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French Forum 28.2 (2003) 117-120



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Mary Orr. Flaubert. Writing the Masculine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 239 pp.

In an effort to counterbalance Anglo-American gender studies of French literature that she considers naïve and anachronistic, Mary Orr undertakes to read Flaubert's œuvre in a "double time-frame," paying heed both to the socio-historical context of nineteenth-century France and to late twentieth-century critical and theoretical perspectives, [End Page 117] with particular attention to feminist work on "masculinities." The result is an extraordinarily well-researched and original, if not always wholly convincing, analysis of the male characters in Flaubert's fiction.

Orr's study proceeds chronologically by publication date of each of Flaubert's major works. Eschewing biography and thus refusing to associate any of the characters with Flaubert himself, Orr maintains that Flaubert was in perfect tune with his era, in which the Napoleonic Code institutionalized the concept of male as norm. Flaubert was less interested in what distinguishes men from women than in what distinguishes men from each other, and his work features a large number of "unlikely male figures" (11) who by their very existence render the notion of male superiority problematical. Indeed, the principal roles played by males do not conform to rules of "successful" masculinity in the patriarchal society that is nineteenth-century France, and the Code can be as detrimental to the "marginal" or non-conformist males as to females. Just as there are many different types of males, there are many patriarchies, from pre-roman Carthage and third-century Egypt to the Paris of 1848, and it is this plurality that is emphasized in Orr's consideration of "the fragments of fractured and split masculinities" (22) that constitute the Flaubertian œuvre.

From this perspective, Madame Bovary becomes the tale of unrequited love, with Charles at its center. Satirizing the institution of marriage as legally codified, Flaubert makes Charles an "exemplary model of [a] married lover" (30) whose nobler aspects have been ignored by critics. Charles is at once a Christ figure who experiences a secular Gethsemane and a "Cinderella-in-the-masculine doomed to the kitchen status of reality" (37) because of his passive masculinity and because marriage as set up by the Code Napoléon does not allow for variation in male behavior. Emma's "masculinity," on the other hand, an idée reçue that can be traced back to the "culprit" Baudelaire (41), is thoroughly dismissed.

In Salammbô, Mâtho is, like Charles, scapegoated by patriarchy. The slave, Spendius, on the other hand, a self-interested liar who is one of three representatives of the power of patriarchy in the novel (the other two being the god, Moloch and the human ruler, Hamilcar), is compared to Homais. Thus this novel is about a homicidal power-game [End Page 118] among men, and Flaubert, cloaking French history in the guise of ancient Carthage, reveals the negative consequences of patriarchy.

Rather than focus on master-slave hierarchies as does Salammbô, L'Education sentimentale takes the middle ground of post-revolutionary democracy as its subject. And yet it forms a diptych with Salammbô as the study of patriarchal forms, refracted ironically, since the inhumanity among men that had been demonstrated in the Punic Wars of the former novel is here rendered as republican "brotherhood" and fratricide. Frédéric, who is comparable to Mâtho as "insider-outsider" (92), is Flaubert's catalyst-narrator who serves as vehicle for criticism of his era. A protagonist on an anti-quest, Frédéric is meaningful above all in his implicitly homo-erotic relationship with Deslauriers. This is the "singular" face of the novel. Its "corporate" face concerns the group of male characters in orbit around Frédéric who demonstrate the failure of the 1848 Revolution. If, in Salammbô, Flaubert had "unglamorized war" (104), here he demythologizes public fraternity, above all in the killing of Dussardier by Sénécal.

In the chapter devoted to La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, the least satisfying and well-integrated, in my opinion, Orr depicts the...

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