France celebrates the bicentenary of Gustave Flaubert’s birth this month. A film depicting his life was screened on France 3 on Monday 6th. It revealed many aspects of the writer, who ranks among the world’s greatest novelists, which were unknown to me.
Debilitating Illness and Literary Career
It was in the historic Normandy city of Rouen, in northern France, that Gustave Flaubert was born on December 12th, 1821. His father was a surgeon. He attended the local school. He was a good student winning prizes for history, and qualifying for his baccalauréat in 1840.
After an unsuccessful attempt to study law in Paris between 1840 and 1843, he began to suffer from strange fits which were identified as epilepsy. The first attack rendered him an invalid for several months. His family moved to Croisset, outside Rouen. A second consequence of the illness was that his parents came to the conclusion that he could not pursue a career and allowed him to devote himself to his writing. Certain critics, among them the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, have commented extensively on the role of Flaubert’s debilitating illness on his subsequent literary career.
In 1846, Flaubert’s father died, a loss quickly followed by the demise of his sister Caroline in childbirth. Flaubert remained with his mother, Caroline Fleuriot, who passed away on April 6, 1872, and his infant niece. He began to develop his literary ideas at that time.
His first draft of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1895), the final version of which was not published until 1874, was read to friends at this time and the foundation of the novel that would become Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886) was laid.
In October, 1849, Flaubert travelled to the Middle East with his friend, Maxime du Camp, until May of 1851. During and after the journey, Flaubert kept in touch through letters, and his correspondence, edited and published after his death, survives as an important record of his thoughts and ideas, as his extensive correspondence with the novelist George Sand illustrates. During the period Flaubert was working intensively on Madame Bovary (1851-1853). He also wrote to Louise Colet, herself a writer. Some people have argued that she was one of the models for the character of Emma Bovary.
The Trial Of Madame Bovary
Flaubert did not publish his first novel, Madame Bovary, until 1856, when it began to appear in serial form in the Revue de Paris. The following year, the novel became the subject of a trial. The agents of the repressive Second Empire regime unsuccessfully prosecuted the novel for obscenity, claiming that the depiction of adultery would corrupt public morals. The novelist was eventually acquitted of the charges and the novel appeared in book form.
The novel was acclaimed in part thanks to his now-famous style (Flaubert was extraordinarily demanding of himself and was constantly revising until he found le mot juste) and his development of “free indirect style”, a form of reported speech in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the voice of the narrator and the interior monologue of the protagonist.
Trip to Tunisia
After the trial, Flaubert took another trip that lasted from April to June 1858. This time he travelled to Tunisia to gather information for a book he was planning to be set in Carthage. This novel entitled Salammbô (English translation, 1886) was subsequently published in 1862 and marked a new trend in Flaubert’s work. His eye for detail made it possible for him to put on paper lush passages of description that illustrate his romantic tendencies. His desire to set the novel in a distant past has been seen by many critics as significant.
Meticulous Documentation of Contemporary Life
Flaubert returned to a contemporary setting in his next novel L’Education Sentimentale (A Sentimental Education, 1898). The book was first published in France in 1869, near the end of the Second Empire. Its description of the 1848 revolution added to Flaubert’s reputation as a realist, thanks to his meticulous documentation of contemporary life. Flaubert’s career was interrupted by the political upheavals of 1870, when France went to war with Prussia. Flaubert continued to suffer from mental illness but served in the National Guard. His work was also interrupted by his mother’s demise. He persevered with his writing despite the setbacks. He wrote a play Le Candidat (The Candidate, 1904) which ran for only four performances. Flaubert was more successful with his novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony, an idea on which he had been working since the 1840’s. The novel was finally published in 1874.
Health Problems and Financial Worries
Towards the end of his life, Gustave Flaubert worked alternately on two projects: Trois Contes (1877), Three Tales, (1903) and Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) Bouvard and Pécuchet, 1896). As these works required lots of documentation, progress was slow. In addition, Flaubert’s health was declining and he was faced with financial problems. Three Tales came out of press in 1877. Flaubert could give his undivided attention to Bouvard and Pécuchet. That was not to be. He breathed his last on May 8, 1880, in Croisset without completing the last work he had embarked upon. The incomplete version was published a year after his death.
Conclusion
Gustave Flaubert’s reputation as a master of prose fiction is based on a number of long novels as well as some shorter fiction, that sustain the quality of his best moments.
His style, innovative in its use of an ambiguous narrative voice and the outcome of much care and labour, has contributed to make of him a major writer. Madame Bovary is acclaimed as a masterpiece of world literature and an example of realism. Flaubert’s psychological insight, and, more recently, an appreciation of his experiments in the control of narrative perspective make him one of the first modern novelists and, what is more, one of the greatest of all time.
Bibliography
1.Bart, Benjamin F. Flaubert, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1967.
2.Brombert,Victor. The Novels of Flaubert : A study of Themes and Techniques. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1966.