Charles Bovary is a shy, oddly dressed teenager who becomes an Officier de santé in the Public Health Service.

One day, Charles visits a local farm to set the owner's broken leg and meets his patient's daughter, Emma Rouault.

Emma is a beautiful, poetically dressed young woman who has a yearning for luxury and romance inspired by reading popular novels.

Charles decides his wife needs a change of scenery and moves his practice to the larger market town of Yonville.

Emma indulges her fancy for luxury goods and clothes with purchases made on credit from the merchant Lheureux, who arranges for her to obtain power of attorney over Charles' estate.

Monsieur Lheureux is a sly merchant who lends money to Charles and leads the Bovarys into debt and financial ruin.

In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, the bourgeoisie is characterized by intellectual and spiritual superficiality, raw ambition, shallow culture, a love of material things, greed, and above all a mindless parroting of sentiments and beliefs.

[10] For Vargas Llosa, "Emma's drama is the gap between illusion and reality, the distance between desire and its fulfillment" and shows "the first signs of alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies.

[12][13] Henry James wrote: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment.

"[14] Marcel Proust praised the "grammatical purity" of Flaubert's style, while Vladimir Nabokov said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do".

[15] Similarly, in his preface to his novel The Joke, Milan Kundera wrote, "not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority.

"[16] Giorgio de Chirico said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book is Madame Bovary by Flaubert".

[18] The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things.

The script had begun life as a straight adaptation of Madame Bovary, but Lean convinced writer Robert Bolt to re-work it into another setting.