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 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)