Gustave Flaubert
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The story of Emma Bovary as told by Gustave Flaubert is told in a way that deliberately avoids grand moral dilemmas and dramatic action, and doing so is part of Flaubert's approach to literature. He places great emphasis on character, however, and this can be seen with reference to Emma Bovary herself, a woman who interacts with several men in the course of her story and who has a belief in high ideals and a romantic and adventurous life and is always seeking something other than what she has. as such, she is both an individual and a representative of her sex and class, allowing Flaubert to comment on the social problems and mores of his age. This desire on Emma's part for romance and adventure, for instance, contrasts with the banality of her middle-class existence, and Flaubert emphasizes this difference as a way of illuminating Emma's character by showing the difference between her dreams and her reality. Her high-mindedness could be a source of ambition and a spur to greater effort to achieve the ideal, but in this novel it makes Emma dissatisfied, hyper-critical of her surroundings and the people she knows, always ready to move from one person to another, and ultimately foolish. The affairs she has are with men she believes to be as noble and grand as the character of fiction, but here again she is bound to be disappointed in the reality and is betrayed again and again as a consequence. Flaubert was a man who loved privacy and solitude and who had been dedicated
. . .
ive the exact measure of his needs, or his conceptions, or his sorrows, and since human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes for dancing bears, when we would like to draw tears from the stars (Flaubert 265).
Stratton Buck states that Emma's tragedy comes in part from the fact that she cannot find words adequate for her feelings or her needs, and the problem of expression is central to her character (Buck 71-72).
Flaubert himself may feel that he has difficulty in finding the words he needs to tell his story and shape his characters, but in truth he writes in a style that is descriptive without being overly florid and brings his characters to life with essential language bringing their inner life to light. Often, he uses Emma as a point of view and so demonstrates how different characters are related to this central consciousness, as Pace noted when he talks about Emma and Leon:
He is not a person to her, merely the object onto which she projects her own imaginings--as she had done, just before their reunion, with the tenor singing in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Rouen theater--and through whom she satisfies her desires. When their love cools, and adultery proves as dull as marriage, she tries to stimu
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Lammermoor Rouen, Emma Bovary, Bovary Flaubert's, Solitude Flaubert, Buck Emma's, Kazin Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert, Emma Leon, University Press, Romanticism Buck, soul overflow sometimes, fullness soul overflow, speeches masking mediocre, sometimes emptiest, emptiest metaphors, affections fullness, fullness soul, soul overflow, overflow sometimes, flaubert york, masking mediocre affections, affections fullness soul, masking mediocre, flaubert 265, makes emma,
Approximate Word count = 1573
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Gustave Flaubert
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
