ frenetic cab tour around Rouen, hidden by curtains, as Leon bids the driver to go on!; their meeting in the cathedral, where they ignore the verger’s appeal to admire the exquisite representations of the Last Judgment and Hell. Flaubert truly lets the facts speak for themselves.