Flaubert, Gustave

(1821-1880)

   writer

   Born in Rouen, Gustave Flaubert is considered by many to be the father of realistic fiction. The son of a prosperous physician, Flaubert was raised in an apartment in the hospital where his father was chief surgeon (an experience that perhaps predisposed the young Flaubert to pessimism about human life). Flaubert was educated in the classics at the Collège Royal in Rouen and, as a youth, was a passionate reader of the works of rené de chateaubriand, victor hugo, J. W. von Goethe, and Lord Byron. At age 14, he met Mme Elisa schlesinger, then 26, who influenced his works and became the great love of his life. she inspired, in part, the character of Emma Bovary, that of Madame Renaude in an early version of L'Éducation sentimentale, and was immortalized as the lovely Madame Arnoux in the final version of that work (1869). In 1840, Flaubert began the study of law in Paris, but he soon experienced a seizure, perhaps epileptic, that changed his life. Thereafter, he lived as a hermit at Croisset, an estate on the seine purchased by his father. Flaubert's mother and niece joined him there in 1846, after the death of his father and sister. only on occasional visits to Paris and a long journey to the Middle East and Greece (1849-51) did Flaubert leave Croisset. He devoted the remainder of his life to literature. But despite his reputation as a realist writer, there is some degree of romanticism in such works as Salammbô (1862) and the short story "Hérodias" (1877). His two acknowledged masterpieces, however, reflect the great conscious effort that he exerted to restrain his flights of passion and fantasy. The first of these is L'Éducation sentimentale, in which French life is vividly described. The other work, Madame Bovary, is the novel through which Flaubert is chiefly known. In it, ordinary, but unforgettable, characters are portrayed, as well as a historical period in its specific reality. The novel's details caused Flaubert to be tried for offenses to public morals. He was acquitted. Because of his literary realism, and innovative narrative, Flaubert was acclaimed by such later modernist novelists as marcel proust, Henry James, and James Joyce, all of whom acknowledged their indebtedness to him. In his Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert anticipated many of the ideas and forms of the novel of the later half of the 20th century.