Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist of the realist school, noted for his objective approach and painstaking perfection of style, characteristics of Madame Bovary, his most famous work.

Flaubert was born in Rouen, Normandy, on December 12, 1821, the son of a doctor. He briefly studied law in Paris but was forced to give it up due to ill health. He then decided to dedicate himself to writing. From 1849 to 1851 he and a friend toured Greece and the Near East, an experience that provided exotic background for two of his novels. Afflicted by a nervous disorder, he spent most of his life quietly at home with his family at Croisset, in the country near Rouen, where he received many leading writers. He died there on May 8, 1880.

Flaubert's first and most widely read novel, Madame Bovary, first published in 1857, soon became the subject of a famous legal case. Both the author and the publisher were prosecuted on the grounds that the novel was immoral. Although they were acquitted, scandal clouded the reception of the novel, and it was some time before it won recognition as one of the masterpieces of French literature. It has been published frequently in English.

Madame Bovary, subtitled Moeurs de province, is the apparently commonplace story of adultery which becomes a profound analysis of humanity and in essence an indictment of the drabness and delusions of bourgeois life. Emma Bovary, her imagination filled with Romantic illusions of love and passion, finds the reality of her dull marriage stifling and searches for the excitement she has read about, in a series of affairs she wishes to see as grand passions but are in fact as unfulfilling as her relationship with her husband. In a fit of despair she takes her own life. The tragedy of these ordinary people is portrayed with powerfully effective perception and Madame Bovary has had a lasting influence as a masterpiece of realism.

Flaubert's other important novels are Salammbô (1863; trans. 1956) and La Tentation de St Antoine (1874; trans. 1943). The former is a historical novel set in ancient Carthage; the latter is a retelling of the Christian legend of the temptations fought by the father of Christian monachism, St Anthony, in the solitude of the desert. Although these two novels are generally regarded as more Romantic in character than Madame Bovary, nearly all of Flaubert's writing combines significant Romantic and naturalistic elements.

In his posthumously published letters, Correspondance (4 vols., 1887-1893), from which selections appeared in English in 1954, Flaubert attested to his experiencing “the agonies of art”. The infinite care that he practised in order to achieve an ultimate precision of detail and of language has become legendary. Flaubert's devotion to art is nowhere more manifest than in the standard of perfection he required of himself.

Other works by Flaubert include the novel Education Sentimentale (1869; trans. 1964); three short stories published as Trois Contes (1877; trans. 1964); and two posthumously published works, the unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881; trans. 1954) and Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1913; trans. 1954).