Fragrance of Drunk Desire—Exploring the Description of Smell in “Madame Bovary”

Madame Bovary, as a representative work of the great French realist novelist Flaubert, fully showcases Flaubert’s modernist narrative of “objective writing”. With objective writing and a daily plot as the starting point, it portrays Emma’s decline process through the meticulous depiction of the environment and things. At present, research on Madame Bovary mainly focuses on the analysis of the character traits, the causes of Emma’s tragedy, and criticism of social reality and romanticism. However, there is relatively little research on the description of the novel’s environment, especially the description of odors in the novel. This article will analyze the text from this perspective and combine it with the famous odor-related treatise Odor—The Temptation of Secrets by Fulong, Exploring how the author presents the implicit meaning in odor description and narrates it.