My Thoughts:It was slow at times but overall it's a fascinating time machine where we get to see what it was like for a woman in the 1800s to act like a man did at the time. It follows a young housewife who desires freedom and seeks out sensual pleasures through affairs with young men. She neglects her daughter, spends all her husbands money, and in the very end she's faced with the debt and guilt she brought upon herself throughout the miserable 400 and so pages of the novel. I'm by no means excusing her immoral behavior, but it feels like if our protagonist was a male, the story wouldn't be worth telling at all because of how frequent we hear stories like that. This is a woman with an unquenchable thirst for sex but she learns that as much as she gives in to her desires, she keeps wanting. She is simply a woman in a man's world. What she did wouldn't be so horrible if she didn't feel obligated to marry Charles in the first place. On the other hand, Charles is the hero of her novels that she wanted all along; someone who would love her unconditionally. I really love Flaubert's style of storytelling, we see the stages of grief, of emotions that ebb and flow from the characters minds. It gives the characters so much depth and makes me feel like I am in their psychology.