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  • “Je comprends les Werther.” Goethes Briefroman im Werk Flauberts
  • Erlis Glass Wickersham
Dagmar Giersberg, “Je comprends les Werther.” Goethes Briefroman im Werk Flauberts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003. 275pp.

This is an exhaustively researched, intriguing, and competent consideration of how Goethe’s Werther influenced the majority of Flaubert’s novels throughout the French author’s long and controversial career. It is a comparative text with extensive quotations from French, German, and a few English sources. The book offers a rich bibliography, arranged according to original sources and scholarly commentary, a wealth of exhaustive footnotes, and multi-faceted analysis of each work cited. Although some theorists are mentioned, this is primarily a close analysis of ideas and style. Secondary sources are well balanced, offering traditional interpretations as well as newer scholarship. Giersberg treats Flaubert’s writings chronologically so as to demonstrate his evolution from an enthusiastic student, who may even have imitated Goethe in his early writings, to an independent artist, who leaves his awe of Werther and its creator far behind.

The author begins with a nicely presented chapter entitled “Vorspann: Flaubert als Leser Goethes.” It includes numerous quotations from Flaubert’s correspondence as well as extensive further evidence of his preoccupation with Werther. Reading many significant passages from Flaubert’s letters gives the student a sense of his level of enthusiasm, his maturity, thought processes, intellectual influences, and the context in which he interacts with his friends, among other things. It is an invaluable concomitant to the text and an invitation to delve further into his personal writings.

Discussion of Flaubert’s oeuvre begins with the novel Novembre. This book is closest to Werther in every important respect. Among the most interesting topics that Giersberg treats is the characters’ choice of reading material, shared or otherwise, and what significance it holds for them. We also see exhaustive comparison of their attitudes toward art and nature, as well as death and the sense of separation from others. This is the point at which the reader sees most clearly how the dynamics and characters in each text can be evaluated, most often in Werther’s favor, both as a human being and as someone who respects the rights of others.

One of the surprising effects of this kind of comparison is the cumulative impression of reading about traditional critical interpretations of Werther. One begins to realize that the novel has not been so exhaustively discussed that there is not room for new visions of its significance in its own time as well as in later centuries.

The third chapter concerns Flaubert’s Les Memoires d’un fou, a very interesting autobiographical work that merits more careful critical attention, as Giersberg convincingly demonstrates here. She then proceeds to discuss the 1845 edition of L’Education sentimentale, including such topics as character description and definitions of genre. These three texts form what she views as Flaubert’s youthful literary production and style.

Before she turns to Madame Bovary, Giersberg makes the following summarizing statement: “Wenn die Leiden des jungen Werther nach einer Pause, in der sich Flaubert für La Tentation de Saint Antoine mit Faust einem anderen Prätext Goethes erneut zuwendet, wieder in Flauberts Texten in Erscheinung treten, dann beginnt ein neuartiges Spiel mit der Vorlage Werther, das sich von dem der Jugendwerke . . . deutlich unterscheidet. Madame Bovary und L’Education sentimentale (von 1869) sind weit davon entfernt, als imitative, reflektierende oder [End Page 249] eher parodistische Auseinandersetzungen mit Werther gelten zu können (245). Instead, they are evidence of Flaubert’s growing detachment and distance from his previous model.

In the process of discussing Flaubert’s most famous novel, Giersberg makes the echoes of Werther that are replaced by the original themes defining Flaubert’s masterpiece very clear and visible to the reader. She shows how the tenor of his times affected Flaubert’s character and milieu portrayals, creating a work of fiction fundamentally different from Goethe’s.

In the last pages of her comparative study, the author discusses Werther and Bovary reception history. This is a fruitful theme, demonstrating from an entirely realistic perspective how differently each work was intended and understood. Finally, the author discusses Bouvard...

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