Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary masterfully explores the cultural scene of the mid-19th century, coloring the subject with his own opinion. Through the book Flaubert offers an insight into the life of the time and conveys his opinions on the social world. It achieves these goals using Bovary. Flaubert reevaluates characters through conflict, absence, juxtaposition, and selective examination of thought to defame Bovary's. Whether out of necessity or willful ignorance, characters rise and fall in importance, allowing Flaubert to lead the reader to his opinion. There is a matter of debate regarding its purpose in this matter, and many critics have extrapolated that Madame Bovary is a criticism of the values ​​of the bourgeoisie. In Madame Bovary, characters rise to prominence when they encounter conflicts. Stories consist of conflicts, in one form or another. A situation that creates conflict brings the characters involved to the fore. As Madame Lefrançois watches Hippolyte suffer, she becomes resentful. A background character in the novel up to this point, he now becomes the protagonist when he refuses the treatment of two of the region's most prominent doctors by proclaiming, "Don't listen to him, my boy" (126). His rise to this status is rapid as the sequence of events regarding Hippolyte's leg unfolds, and his fall occurs almost as quickly. He uses his time in the spotlight to criticize Charles' decisions and directions. For a brief moment Madame Lefrançois was the center of attention, as the conflict demanded, but when this dissipated she quickly disappeared from the reader's mind. Flaubert ignores the characters until they help him denigrate the Bovaries. The reader would almost forget that Madame Bovary had a… paper medium… through their interactions with the various characters. This allows the narrator to have an opinion. For this reason, the reader must analyze their thoughts to determine their origin. Flaubert masterfully plants ideas in readers' heads, a skill that readers can learn from and use. The various methods by which he does this progress in order of complexity and subtlety: conflict, ignoring and expanding beyond characters, juxtaposing Bovary's with successful characters, and selective examination of thought. This serves Flaubert's purpose of denigrating the Bovarys without him presenting them as deplorable. By denigrating the Bovaries, Flaubert criticizes the desired bourgeois lifestyle, allowing the Bovaries to achieve it only through financial ruin. Work cited Flaubert, Gustave. Mrs. Bovary. Trans. Eleonora Marx Aveling. Mineola (NY): Dover, 1996.