1821-1880

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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)