I recently had to do a presentation on 'the social opportunities available for women in Madame Bovary.' It's sort of obvious that there weren't many. However, the only book in the library which referenced it was 'Female Perversions,' oddly enough. It let me know that Flaubert constantly sniffed a woman's slipper when writing it. Which is slightly interesting.
Madame Bovary is what Disney’s Beauty and the Beast would have been if Belle had married a doctor in the first five minutes. I think that things would have been a lot better if, instead of shagging Rodolphe (Gaston?) in the forest, Emma had stumbled across a Beast’s castle and become a princess. I'm sure the culinary efforts of talking furniture taste better than arsenic.