How The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion drew on Madame Bovary
A documented line of influence: Ford Madox Ford 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
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
Ford Madox Ford · 1915
ModernRelevance
8/10
On The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion’s page
- Ford held Madame Bovary up as the model of what a novel could do — the craft behind The Good Soldier is Flaubert's craft
- Ashburnham is the Emma Bovary figure turned English and male: undone by the romance he mistook for life
- Read Flaubert first and the self-poisoning that ends Florence's story rhymes straight back to Emma's
On Madame Bovary’s page
- Flaubert was one of Ford's literary gods, and Madame Bovary was the textbook he taught the novelist's craft from
- Edward Ashburnham is an English Emma Bovary — a sentimentalist ruined by the romantic illusions his reading taught him
- Both novels close the same way: an adulterous wife dead by her own poison