As a youth he is said to have been idle at school, but to have been occupied with literature from the age of 11. Flaubert was educated in his native city and did not leave it until 1840, when he went to Paris to study law. Larivière in Madame Bovary, was a surgeon in practice at Rouen his mother was from some of the oldest Norman families. His disdain for women as moral, emotional, and intellectual beings provided a precedent for misogynistic treatment of women in Western literature.įlaubert's aesthetic ideals influenced the development of the novel in Europe, America, and around the globe.įlaubert's father, who serves as a model for the character Dr.
The never-married Flaubert was notorious for his prodigious appetite for prostitutes and often expressed misogynist attitudes toward women. The subject matter and realistic treatment outraged French society and Flaubert was brought up (and acquitted) on charges of obscenity. Presenting Emma as a stifled and repressed romantic, Flaubert poured scorn on the banality of bourgeois conventions. Flaubert's attention to the diction and cadences of prose-he sometimes spent a week in the completion of one page-contrasted with popular English novelists, like Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope, whose prolific, often melodramatic, plot-driven novels were serialized for publication and composed under deadline constraints.įlaubert's best-known and influential novel, Madame Bovary, explored the provincial life of the bored and adulterous Emma Bovary, realistically rendering her relationships and psychology without projecting moral judgment. Decades before Henry James' explicit defense of the novel as an art form on equal standing to other fine arts, Flaubert elevated the novel through exacting literary craftsmanship. Gustave Flaubert (Decem– May 8, 1880) was a French novelist who, with near contemporaries Stendhal and Honore de Balzac, is credited with the development of literary realism.
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