How Buddenbrooks drew on Madame Bovary
A documented line of influence: Thomas Mann demonstrably engaged Gustave Flaubert’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann · 1901
ModernRelevance
7/10
On Buddenbrooks’s page
- Buddenbrooks is an instance of French style, Flaubert's, moving into German: Mann adopts the affective interiority and the leitmotif technique of Madame Bovary to render his decaying family from the inside.
- Tony Buddenbrook openly resembles Emma Bovary, the realist heroine trapped in marriages of convenience, but Mann is Flaubert's opposite in attitude, where Flaubert is cool and pitiless, Mann loves Tony in spite of her folly.
On Madame Bovary’s page
- Buddenbrooks is Flaubert's style crossing into German: Mann enters his characters' minds with the affective exposition and recurring leitmotif he learned from Madame Bovary, transplanted to a North-German merchant world.
- Tony Buddenbrook is the explicit counterpart to Emma Bovary, a woman undone by marriages she did not choose, though Mann grants her irony and survival where Flaubert offered Emma only the clinical cruelty of the trap.