After Eugene's first wife died, he married Delphine Couturier, who turned out to be unfaithful to him, just as Emma was to Charles. She also died at a very young age, leaving Delmare with many debts and a young child to rear. Eugene, like Charles, died shortly after his wife out of despair. .
Madame Bovary is written in the tradition of combining a realistic portrayal of society with a formalistic desire to create a new way of life in much the same way Degas and Manet attempted to paint the mediocrity of modern life without becoming vulgar themselves. Flaubert had to break the convention of the novel of manners in an attempt to mirror reality. While the novel of manners shared and exalted middle class values, Flaubert is deeply ironic and ruthlessly critical of them. Within the illusion of looking into a real world, Flaubert creates brilliant, precise descriptions with exhaustively selected details. The text is aesthetically obsessive with formalism in an artistic sense, and analytically critical in a realist sense. .
Taking over 5 years to write, this masterpiece is noted for "white writing", a style that is independent of its content. Flaubert's style is also described as indirect free-style in which he very carefully describes characters not directly as the author, but through the eyes of another character. The portrayal of this mediocre, country woman in a mundane, philistine life, shows that it is possible to write artistically about anything. A combination of naturalism and aestheticism, Madame Bovary is a work of "high art about low society"(Resch) that truly embodies the notion of art for art's sake. .
The beauty of Flaubert's style as a critical realist is perhaps most evident in the manner in which he creates rhythm within the novel with the building up of Emma's expectations and then having them plummet back to the depths of disparity. A mediocre individual, who gets her ideas of love and happiness from novels and tries to live out these fantasies, Emma stumbles through every kind of romantic "escape" from the banality in which she exists.