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.