The method transformed realism and even became an issue in the trial. His use of what literary critics call “free indirect discourse” (in French, “style indirect libre,” “free indirect style”) tended if anything to undermine the idea of the objective narrator, by making it difficult to distinguish between the perspective of the narrator and that of the character. Rather, his narrators were generally unobtrusive. He wrote that “the artist in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” This idea of the godlike artist did not involve meting out punishments or pronouncing moral judgments. Pinard failed to win a conviction, but the court reprimanded Flaubert for forgetting that art “must be chaste and pure not only in its form but in its expression.” įlaubert attempted to cure the banality of modern “received ideas” through the dispassionate and precise use of language. In January, 1857, the French prosecutor Ernest Pinard accused Flaubert of an “offense to public and religious morality and to good morals” for publishing the novel. The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things. Gustave Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary (1856) is the story of a bored housewife who has two extra-marital affairs but finds adultery almost as disappointing as marriage.
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