Life and Works of Gustave Flaubert: A Literary Journey

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen into a family of doctors. His father, Achille-Cl ophas Flaubert, a chief surgeon at the Rouen municipal hospital, made money investing in land. Flaubert's mother, Anne-Justine-Caroline, was the daughter of a physician; she became the most important person in the Flaubert's life.

Flaubert began to write during his school years. At the age of fifteen he won a prize for an essay on mushrooms. Flaubert fell in love with Elisa Schl singer, who was married and some 10 years his senior inspired much of his early writing. His bourgeois background Flaubert found early burdensome, and eventually his rebel against it led to his expulsion from school. Flaubert completed his education privately in Paris.

In the 1840s Flaubert studied law at Paris, a brief episode in his life, and in 1844 he had a nervous breakdown . He failed his law exams and decided to devote himself to literature. Flaubert was helped by his father who bought him a house at Croisset, on the River Seine between Paris and Rouen.

From November 1849 to April 1851 he travelled with the writer Maxime du Camp in North Africa, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. On his return Flaubert started Madame Bovary, which took five years to complete. Sometimes he spent a week on one paragraph. It appeared first in the Revue (1856) and in book form next year. The realistic depiction of adultery was condemned as offensive to morality and religion. Flaubert was prosecuted, though he escaped conviction.

In the 1860s Flaubert enjoyed success as a writer and intellectual at the court of Napoleon III. Among his friends were Zola, George Sand, Hippolyte Taine, and the Russian writer Turgenev, with whom he shared similar aesthetic ideals dedication to realism, and to the nonjudgmental representation of life.

In the 1870s Flaubert's work gained acclaim by the new school of naturalistic writers. His narrative approach, that the novelist should not judge, teach, or explain but remain neutral, was widely adopted. Flaubert himself detested the label Realist and other labels. Among Flaubert's later major works is SALAMMB (1862), a story of the siege of Carthage in 240-237 BC by mercenaries.

Realism Realism was a literary movement in the last half of the 19th century in which writers opposed much of what the Romantics had stood for. Most critics give the dates 1850's to 1880's as the dates for the strongest examples of Realism in Western literature. It is the depictions of contemporary life (banal activities and experiences) and society "as they were." (There is some overlap between the dates for Romanticism* and Realism.)

*Romanticism: (late 18th - mid-19th century) Interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions. Literary, artistic, and philosophical movement. In its intense focus on the individual consciousness, it was both a continuation of and a reaction against the Enlightment.** ** Enlightment: (17th 18th century) Ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and man were blended into a worldview that inspired revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason.