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screen adaptations? The trivial answer is of course: nothing. Flaubert could have had no conception of the twentieth-century form of cinema, let alone of the fact that his novel would become one of the most filmed works in the Western canon. In her indispensable study Madame Bovary at the Movies, Mary Donaldson-Evans lists eighteen screen versions of the novel, and this number has increased in recent times.2 Yet even though Flaubert certainly lacked foreknowledge of the future, the suggestion of this chapter is that his novel contains a profound, pre-emptive reflection
likewise was over forty, and so twice the age of Flaubert’s Emma when we first meet her. 19 Martin du Garde predictably found Renoir’s film ‘Indefensible’. See Mérigeau, Jean Renoir, p. 170. 20 Katherine Mannheimer developed these ideas in ‘Emma Bovary’s Formalist Frames, Madame Bovary’s Realism’, a paper for my seminar at Yale, December 2002. She dwelt on the various paintings hanging on walls in the film, something carefully discussed by Mary Donaldson-Evans, Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2009), pp. 59–67. The author