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Realism in Short Fiction
Gustave Flaubert's short story "A Simple Heart" is a prime example of the literary genre of realism. Throughout the story, the character of Felicite performs the mundane and everyday tasks of a servant. Though her life has important events and truly life-altering moments, they are not unusual, but of the normal life-changing variety. She suffers through a broken heart and several deaths; she loses her health and her hearing, she becomes confused in old age, and eventually, she dies. There is nothing fantastical in the tale; Felicite never does anything out of the ordinary. This is the essence of her character and largely comprises the point of the story -- she lives her life, which is not particularly happy, but as she is the one living it she doesn't notice that, and ekes out happiness in her own pathetically rendered way -- a cynical, yet realistic view of many human lives.
This is also what Leo Tolstoy meant in his short story, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," when he said, "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." His life is not nearly as depressing as Felicite's; he has a family and is upwardly mobile, using friendships to maneuver his way into better positions both economically and socially. The details of his life are as mundane as Felicite's, if more lucrative. As he grows more obsessed with his work he loses touch with his family and other things that presumably used to bring him joy. He begins to suffer all the more when he learns that he is dying. Death is not easy for him, either; he suffers from a pain in his side for a long time first. The reason an ordinary life is considered so terrible is because Ilyich is blind to the ordinariness. Only on his death bed does he realize the difference between a true life of fulfillment and an artificial life of selfishness and greed. Ilyich was not exactly a miser in life, but he was so focused on work that he missed the genuine moments of life that he could have had with his family and other experiences. It is ordinary to walk past the roses without smelling them, and yet it is terrible no to take the time to stop.
Flaubert believed the emerging middle class in nineteenth century Europe to be unrefined, pompous know-it-alls, and fundamentally stupid. This may help to explain some of Leon's lack of intelligence despite his success -- he has emerged from the middle class. Charles, however, represents many of the problems that Flaubert saw with the middle class, and Emma, additionally, grows to despise everything that her husband stands for. When Charles looks
When Edith Wharton tells us that "it was the background that she [Lily] required," we understand that both Emma Bovary and Lily have a very important thing in common. They are first of all women in the nineteenth century society, fettered by social conventions to fulfill any kind of aspirations or ideals. A woman, as it is clearly stated in both novels, had no other means of being having
Denied marriage, the only other societal option is suicide. Society is the agent of her demise, not Lilly: "her life is not unpleasant until a chain of events destroys her with the thoroughness and indifference of a meat grinder." Goetz, Thomas H. "Flaubert, Gustave." World Book Online Reference Center. 2006. [1 Oct 2006] http://www.aolsvc.worldbook.aol.com/wb/Article?id=ar200180. Biographical overview, provides insight into Flaubert's role as a uniquely realistic writer, thus stressing Emma's economic and moral
Emma likes the type of pulp, romantic and sentimental fiction condemned by Nabokov, the 19th century version of Harlequin Romances. Emma is not an artist of prose like her creator, she is a consumer of written culture in a very literal as well as a metaphorical sense, just as she consumes all sorts of material goods in her futile quest for fulfillment, and dies by consuming poison at the
Madame Bovary's entire experience is by way of approaching her own obscurity, and indeed her own demise, and her death as an individual. The essay by Elisabeth Fronfen is, for the most part, very perceptive and the analysis she offers is razor sharp; when she asserts (411) that Madame Bovary's reading "consumes the life of the reader, who reads instead of living," she hits the literary mark with thorough