From Madame Bovary to Primo Basílio: the bovarist’s singularity of Luísa

Abstract

Published in 1856 in the Revue de Paris and edited in volume in the following year, Madame Bovary would become, in the next decades, the narrative model for the naturalist novel. Clearly inspired in Flaubert’s work, both in the narrative structure and the theme of feminine adultery, O primo Basílio is not a mere copy of the French masterpiece, since Eça de Queirós manages to fictionally create a possible world in his novel, one the reader can easily identify, both geographically and socially, as the Portuguese capital. Regarded by the Portuguese and Brazilian contemporary critics with a mixture of aesthetic enthusiasm and moral repulse, Eça’s novel is also set apart from its contemporary works with a similar theme due to the uncommon sensuality of its main female character, Luísa.