GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 1821 1880 CHILDHOOD Rouen France Father

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 19 TH 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 19 th C = Rise of Realism, coinciding with rise of the Novel (also, drama: Ibsen, Chekhov) • Naturalism: humans as victims of greater forces (Marx, Freud, Darwin)