Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880)

French novelist of the realist school, noted for his objective approach and painstaking perfection of style, characteristics of Madame Bovary, his most famous work. Flaubert was born in Rouen, Normandy, on December 12, 1821, the son of a doctor. He briefly studied law in Paris but gave it up to write. From 1849 to 1851 he and a friend toured Greece and the Near East, an experience that provided exotic background for two of his novels. Afflicted by a nervous disorder, he spent most of his life quietly at home with his family at Croisset, in the country near Rouen, where he received many leading writers. He died there on May 8, 1880. Flaubert's first and most widely read novel, Madame Bovary, first published in 1857, soon became the subject of a famous legal case. Both the author and the publisher were prosecuted on the grounds that the novel was immoral. Although they were acquitted, scandal clouded the reception of the novel, and it was some time before it won recognition as one of the masterpieces of French literature. It has been published frequently in English. Madame Bovary relates, against a French provincial-town background, the romantically motivated adulteries of a married woman whose pathetically overblown love affairs end in her suicide. In essence the novel is an indictment of the drabness, pretensions, and petty delusions of bourgeois life, which Flaubert loathed almost to the point of obsession. Nevertheless, the tragedy of the characters, mediocre and dull though they are, is portrayed with powerfully effective perception. Madame Bovary has had a lasting influence as a masterpiece of realism. Flaubert's other important novels are Salammbo (1863; trans. 1956) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874; trans. 1943). The former is a historical novel set in ancient Carthage; the latter is a retelling of the Christian legend of the temptations fought by the father of Christian monachism, St. Anthony, in the solitude of the desert. Although these two novels are generally regarded as more romantic in character than Madame Bovary, nearly all of Flaubert's writing combines significant romantic and naturalistic elements. In his posthumously published letters, Correspondance (4 vol., 1887-93), from which selections appeared in English in 1954, Flaubert attested to his experiencing "the agonies of art." The infinite care that he practiced in order to achieve an ultimate precision of detail and of language has become legendary. Flaubert's devotion to art is nowhere more manifest than in the standard of perfection he required of himself. Other works by Flaubert include the novel Sentimental Education (1869; trans. 1964); three short stories published as Three Tales (1877; trans. 1964); and two posthumously published works, the unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881; trans. 1954) and Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1913; trans. 1954).