Lecture 13. Realism and critical realism

Flaubert ( 1821-1880)
Born the son of a chief surgeon in Rouen, Normandy, Gustave Flaubert was beset by ill health. His personal misfortune made him live a solitary life of rigid discipline. He devoted himself to literature quite early in his life, although his father wished him to become a lawyer. He wrote assiduously and his labor of writing was supposed to have aggravated his afflicting malady. In 1846 he moved to Croisset, a town just outside of Rouen on the Seine, where he settled down for the rest of his life, except for some years during which he traveled extensively in Greece, Syria, and Egypt, and made an occasional trip to Tunisia. He died suddenly of a stroke of apoplexy without finishing his last novel. Flaubert wrote both novels and short stories. Like the works of Stendhal and Balzac, Flaubert’ s works are tinged with romanticism despite their realistic treatment.
They often express lyricism and vivid imaginings in passionate passages. Today, however, he is regarded as one of the greatest literary artists of the 19^th century chiefly because of his realistic or naturalistic characteristics. His works are indeed marked by exactness and accuracy of observation plus extreme impersonality and objectivity. His precise portrayal of object and event is accompanied by good selection of detail and chiseled perfection of style. It is said that he would labor hour after hour, seeking le mot juste (the “just” word), over the rhythm or music of a particular sentence. His virtuosity in composition is certainly commensurate with the subtlety of his character portrayal and the accuracy of his environmental description.
Flaubert’ s masterpiece, Madame Bovary, 1856) is considered the showpiece of French realism. It depicts the life and fate of Emma (daughter of a farmer, M. Rouault), who marries Charles Bovary (a provincial doctor), finds her dreams of romantic love unfulfilled, commits adultery first with Rodolphe (a wicked seducer) and then with Lé on (a young lawyer), piles up enormous debts, and finally takes her own life in desperation. In this novel, we find a whole spectrum of social types (including a pharmacist, a notary, a tax collector, a priest, a woman innkeeper, and a landowner in addition to the doctor and the farmer), along with the setting (Tostes, Yonville-L ’Abbaye, and Rouen), truthfully and objectively described with
minute detail. Moreover, we find the romantic heroine’ s fate and the fate of her stupid husband understandably determined by their hereditary characters and social circumstances.