Flaubert, Gustave | Introduction
Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880
French novelist, short story writer, and playwright.
For additional information on Flaubert's complete career, see ; for a discussion of the novel Madame Bovary, see ; for a discussion of the novel Sentimental Education, see . A single-work entry updating the criticism on Madame Bovary will appear in an upcoming NCLC volume.
INTRODUCTION
Considered among the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century, Flaubert is frequently associated with the realist and naturalist schools of fiction and is best known for his masterpiece Madame Bovary (1857). A meticulous literary craftsman, Flaubert diligently researched his subjects and infused his works with psychological realism with the goal of achieving an objective prose style "as rhythmical as verse and as precise as the language of science."
Biographical Information
Flaubert was born in Rouen, where his father was chief surgeon at the city hospital and his mother was a respected woman from a provincial bourgeois family. As a youth, Flaubert attended school at the Collège Royal de Rouen. It was during a summer vacation with his family in Trouville that Flaubert met Elisa Schlésinger, a married woman for whom he harbored a lifelong infatuation. In 1838, Flaubert began Mémoires d'un fou, a reflective essay in which he recounted the agonies and frustrations of his love for Schlésinger. Shortly after, between 1841 and 1842, he composed the short novel Novembre (November), which relates the slow death of the main character. Upon receiving his baccalaureate degree, Flaubert honored his parents' wishes and reluctantly registered for law school in Paris, despite his stronger interest in literature. In 1844, however, he experienced an attack of what is now believed to have been epilepsy; he subsequently abandoned his law studies and devoted himself entirely to writing. In 1845, Flaubert completed the first draft οf L'éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education), which contrasts the respective rewards of love and art. Following the death of both Flaubert's father and sister in 1846, Flaubert moved to the family home at Croisset, near Rouen, with his mother and his infant niece. In 1849, he completed the first version of La tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Antony), a novel inspired by a painting by the elder Brueghel. When Flaubert's friends
Major Works
Through painstaking attention to detail and the process of extensive revision, Flaubert developed a dispassionate but psychologically accurate prose style that has subsequently served as a respected model for innumerable writers. During the process of writing Madame Bovary, for example, Flaubert composed at most a few paragraphs each day, which he would repeatedly revise in an effort to achieve stylistic perfection. He rejected the use of synonyms; instead, he searched for le seul mot juste, or the most precise word, to convey each thought. Partly because of its breakthrough status in the evolution of the objective narrative voice, Madame Bovary is considered Flaubert's masterpiece—the most influential French novel of the nineteenth century. History is an important element of such works as Sentimental Education, which historians as well as literary critics have regarded as a record of daily life in France during and immediately following the July Monarchy. According to Flaubert, the goal of this work was the writing of "the moral history of the men of my generation." Historical fiction is also the focus of Salammbô, which Edmund Wilson characterized in 1948 as "gruesome and extravagant," depicting the "savage and benighted barbarians" of Carthage "[who] slaughtered, lusted and agonized superbly." Contrasting with the exoticism of Flaubert's historical fiction, such noted works as Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education delineate the concerns of the French bourgeoisie, displaying an autobiographical impulse. Emile Faguet argued in 1899 that each of Flaubert's works was inspired by a particular tendency or "mania" in the author's temperament. Faguet attributed the novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), for instance, to one of Flaubert's primary manias: his "horror of stupidity and at the same time [his] sort of fascination [with] stupidity." Another important theme that runs throughout Flaubert's oeuvre is a concern with the experience of human failure. Particularly in Madame Bovary, Salammbô, and Sentimental Education, Flaubert explores the failure of bourgeois characters to achieve love, happiness, and distinction, and their subsequent renunciation of idealistic dreams. Paul Valéry viewed Flaubert's long-term project The Temptation of Saint Antony as "a personal antidote against the boredom (which he admits) of writing his novels of contemporary manners, erecting stylistic monuments to the banality of provincial bourgeois life." Valéry linked The Temptation of Saint Antony with Goethe's Faust, emphasizing the theme of man versus the devil in both works. Flaubert also addressed religious themes in Three Tales, which presents three stories ranging in setting from contemporary France to classical antiquity, each of which explores the concept of sainthood and the Christian idea of the trinity. While some critics have interpreted the work as moralistic, others have posited that the volume demonstrates Flaubert's belief that history can be divided into three distinct phases: paganism, Christianity, and muflisme, which refers to Flaubert's conception of the nineteenth century as an era marked by the petty values and lifestyles of the bourgeoisie.
Critical Reception
Flaubert's breakthroughs in approaches to narration instigated negative criticism during the nineteenth century, usually on moral grounds. Madame Bovary, for example, was widely faulted for its pessimistic view of provincial life and for what was seen as the complete absence of goodness* in his characters. Another revolutionary work, Sentimental Education, was also attacked for what many critics perceived as questionable morality, the lack of a strong hero figure, and an awkward and disjointed structure. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of ethics and aesthetics as separate fields that critics began to evaluate Flaubert's works on the basis of artistry rather than morality. Twentieth-century critics have consistently praised the technical virtuosity of Flaubert's writing—his use of style, structure, imagery and symbolism. Flaubert's writing process itself has also been the subject of continuing study, with letters and various drafts of his works being examined in order to gain an understanding of his approach to craft. In recent years, some critics have been concerned with the question of Flaubert's modernity and his perceived role as the father of the modern novel. Victor Brombert, for example, has argued against viewing Flaubert as "the direct ancestor of the nouveau roman," arguing that his works reject the application of critical systems of poetic theory. Another area of reexamination among contemporary Flaubert critics has been the significance of the theme of stupidity in his satirical works. Diana Knight, for example, has argued that Flaubert "suggests an important connection between moral and aesthetic values in [his] so-called 'simple' characters."
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