SOURCE: Furst, Lilian R. “The Role of Food in Madame Bovary.” Orbis Litterarum, 34, no. 1 (1979): 53-65.

In the following essay, Furst examines the multiple functions of the detailed descriptions of food in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, including the use of food as a marker of social class.

“Madame Bovary is a well-made book—so we have always been told, and so we find it to be, pulling it to pieces and putting it together again. It never is unrepaying to do so once more.”¹ In the fifty or so years that have elapsed since Percy Lubbock's assertion, many critics have pulled Madame Bovary to pieces, and some have also put it together again. And even now, in spite of the wealth of already published exegesis, it is not “unrepaying to do so once more,” as Lubbock suggests in a gentle understatement that holds, perhaps, a touch of irony.

Of all...