Flaubert: A Biography (review)

In Flaubert: A Biography, Frederick Brown describes Flaubert's novel L'Éducation sentimentale as "a story unfolding scene by scene and within a historical context. Allusions to works published . . . external events, datable entertainments, fashionable clothes and décor all create a Louis-Philippean ambiance" (154). Remarkably, the same is true of Brown's masterpiece, a riveting historical narrative that seeks to know Flaubert on the most intimate and honest terms. By illuminating the writer's complex personality and devoting ample space both to his social milieu and the major historical events that confronted nineteenth-century France, Brown manages to invoke and sustain a Flaubertian ambiance as early as the prologue that locates Rouen as the site where "life began" (3) for the author of Madame Bovary, to the epilogue that closes with the death of his niece in 1931.

It is difficult not to be engaged by Brown's lyrical and richly descriptive prose from which emerges Flaubert the writer, celebrated as a master of discipline, style, and realism, and Flaubert the man, a complex and fallible figure whose artistry was often at the mercy of epilepsy, wanderlust, bourgeois conventions, public opinion, mistresses, prostitutes, rebellion, and his own rigorous criticism. Riddled with a host of contradictions, it is apposite that Flaubert generally made a point of "[eschewing] portraits, for fear of being hostage to an external image" (349). It is Brown's challenge, then, to depict authentically the many facets of Flaubert's paradoxical personality in a manner that does not feel chaotic. Fortunately, Brown's research is thorough, organized, and well thought-out, rendering him capable of accomplishing this task with seeming ease and fluency. Indeed, Brown gracefully acquaints his readers with the Flaubert who posited that the publication of one's work was a betrayal to one's art, but who was nevertheless eager to negotiate with publishers once his work was ready; the Flaubert who professed to write for art's sake and dubbed himself a "'Bourgeoisophobus'" (295), but then kept track of reviews and lamented any unfavorable reception of his work by middle-class readers; the Flaubert who perfected the rhythmic movements of a sentence but could never escape the gnawing fear that he was inexpressible; and the Flaubert who never lost sight of his love for Don Quixote, spectacle, and theatrics, but still occupied a place as a founder of realism.

Brown's treatment of Flaubert's intriguing character is complemented by his marked attention to the historical moments that riveted France and its denizens at this time. The 1848 Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Second French Empire, are major subjects in and of themselves in this work, as are the foreign places to which Flaubert traveled, including Egypt, Spain, and Corsica. And although Flaubert once wrote to Louise Colet that he was "'a man . . . worn by the excesses of solitude'" (278), Brown believes that his subject cannot be understood fully outside his literary and social coterie, which included luminary figures such as Maxime Du Camp, Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Ivan Turgenev, Louise Bouilhet, Guy de Maupassant, Louise Colet, and Caroline Commanville. While Brown often insists on spending a considerable amount of time on each of these individuals (for instance, seven and a half pages are committed solely to Turgenev's history and his relationship with his mother), it is not without reason. Brown's resistance to marginalize Flaubert's inner circle makes plain the integral role they often played in Flaubert's development as a writer. Furthermore, as a lifelong bachelor whose relationships with women were often rocky, Flaubert turned to these companions for the security, validation, and company that he so desperately craved. The inclusion of the private correspondences between Flaubert and Sand, Turgenev, and Colet respectively are arguably the biography's most compelling moments since they unequivocally expose Flaubert's insecurities and private desires as both a man and an artist.

Informed by the cities, letters, photos, notes, and works that remained after Flaubert's death in 1880...