"A Simple Heart"
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Gustave Flaubert wrote "A Simple Heart" near the end of his life and the short story provides some interesting parallels between the life of Flaubert, one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, and a simple, uneducated servant named Félicité. Flaubert (1821-1880) was born into a doctor's family in the provincial town of Rouen in Normandy, France. As a boy he found the life of the town conventional, dull, and stifling and throughout his writing career this beginning portion of his life affected his fiction. When he was young Flaubert would escape from this depressing reality in two ways. One was in writing down lists of received ideas as a way to "mock the banality of bourgeois life" (1017). The other means of escape was "writing exotic romantic stories" (1017). As an adult Flaubert wrote five novels and several short pieces of fiction and they were either quite realistic, like Madame Bovary, or completely romantic, like Salammbo. Thus in his mature work the escape routes he used as a boy were still his main means of expressing himself. In a story such as "A Simple Heart," the connections between Flaubert's own life and that of the servant Félicité do not seem very strong. But when Flaubert's method of writing is considered and the story is analyzed, it becomes clear how much the life of the pathetic Félicité was related to Flaubert's own story. Flaubert escaped from the town that he hated by going to Paris as a law student. But Flaubert failed his exam
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to visit her and "Félicité's thoughts from that moment ran entirely on her nephew" (1027). The nephew, who was a cabin boy, died on a journey to America and then Virginie, who had never been very strong, died as well. Madame Aubain was genuinely moved by her daughter's death and for the first time, when she recognized how genuinely Félicité was grieving, treated the servant as a human being. From that moment on Félicité's devotion was entirely transferred to her mistress. She also performed many acts of charity for people in serious need. But Félicité's need for someone to love was not satisfied by this and when she obtained a beautiful parrot named Loulou, which reminded her of Victor because it came from America, she loved it as she had loved Virginie and Victor. Félicité became old and deaf and her mistress died. Paul left her to take care of the house, which he hoped to sell, but the house did not sell and rotted slowly away with Félicité living there with only the parrot, now dead and stuffed, as a companion. When she died Félicité, almost senile, had a vision in which the Holy Ghost, instead of appearing as a dove, appeared as "a gigantic parrot hovering above her head" (1038).
In Félicité's life the terrible beha
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Approximate Word count = 1949
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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