The novelty of Flaubert: "Madame Bovary" as an example of ideal realistic novel

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UDC 821.133.1:82

The National Polytechnic University of Lviv

THE NOVELTY OF FLAUBERT: «MADAME BOVARY» AS AN EXAMPLE OF IDEAL REALISTIC NOVEL

Vysotska R.R.

The definition of the problem. Madame Bovary is considered as the masterpiece of the French realist novel of XIX century. When realism appears in the 1850s, it has nothing foolish, however. From the earliest times, from the Latin romance to the bourgeois novel of the classical age, from the novel of the eighteenth century to Balzac, the novel aims to describe with fidelity the realities of its time. To mention only the nineteenth century, Father Goriot, The Red and the Black, L'Assommoir and Bel-Ami are novels that can be described as "realist".

Our research objective is to distinguish the realist 'objective' that has always existed from the realist 'movement', which is limited in time (the 1850s-1870s) and has particular characteristics. . How to define realism in one word? It is a literary current that represents the comtemporary real with a concern for truth, sometimes even in what it can have trivial. The definition is actually insufficient because, to understand the realism, it is necessary to know that it is built entirely in reaction against the romanticism presents the actuality of the work.

The scientific interest. The intellectual context of the 1850s, during which Madame Bovary is written, is very different from that of the 1830s, the moment of romanticism's apogee. First, because society has evolved. Emergee in the eighteenth century, confirmed in its rights by the Revolution of 1789, rising to power in the Romantic era, the bourgeoisie plays, from the middle of the century, a political, economic and social role of the forefront. Whether industrial, banker or merchant, the bourgeois is indeed the great beneficiary of the industrial revolution that began in France in the 1840s.

The basic material. Faced with an aristocracy unable to adapt to modernity, the bourgeoisie confirms with brilliance the victory of merit over birth. But if it sets up industrial capitalism, it also imposes its culture and its morality. Initially dynamic and innovative, the ideal of bourgeois life, centered on work and individual success, has gradually been associated with a cultural frilosite and a conformity of thought [1, p. 106]. The time when Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, the second Empire (1852-1870), saw culminating this

bourgeois morality, of which the character of Homais is a perfect representative. The term "bourgeois", which does not yet have its modern meaning, signifies, more broadly, the man of the century, satisfied and common. The mode of bourgeois thought (which at the time is called the "shopkeeper" spirit), etric and materialist, thus impregnates its time and is a powerful repellent for the artist.

Another characteristic feature of the 1850s is the fact that intellectuals and artists are marked by a relative shift away from politics. The revolution of 1848 (one of the three revolutions that took place in the century and which, following that of 1789, gradually allowed the Republic to settle in the minds and democracy to become effective) comes to take place. But, having aroused a certain amount of enthusiasm (that of the Caster II Republic, 1848-1852), history is: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte provokes a coup d'etat and, taking power on the name of Napoleon III, establishes an authoritarian regime. The scenario of 1830 repeats: instead of bringing about social justice, the revolution of the time had signaled the triumph of economic liberalism, that is, money. Although more laborious and carried by a revolt more acute, the revolution of 1848 does not lead to anything new [1, p. 156].

If this confiscation of democracy leads some, like Hugo, to engage even more on the left, it interacts with others, including Flaubert, a tenacious tenacity vis-а-vis politics. While the representatives of the Roma generation still believe in the ability of literature to change society, young writers severely question this possibility. Nothing contradictory to this at a time when it turns away from History that the literature turns to the exploration of the real: to say the real in what is trivial is to put down the political illusions by showing the truth of things is to sign the death of utopias. "Republicans, reactionaries, reds, blues, tricilores, all this contributes with ineptitude," exclaims Flaubert [4, p. 250]. It is essential to have in mind, when one reads the latter, this refusal of the policy which animates it, because it allows not only to understand the social satire to which it is devoted in its novels but especially its aesthetic elitism, its formal requirement. At the antipodes of Hugo and Georges Sand, the novelist does not accord to his work any mesial dimension on the social level: the beauty of literary work, naturally at the service of a "message", is for it. -even. It is against the world that Flaubert elaborates his work [4, p. 255].

The last thing that marks the movement is the crucial one: the 1850s, corresponding to a moment of great scientific and technical development. Advances in medicine, the development of machine tools and technological inventions improve the standard of living, boost the economy and, above all, change the relationship of writers to the world. While, in Roman times, the great questions which man was asking for answers to art and literature, it is from now on the science which brings them to him. Providing its effectiveness, it destroys the literature in its ability to act on society. For the proponents of positivism, a current of thought that emerges in these years and of which Auguste Comte (1798-1857) is the central figure, exists only what is verifiable by science. Close to positivists, Flaubert is nourished this time in science. For him, the literature can only be credible if, ceasing to revel in a lyricism now out of place, it arises as a rival of science. From Flaubert, the novel is rooted entirely in the will, far from the romantic vagueness, to read a clinical account of the world. The realist novelist transforms himself into a scholar [3, p. 458].

The term "realism" is first used with respect to painting. The pictorial criticism applied it to artists who, in the 1850s, broke aesthetic conventions by endeavoring to paint everyday subjects, to show reality "as it is, without lies and without ornament" [3, p. 468]. Indeed, until the middle of the century, academic painting - and even the daring romantic painting - gave little to admire the so-called "noble" subjects: portraits, historical scenes, ancient and biblical subjects.

The realism of Flaubert. The realistic novel is in line with the work of Honore de Balzac (1799-1850). If he fully reveals romanticism by his writing, Balzac is indeed the first to engage in a meticulous description of the real, to leave the novel the field of pure fiction, in which he was confined until then, for the transform into a real-life observation tool. Flaubert's debt to his groin is obvious: the subtitle of our novel, "Moeurs de province", recalls the Scenes of provincial life. realism flaubert novel romanticism

In what way is the Flaubertian novel more realistic than the Balzac novel? First, by its desire to bring back a true story. Thus, the subject of Madame Bovary is inspired by a news item that the novelist has read in the press. In Ry, a small town near Rouen, Delphine De-Lamare, a doctor's wife, is bored. She deceives her husband, before going into debt and committing suicide, before he, devoured by sorrow, does the same, leaving behind a little girl. Although the plot of Balzac's novels is likely, it does not find its origin, as is the case here, in a real fact.

At the time of its publication, Madame Bovary's only scandalous dimension was retained. There was little comparison of the stylistic revolution that Flaubert was making. if the latter renews the novelistic genre, it is not only because it describes the real without concession, but above all because it confers on the novel estheistic ambitions. Indeed, the cult of neutrality and the scientific model, on which the realist novel is based, should not make us forget that Flaubert is above all an artist. It would be reductive to see in his novel only a proces-verbal devoid of any aesthetic dimension. The passion for form and the love of style that animate the novelist, he will infuse into the novel which, until then, did not set itself as the first goal of creating beauty. Such is the revolution, capital, that Flaubert operates on the novel [10, p. 205]. In the nineteenth century, accompanying the social upheavals, the novel knows an unprecedented development. Beside the great novelists, a crowd of minor authors proliferates. Adventures novels, sentimental novels, romance novels, historical novels: the genre is enriching, ramifying, occupying more and more space in the deliveries of bookstores. Yet nothing made the novel, a poor relation of literature from the beginning, a kind of immoral judge, worthy of little interest in classical times, to be so plebiscite. Like an "upstart", animated by the "liberty of the conqueror whose only law is the unfolding expansion", the novel "appropriates all forms of expression, exploits for its profit all the processes without even be required to justify its use "[10, p. 208]. Meprise, it stands out as the major genre of the century. Dedaigne, he becomes famous. Two reasons explain this seizure of power.

First, there is the fact that, unlike poetry and theater, the novel has never obeyed any rule. But the new social order produced by the Revolution, complex, multiple, constantly in motion, can not be said by the genres as well as the poetry and the theater. Free, without ties or laws of composition, the novel thus offers writers as the genre most capable of representing the modern world.

The other reason for the triumph of the novel is the democratization of the literary fact. A new ruling class, more gifted for the concrete world than for the debate of ideas, the bourgeoisie wishes a literature in its image and at its level. Far from the classical literature of which the aristocratic minds go beyond her, far from the romantic audacity with which she feels little affinity, she appreciates the novel, a kind of repute that is accessible and offers, often at little cost, the necessary ration. of dreams and evasion. In other words, it is the triumph of the bourgeois who insures that of the novel. The more the century sees bourgeois values ??settle, the more the genre develops. The novel thus accompanies a veritable democratization of literature: it is read by all, written for all, from the man of letters to the young girl - Emma's readings at the convent testify to it. In many respects, the triumph of the novel is quite similar to that of the cinema at the beginning of the next century.

When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, the novel dominated the literary scene [9, p. 114]. But the popular success of the novel sometimes makes it compromise, to the detriment of its quality, in commercial strategies. The 1850s mark the beginnings of so-called "station" literature (easy-reading novels which are sold exclusively in railway stations, and are reserved to cover the time of travel). In other words, demanding or touting, a tool for describing society or a simple means of escape, the novel does not yet aim at an aesthetic goal. It is to this new objective that Flaubert will focus. If, realized ten years after the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Madame Bovary appears more modern, it is because it is not only debarasse the excessive romanticism which characterized the novel of the first part of the century, but especially that it aims the goal, free of all, to create beautiful. With Flaubert, the novel is established for the first time as the site of a stylistic work. Thus, the Flaubertian innovation brought to the novel goes somewhat against the current of the general trend of the century. A thousand leagues from the objectives of the novel with a great deal of interest. Madame Bovary is a novel without a subject, concisely concise, refusing to bait or frighten the reader at a glance [9, p. 116].

Contrary to the objective achieved which forbids any manifestation of the narrator, the Flaubertian novel is, contrary to all expectations, extremely lyrical - not of this lyricism which is a punctuation, but of a powerful, violent, new lytrism, which makes an integral part of the novelist's inspiration [5, p. 62].

Romanticism, Flaubert has indeed preserved a sensitivity, a taste of excess and color. Beside the nomenclator of the facts and gestures of everyday life, there is another man in him, "full of shouts, lyricism, great flights of eagles, all the sonorites of the phrase and summits of the idea "[6, p. 26]. What Flaubert refuses is not romanticism, but its facilities, this weakened, affadiated, embourgoise, romanticism, which takes the form of a mischievous sensibility or a ridiculous exaltation. The romantic excess, as a mark of an aspiration to infinity, is, as for him, far from being condemned. Thus, Emma's conjugal and social frustration, her exalted temperament, her way of offering herself completely to passionate love, even if they are fired by the novelist, reflect a deep and sincere dissatisfaction, reflection - was it degrade - from that of the artist. Although he may be condemned, "bovarysm" is, in his own way, a heroism [7, p. 145]. Similarly, many of the scenes in the novel bear witness to a real romantic taste: the heroine, in the early morning, after running through the meadow to meet her lover, enters the room of the latter "exhaling all his person a fresh scent of seve, greenery and open air "would not dissolve in the novels of George Sand ...

The Flaubertian novel is thus entirely subject to this tension, both untenable and enjoyable, between the flatness of the subject and the sumptuousness of the language, between the mediocrity of the real and the splendor of the word. With Flaubert, the novel becomes a work of art in its own right. This conception of the genre is, since Proust, Celine and the new novel, now familiar, but it is, at the time unpublished.

Madame Bovary, great comic novel? Affirmation is not without foundation. Beyond the work of recess in the manner that characterizes it, the interest of the Flaubertian novel resides, in an ultimate way, in the constant irony which founds it. The valorization of lyricism goes hand in hand with the criticism of the values ??of time.

The fact that Emma excels in "laying on the vine leaves the pyramids of queen-claudes" admires the admiration of the clientele of her husband, on which reflects much consideration. Like so many others, this statement is ironic. A sign of an authoritative judgment, indicative of a strong presence of the narrator in his story, irony questions the dogma of impassibility, which is supposed to be at the heart of the realistic creed. Joining the subjective point of view and the style effects already noted, it constitutes the mark of a commitment of the novelist in his story, all the more complex that it hides behind the mask of impassibility. Thus, unlike the ideas received, the Flaubertian novel is eminently personal and subjective. In this context, the novelist's refusal of the "realist" etiquette [3, p. 98]. Highly worthy of his master, Maupassant will write that "it is enough to read with intelligence Mrs. Bovary to understand that nothing is further from realism." In a word, with this novel, Flaubert creates and dynamites both the realist novel. The genius of a work which, at the same time as it gives birth to a model, the de built and the sublime.

Crue, apre, brutal, the painting of the dissatisfaction feminine in Madame Bovary has, in her time, offends the opinion. Flaubert's realism went too far. Never before had a novel by Balzac or Stendhal so directly represented a woman's frustration and her discovery of pleasure. At the time of the publication of the novel in review, the novelist and his publisher are sued in court for "offenses of outrage to public morality and religion and morality" [8, p. 44]. Episodes and sentences are judged to be offensive to morality. Flaubert's lawyer pleads in favor of the artist's morality by arguing that a work that presents passages that can upset morality is not immoral. The accused are acquitted and the novel, authorized for publication, is dedicated by Flaubert to his defender.

The prosecution of Madam Bovary in court seems to us today of another age, but it is undeniable that the sexuality - the censors were not mistaken! - plays the leading role. The story is that of a woman who is gradually invaded by sexuality, by a destructive eros she had not suspected. And when the novelist contemplates, through the fascinating gaze of Charles or Rodolphe's predator, Emma's body, we are far from the romantic idealization: the places of the body described bear a violent sensuality. Thus, he notes that Emma, ??after making love with Leon in Rouen, returns to Yonville drowned in cum, tears, hair, champagne [5, p. 200].

It is important to specify that, in fact, with Madame Bovary, it is the whole body - and not just sexuality - that enters into literature. The body is described in its natural functions as it has never been before [10, p. 198].

To conclude it is to say that in the literature of the classical age, the body is not very representative. If one found it in Rabelais, if he reappeared in the bourgeois novel, which proposes to describe the common real, it is almost absent from the heroic and gallant novel. Victim of a moral inedit, carrying a truth that is considered vulgar, it is indeed banned by preciosite. In The Princess of Cleves, the initial, allusive portraits of heroine and the Duke of Nemours bear witness to this.

Limits to the face, the only place worthy of interest, they do not deviate from the ancient and medieval topoi: paternal and harmony for the woman, power and heroic air for the man. In the following century, the body does not appear much in the novels of Marivaux, Prevost and Rousseau. It will be necessary to wait for the libertine novel, in the second half of the century, so that it is put back in the honor.

List of works consulted

1. Becker C., Cabanes J-L. Le roman au XIX siecle. L'explosion du genre / C. Becker, J-L. Cabanes. - Breal: «Amphi Lettres», 2001. - 198 pp.

2. Butor M. Improvisations sur Flaubert / M. Butor. - Pocket, «Agora», 1996. - 159 pp.

3. Dufour P. Le realisme. De Balzac a Proust / P. Dufour. - Presse universitaires de France, 1998. - 588 pp.

4. Dufour P. Flaubert ou la Prose du silence / P. Dufour. - Nathan, 1997. - 357 pp.

5. Gothot-Mersch C. La Genese de Madame Bovary / C. Gothot-Mersch. - Slatkine Reprints, 1980. - 258 pp.

6. Neefs J. Madame Bovary de Flaubert / J. Neefs. - Hachette, «Poche critique», 1972. - 145 pp.

7. Neefs J. Preface a Madame Bovary / J. Neefs. - Librairie Generale Franfaise, «Le livre de poche classique», 1999. - 369 pp.

8. Philippot D. Verite des choses, mensonge de l'homme dans Madame Bovary de Gustave Flaubert / D. Philippot. - Champion, 1997. - 458 pp.

9. Robert M. En haine du roman. Essai sur Flaubert / M. Robert. - Balland, 1988. - 279 pp.

10. Vaillant A., Bertrand J-P., Regnier P. Hisoire de la litterature franfaise du XIX siecle / A. Vaillant, J-P. Bertrand, P. Regnier. - Hachette, «Les Fondamentaux», 1995. - 377 pp.

Annotation

The article is devoted to the question of the development of Flaubert's realism and his main novel. Particular attention is paid to the concept of «bovarism», which appeared for the first time in this novel. A detailed analysis of theoretical sources and journals has been conducted. Attention is paid to the comparative aspect of Romantic novels with the Flaubert novel. Presented examples of the novel with documentary accuracy.

Keywords: novel, realistic aspect, bovarism, description, accuracy, love, death, story, context.

Подана стаття присвячена питанню розвитку реалізму Флобера в його головному романі. Особливу увагу приділено поняттю «боваризм», що вперше з'явився у творі. Проведено детальний аналіз теоретичних джерел та журналів. Увага приділяється порівняльному аспекту романів епохи романтизму з флоберським романом. Представлено приклади роману з документальною точністю.

Ключові слова: роман, реалістичний аспект, боваризм, опис, точність, любов, смертність, розповідь, контекст.

Представлена статья посвящена вопросу развития реализма Флобера и его главного романа. Особое внимание уделено понятию «боваризм», впервые появившееся в этой работе. Проведен детальный анализ теоретических источников и журналов. Внимание уделяется сравнительному аспекта романов эпохи романтизма с флоберським романом. Представлены примеры романа с документальной точностью. Ключевые слова: роман, реалистический аспект, боваризм, описание, точность, любовь, смертность, рассказ, контекст.

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