Flaubert Madame Bovary Term Paper

Flaubert Madame Bovary

Realism came as a counter balance for romanticism. It came up "against all formalized and aestheticized images of things" ((Nineteenth-century literary realism: through the looking-glass, p.3). With the hindsight one has today, realism appears as a highly formalized art, but at the time it developed it fit the criteria for a movement that did not fit the canons previously imposed by the art of writing. The French literature in the nineteenth century was the first to make way for a new movement, a reaction and also a natural sequence to romanticism. Katherine Kearns admits that realist fiction is an oxymoron, but she points out that although objectivity is the main concern of the writer who chooses realism for his work, there are no identical two accounts on reality since it depends on each accountant's point-of-view. Historically and geographically, realism can be traced as having originated in France, in the mid-nineteenth century (Villanueva, Theories of literary realism, p.1), but the concept of realism is far more reaching than the historical and geographical context.

Katherine Kearns points out that "the realist author articulates multiple obligations: a duty to faithful representation, a duty to the truthful treatment of material, a duty to the everyday and the ordinary, and so on" (Nineteenth-century literary realism: through the looking-glass, p.3). So, the essence of realism resides in its focus on the ordinary in the contemporary society, on the features that demystify and are true to human existence in its most common aspects and in the objectivity the writer is expected to show when treating the subjects.

The French revolution and industrialization were two factors that competed to the birth of a new approach in art. The revolution was perhaps better suited for the romantic movement in literature, that created and promoted heroes instead and gave reality a twist of legend, but French society experienced its followings that were But pragmatism, social restlessness, the new class of the bourgeoisie that was rising on the wave of capitalism, the need for recognition for the working classes that were the backbone of the capitalist society, all these led to the need for a different type of approach in literature. Gustave Flaubert, educated at the bosom of romanticism, started his writing career as a romantic writer, but soon discovered that he could find in reality subjects far more interesting and challenging for the contemporary public than the exulted mystical stories from the Middle Eve.

For Mme Bovary, Flaubert chose his subject from real life. He used the real stories of two women and their marriages in order to create Mme Bovary's story and used models of real villages for the setting of his novel. Emma and Charles are presented by the author as objectively as possible, sometimes even almost in a cruel light that does not allow the reader to feel sympathy for them, but only pity. The novel begins with Charles Bovary's childhood as if intended to ruin any attempt to hope for a heroic attitude in this character. His mother is already anticipating the model of a woman living in small town, where nothing happens, nourishing dreams of grandeur on behalf of her husbands' achievements and getting only disappointment out of it. Flaubert is very careful to…