Volume 10, Number 9 · May 9, 1968
Can You Top This?
By Matthew Hodgart
Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait
revised edition, by Francis Steegmuller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 365 pp., $6.95
Flaubert: The Making of the Master
by Enid Starkie
Atheneum, 403 pp., $8.50
Flaubert
by Benjamin F. Bart
Syracuse University, 791 pp., $16.00
Madame Bovary and the Critics
edited by B.F. Bart
New York University, 197 pp., $6.00
The relationships between an author's life and his work, between biography and literary criticism, are always puzzling. Does it matter what kind of a man he was? And if so, just how much and in what ways does it matter? This is particularly difficult in the case of Flaubert, because of his famous saying 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' In a preliminary study (Search for a Method, 1963) Sartre attacks the problem with verve and ingenuity: 'going back to his biography, I discover his dependence, his obedience, his 'relative being,' in short all the qualities which at that period were commonly called 'feminine.' At last I find out, a little late, that his physicians dubbed him a nervous old woman and that he was vaguely flattered. Yet it is certain that he was not to any degree at all an invert.' (Sartre's italics)
Review, 1643 words
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