Gustave FlaubertSTYLE CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM CONTENT

Contrast the style of the two passages:

• The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills. (Crane)

• I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. (Shelley)

Romanticism v Realism

• A representation of how things truly are

• The commonplace and the common man become important

• The author or artist remains objective

• Can give birth to Naturalism

• Style is usually sparse

• “A spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth)

• Nature is transformative and we should praise beauty in nature for its transcendent and spiritual force

• Man is a pure being who is corrupted by society

• Focus on the mystical

• Truth is only reachable via the imagination

• Style is fluid and ornate

Which is this?

She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life—the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that separated her from him. (1.7)

Romantic Realist? Or are you just a Modernist?

• Written as a Dare?

• A combination of both techniques was utilized to show the gross materialism of the bourgeoisie via Emma

• Cinematic style

• Most of the passages are full of detail, flourish and idealization, only to plummet to the often ugly reality.

• “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Flaubert echoes our own human tendency to idealize instead of face disappointment. • Mirrors this through shifting point-of-view

Every Word has Meaning

• Took 5 years to write.

• Flaubert’s process:• Begin to sketch out scenes. Research settings, character types, and

processes through visitation and interviews. Provide his character motives and histories.

• Give a cursory description of what is happening in the scene so that narrative continues.

• Draft a specific scene. Add and subtract as needed.• Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. Redraft. • Final Draft.

Free Indirect Discourse

• presenting the thoughts or utterances of a character as if from that character's point of view by combining grammatical and other features of the character's 'direct speech' with features of the narrator's 'indirect' report (3rd person narration).• Direct discourse: He wondered, “Do I have to drive here tomorrow?”• indirect discourse would be He wondered if he had to drive there

tomorrow.• Free indirect style, however combines the person and tense of

indirect discourse (he had to go )with the indications of time and place appropriate to direct discourse ('here tomorrow'), to form a different kind of sentence: He would have to go here tomorrow.

Example from the text

• She repeated, 'I have a lover! a lover!' delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon a marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.

• Makes the audience a character

Structure

• Bovary is sectioned into three parts:• Exposition• Confrontation• Resolution

• Begins and Ends with Charles

• Chapters often begin with a small event that lead to a larger idea or event.• Characters are developed in a manner that shows the contradictory

nature of the human. • Ex: Emma’s trip to the wet nurse and Leon’s increasing capitulation.

So What?

• This text was one of the first to directly comment on the failures of the rising bourgeoisie. • false sophistication • blaring provinciality• Status-climbing• Materialistic• Vapid• Id-driven

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