Gustave Flaubert
STYLE CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM CONTENT
Contrast the style of the two passages:
• I am already far north of London, and as
I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I
feel a cold northern breeze play upon
my cheeks, which braces my nerves and
fills me with delight. Do you
understand this feeling? This breeze,
which has travelled from the regions
towards which I am advancing, gives me
a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited
by this wind of promise, my daydreams
become more fervent and vivid. I try in
vain to be persuaded that the pole is the
seat of frost and desolation; it ever
presents itself to my imagination as the
region of beauty and delight. (Shelley)
• The cold passed reluctantly from the
earth, and the retiring fogs revealed
an army stretched out on the hills,
resting. As the landscape changed
from brown to green, the army
awakened, and began to tremble with
eagerness at the noise of rumors. It
cast its eyes upon the roads, which
were growing from long troughs of
liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A
river, amber-tinted in the shadow of
its banks, purled at the army's feet;
and at night, when the stream had
become of a sorrowful blackness, one
could see across it the red, eyelike
gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the
low brows of distant hills. (Crane)
Romanticism
v
Realism
• “A spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings” (Wordsworth)
• A representation of how things
truly are
• Nature is transformative and we
should praise beauty in nature for its
transcendent and spiritual force
• The commonplace and the
common man become important
• Man is a pure being who is
corrupted by society
• The author or artist remains
objective
• Focus on the mystical
• Can give birth to Naturalism
• Truth is only reachable via the
imagination
• Style is usually sparse
• Style is fluid and ornate
Which is this?
She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life—the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste
the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days
after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road,
listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a
waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces
above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring
happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss
chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and
thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an
undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.
If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden
plenty would have gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their
life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that separated her from him. (1.7)
Romantic Realist? Or are you just a Modernist?
• Written as a Dare?
• A combination of both techniques was utilized to show the gross
materialism of the bourgeoisie via Emma
• Cinematic style
• Most of the passages are full of detail, flourish and idealization, only to
plummet to the often ugly reality.
• “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Flaubert echoes our own human tendency
to idealize instead of face disappointment.
• Mirrors this through shifting point-of-view
Every Word has Meaning
• Took 5 years to write.
• Flaubert’s process:
• Begin to sketch out scenes. Research settings, character types, and processes
through visitation and interviews. Provide his character motives and histories.
• Give a cursory description of what is happening in the scene so that narrative
continues.
• Draft a specific scene. Add and subtract as needed.
• Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft.
• Final Draft.
Free Indirect Discourse
• presenting the thoughts or utterances of a character as if from that
character's point of view by combining grammatical and other
features of the character's 'direct speech' with features of the
narrator's 'indirect' report (3rd person narration).
• Direct discourse: He wondered, “Do I have to drive here tomorrow?”
• indirect discourse would be He wondered if he had to drive there tomorrow.
• Free indirect style, however combines the person and tense of indirect
discourse (he had to go )with the indications of time and place appropriate to
direct discourse ('here tomorrow'), to form a different kind of sentence: He would
have to go here tomorrow.
Example from the text
• She repeated, 'I have a lover! a lover!' delighting at the
idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she
was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of
which she had despaired! She was entering upon a
marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy,
delirium.
• Makes the audience a character
Structure
• Bovary is sectioned into three parts:
• Exposition
• Confrontation
• Resolution
• Begins and Ends with Charles
• Chapters often begin with a small event that lead to a larger idea or
event.
• Characters are developed in a manner that shows the contradictory nature of the
human.
• Ex: Emma’s trip to the wet nurse and Leon’s increasing capitulation.
So What?
• This text was one of the first to directly comment on the failures of the
rising bourgeoisie.
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false sophistication
blaring provinciality
Status-climbing
Materialistic
Vapid
Id-driven