Download Gustave Flaubert

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
1821-1880
CHILDHOOD
• Rouen, France
• Father = doctor, middle class
• French culture in wake of Revolution,
Romanticism
ADULTHOOD
• 1841: Paris (law school)
• 1844: epileptic attack, move to Croisset
• Travel (near East, Africa, Paris) and
correspondence (Maupassant, Turgenev)
• 1846: begins 10-year love affair w/ Louise
Colet
MADAME BOVARY
• Influence of friend Louis Bouilhet: Real over
Romantic, plot of novel
• Laborious, five-year process of composition
• Madame Bovary (1856) = praise + indignation
• Trial (“outrage of public morals”)
• Attacks on excessive romantic idealism of Emma
tempered by attacks on bourgeois materialism and
crassness
• Q. “Who is Madame Bovary?”
GF: “Madame Bovary c’est moi.”
• Struggle between Romanticism & Realism
WRITING STYLE
• Flaubert’s writing: “mot juste”
• Structural tightness of poetry applied to novel form
• First truly modern novel? (novel as a carefully
wrought art form, a la poetry, drama)
• Writer should be like God, “everywhere present, but
nowhere visible”
• General chronological progression (but flashbacks,
symbolic episodic structure & “double action”/
counterpoint)
• Criticism: “life of the novel [becomes] secondary to
static, though beautiful, design” (Burt)
REALISM (END OF 19TH C)
• Accurate representation w/out idealization
• “Close observation” eventually descends into excessive minuteness
of detail & preoccupation with trivial, sordid, squalid subjects
• Purposeful choice of common, everyday characters (avoid the
unique, the unusual)
• Joyce says never write about the extraordinary – that is the job of the
journalist!
• Even unique circumstances rendered in common, everyday, ordinary
manner
• MB = “an unrelentingly objective portrait of the bourgeois mentality”
• Emphasis on detachment, objectivity, accurate observation
• Second half of 19th C = Rise of Realism, coinciding with rise of the
Novel (also, drama: Ibsen, Chekhov)
• Naturalism: humans as victims of greater forces (Marx, Freud, Darwin)