I.

Introduction

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French writer, known for his novels Madame Bovary (1857; translated 1886) and L’éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education, 1898). Considered by many to be the father of realistic fiction (see Realism), Flaubert consistently rejected membership in any school, asserting that he “strove only for beauty.” His works influenced the development of the modern novel, most notably in their detailed, objective observation of everyday life and their concern for form.

II.

Life and Career

Born the son of a prosperous doctor in Rouen, Normandy (Normandie), Flaubert spent much of his childhood in an apartment in the hospital where his father was chief surgeon. He was thus exposed daily to suffering and death, and his experiences reinforced a predisposition to pessimism about human existence. Flaubert attended the prestigious Collège Royal in Rouen, where he received a solid education in the literary works of ancient Greece and Rome. As a young man he was a passionate reader of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of Germany, Lord Byron of England, and François Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo of France. All of these writers were associated with romanticism, a movement that championed individualism, emotion, and imagination.

At the age of 14, Flaubert met Madame Elisa Schlésinger, a 26-year-old married woman who dazzled Flaubert and became the great love of his life. Schlésinger profoundly influenced his work. She inspired the character of Emma Bovary in part, was Madame Renaude in an early version of L’éducation sentimentale, and was immortalized as the lovely Madame Arnoux in the final version of L’éducation sentimentale.

In 1840 Flaubert began law studies in Paris. After failing his second-year examinations, he experienced a seizure while traveling by carriage. What Flaubert termed his “nervous disease” and may have been epilepsy changed his life. Thenceforth he lived as the hermit of Croisset, an estate on the Seine River purchased by his father; his mother and his niece joined him there in 1846, after the deaths of his father and sister. A long journey to the Middle East and Greece from 1849 to 1851 and occasional visits to Paris marked his only considerable absences from Croisset until his death.

Flaubert devoted the remainder of his life to literature. In his correspondence with writers Louise Colet, George Sand, and others, he described what he called “the tortures of style” in his creative process. His six major works required an average of five years each to write. His exacting standards led him to write and rewrite sentences many times over, even yelling them to himself in his garden in an effort to hone and polish them. Flaubert’s pessimistic view of human existence led him to believe that there was no place in the world for ideals or perfection, even though human beings could conceive of them. Appropriately, human speech was an imperfect instrument on which imperfect people must “beat out songs for dancing bears when we would like to make the stars weep.” Flaubert believed that writers must discipline themselves to find the exact words to describe perceptions, to eliminate repetitions and awkwardness, and to discover just the right rhythm and sounds to communicate their vision.

Despite Flaubert’s reputation as a realist writer, Salammbô (1862; translated 1886), La tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1910), and the short story “Hérodias” (1877; translated in Three Stories, 1910) are colorful and exuberant in their action and setting, and are thus to some degree romantic. His two acknowledged masterpieces, however, reflect the great conscious effort that Flaubert exerted to restrain his flights of fantasy and passion.

III.

Major Works and Influence

The first of Flaubert’s masterpieces, L’éducation sentimentale, recounts the failure and disillusion of Frédéric Moreau in most areas of life, including his idealistic love for Madame Arnoux. Moreau’s life and character are meant to imitate what Flaubert sees as the mediocrity of French society in his time. The reader sees, hears, smells, and feels the streets of Paris through the vivid detail of the novel. Character and historical moment, structure and style, and subject matter and form are perfectly interrelated.

Madame Bovary, however, is the great novel by which Flaubert is chiefly known. Subtitled Moeurs de Province (Provincial Customs), the novel portrays unforgettable but ordinary characters, as well as a historical period in its tangible and specific reality. Charles Bovary, a country doctor, marries Emma, whose education in a convent has left her with vague, mystical longings, and whose readings of romantic novels leave her awaiting a great love to redeem the dreariness of reality. The dull Charles disappoints her, as do Rodolphe and Léon, the two men with whom she has love affairs, and her disastrous financial dealings finally bring her to despair. She commits suicide by swallowing arsenic and dies a horrible and vividly described death. Upon publication of the novel, Flaubert was tried for offenses to public morals resulting from the book’s subject matter and frank detail, but he was acquitted.

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (“I am Madame Bovary”), Flaubert asserted of his title character, and yet his stated goal was to hide all trace of the author, much as he considered God to be absent from nature. The reader encounters characters of remarkable mediocrity and stupidity, but no narrator judges them or indicates clearly to the reader how they should be judged. Flaubert’s use of this so-called free indirect style, by which the exact thoughts of a character are reported by an objective and articulate narrator, revolutionized modern fiction. This narrative technique and style allowed Flaubert to be, and simultaneously not to be, Madame Bovary. He could present the romantic psychology of Emma (and his own younger self) and undercut it with irony at the same time. Thus Madame Bovary both depicts and critiques the inability of the romantic temperament to live in the real world.

The essential aspects of Flaubert’s work include literary realism, perfected form, innovative narration, and brilliant style. American writer Henry James called Flaubert “the novelist’s novelist,” and after James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other modernist novelists acknowledged their indebtedness to the hermit of Croisset. Flaubert anticipated many of the ideas and forms of the novel in the second half of the 20th century in Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881; Bouvard and Pécuchet, 1896), an unfinished novel published after his death that expresses the novelist’s disgust with middle-class society even more than his earlier works do. The new novelists and absurdists, two avant-garde groups of writers who emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s, recognized the validity of Flaubert’s insights into language, literature, and society.