Author Information
Madame Bovary & Bovarysm
Jules de Gaultier (1858-1942), the French philosopher who invented Bovarysm, has been forgotten, overshadowed by the popularity of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzche, and Bovarysm is unheard of today. Perhaps Bovarysm with a "y" is too clumsy of a term. We might prefer "bovarism", but that would dishonor its etymological origin in "Bovary"; that, in turn, might be refered back to "bovine", meaning cowlike, which would dishonor the struggling spirit of Madame Bovary against the boring, mundane world.
Bovarysm is Gaultier's version of the Flight of the Butterfly, or Psyche's quest to recover Eros after he disappeared because she had dared to shed light on his Beauty. In modern terms, we might speak of the tension between external reality and human imagination. Gaultier, like others in his day, was much taken in by biological evolutionism, hence his butterfly does not fly off without a flight plan into the flame to perish prematurely, but rather uses her fall into the Sun to gain momentum enough to orbit it while continually metamorphosing. She remains aloft in motion to behold the Grand Spectacle and is thus in harmony with her Beauty without possessing it.
The vitalist line drawn by Gaultier has been drawn before and shall ever be drawn unto extinction of our kind; yet he, like other originating artists, none of whom are unique except in their coincidental variations, drew his segment of the line in his own way. Now France is the mother of several fine "minor" philosophers whom I admire. She has a way of grinding up obsure German philosophy and practical English philosophy into ordinary saugage suitable to my common way of thinking. In fact, she purchased her German idealism after it had been recycled by Scottish common sense philosophers, the most notable of which is Thomas Reid (1710-1796). She did not believe everything she heard, especially after examing the pragmatic English sceptics. The French synthesis or eclectical sausage I find so digestible because I can understand it, professional philosophers call "mediocre" because slow people like me do understand it. So be it - I relish it.
In any case, although France is my philosophical queen, philosophy is everywhere an art and the show must go on. Gaultier said the history of philosophy is the history of the way philosophers beg the question as if there were an answer in the first place. Of course no answer is good enough. He noted by way of example that, after centuries of speculation, Kant discovered a science of knowledge, then repudiated it. I recall the logical philosopher Charles Pearce once said a fool keeps asking a question after it has been answered. Methinks some questions want no answers, or are really based on those disguised First Answers philosophers call absolute presuppositions not even worth considering because they are not relative to anything at all hence are unprovable, et cetera. But that is precisely what beggars and artists need to keep them going: Nothing. Gaultier noted well that the infantile "why" is the source of our most lofty speculations....
Gaultier is a philosopher of living an artistic life - of living with an aesthetic attitude. He described that attitude as a smiling face arising out of centuries of vitality struggling for the crude satisfaction of base needs. That smiling visage is essential to our growth; it must be put on, and the ugly, crude, vulgar costumes should be discarded. The face smiling through tears is drawn by art, not by the permanent, witch-hunting, frowning Truth that strangles life in its crib, warping the infant mind and stunting the growth of the human being. That sort of external Truth imprisons the soul and demonstates just how shriveled up the person really is in the impoverishment of his or her internal morality.
According to Gaultier, "Morality is the fact of sensibility. It has no need to have recourse to reason for its affirmations." That does not mean he advocated living an unreasonable life of immorality; nor does it mean he did not use his reason to explain good sense or to fashion his art. He advocated living an artistic life motivated by moral sensibility rather than shiny golden calves of the cow called Truth, the idol which for a fee affords anxious people some shelter for lying to be "good." Thoreau agreed in that regard, saying, "It is golden not to have and rule at all." And Blake asserted, "the only golden rule of life is "the great and golden rule of art." Gaultier put it this way: "Art is in a certain sense, the only morality which life admits," he claimed.
Gaultier's Bovarysm is the outcome of his critical reflections on Gustave Flaubert's scandalous Madame Bovary, a prosperous farmer's daughter who married a dull doctor named Charles and who read too many novels or bad ones for her own good. She found life boring as a consequence, and, not being content with the exercise of her imaginatiion, she betrayed her imagination and her husband in futile attempts to realize her fantasies in lovers. Having failed deplorably, she despaired and committed suicide.
But her creator Flaubert remained faithful to the imaginative life: in his case, art for art's sake. He wrote novels including Madame Bovary at his countryside hermitage, keeping love at a comfortable distance. As far as he was concerned, love is a secondary affair, yet he did write letters about Madame Bovary to his lady love in Paris, whom he visited but would not live with: the stunning beauty Madame Louise Colet. Louise was an award-winning romantic poetess; she was sponsered by the powerful Victor Cousin (one of those "mediocre" French philosophers I admire) - Monsieur Colet was discreet.
Although Flaubert despised "Realism", and ventured to say the stupidity of his age tasted like dung to in his mouth, he was considered to be budding Realism's chief apostle, and his novel Madame Bovary was deemed be its first and foremost example. He said he enjoyed shaping the dung in his mouth and pasting it all over the nineteenth century, that it might stick and endure. Well, Flaubert's artistic life was realistic because it represented the flight of the human imagination over mundane realism. Thus, when he was pressed to identify his model for Madame Bovary, he responded with his famous answer, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," although he had had one or more ladies in mind during the composition of the novel.
Fortunately for those of us who love his work, Flaubert had sufficient leisure to study reality and to write about it honestly; his modest pension freed him from the distracting, daily grind of eking out an absurd existence. His serialized Madame Bovary was quite the success. Some critics were astonished that he chose such a commonplace subject as adultery for a novel; the imperial prosecutor was indignant over his "poetry of adultery" and charged him with publishing an immoral novel; he was acquitted; nevetheless, the judge lectured him on the "vulgar" and "shocking" content of "realism", a term synonymous with vulgarity in those days. It seems one might be vulgar but darst not write about it: one must invariably lie to be good, to at least maintain an appearance of propriety lest the Revolution recur.
Jules de Gaultier was deeply impressed by Flaubert's perspicacity. Gaultier's Bovarysm describes the will-to-illusion, which we may distinguish from Schopenhauer's will-to-live and Nietzsche's will-to-power. The will-to-illusion is the desire to be other than what one presently is. Madame Bovary is a pathological spectacle but a necessary example:
"There exists a pathology of Bovarysm," writes Gaultier, "namely, that the power to conceive oneself otherwise, whose benefits are distributed in a very unequal fashion to those who profit by it, is for many other individuals the cause of aberration and the principle of ruin or of ridicule....
"The spectator can only rejoice in this state of things. It is thanks to this imperfection that life remains a spectacle to him. If the power to conceive oneself other were to function in humanity according to an absolutely normal rhythm, if all men were equally endowed with the power to conceive themselves as resembling one another were equally gifted with the ability to realize this conception, there would no longer be but one human examplar. The monotony of the representation would engender an ennui destructive of life itself and the power to imitate would find itself abolished for lack of differentiated types proposed for imitation. The world would congeal in the identical."
Equality might be hell in a revolutionary democracy. But given an equal opportunity, those few who are more apt to learn from Madame Bovary may, with her tragi-comic spectacle in mind, regulate their instinctive power to be other than what they presently are, into normal, harmonious modes of behavior, that they may be in harmony with themselves. In other words, Gaultier, influenced by evolutionary theory and vitalist philosophy, used Madame Bovary as a foil for advocating healthy growth. Our slogan, "To be all you can be" comes to mind here. He advocates evolution, not revolution.
We might very well say living is an art, we might talk about art all day, write essays and books about art, but to succeed as a serious artist, to be happy in life, to sell our paintings and books is something else again. Yes, indeed, to imagine or to conceive oneself other is one thing, but to be that other is another; it is as if we are ruined by the violent divorce or "diremption" of reality and imaginaton at the very outset, hence we are perpetually crucified by hypo-crisy, the underlying crisis of existence and being - the cross of the real and ideal, of deeds and words. Jean Paul Sartre, in his three-volume, 2,801 page "biography" of Flaubert, pointed out that Madame Bovaryis not a novel about the conflict between literary realism and romanticism, as some critics suppose, but is about the tension between the real and the imaginary. Gaultier would have us deal with the tension harmoniously; Bovarysm emphasizes a constructive employment of the will-to-illusion.
Madame Bovary was well aware of the tension of which we speak - her husband Charles is not good enough for her; her lover Rodolphe becomes a stick in the mud in her eye, but she desperately clings to it nevertheless, as we can see in excerpts from Madame Bovary, discussing her relationship with her lover:
"Their great love, in which she lived completely immersed, seemed to be ebbing away, like the water of a river that was sinking into its own bed, and she saw the mud at the bottom. She refused to believe it; she redoubled her caresses; and Rodolphe hid his indifference less and less."
Despite her forced belief, she, while thinking about her father a short while later, is still aware of the illusory process:
"How long it was since she had sat there beside him (her father), on the fire seat, burning the end of a stick in the flame of the crackling furze! She remembered summer evenings, full of sunshine. The foals would whinny when anyone came near, and gallop and gallop to their heart's content. There had been a beehive under her window, and sometimes the bees, wheeling in the light, would strike against the panes like bouncing golden balls. How happy she had been in those days! How free! How full of hope! How rich in illusions! There were no illusions left now! She had had to part with some each time she ventured on a new path, in each of her successive conditions - as virgin, as wife, as mistress; all along the course of her life she had been losing them, like a traveler leaving a bit of his fortune in every inn along the road..."
Emma Bovary had to know she would be disappointed again and again with her current lover, yet she presses on pathologically, as if her will-to-illusion was an unconscious will-to-die. She responded inappropriately to the tension between the life she imagined and external reality; for her, it was a conflict between either/or contraries, leading to her self-destruction by suicide rather than an endurable tension or a continuous, bipolar impetus to personal growth:
"He (Rodolphe her lover) saw no reason why there should be all this to-do about so simple a thing as love-making. But for her there was a reason; there was a motive force that gave an impetus to her passion. Every day her love for Rodolphe was fanned by her aversion for her husband. The more completely she surrendered to the one, the more intensely did she loath the other; never did Charles seem to her so repulsive, so thick-fingered, so heavy-witted, so common, as when she was alone with him after her meeting with Rodolphe..."
In the final analysis, for Emma Bovary the difference between the real and ideal was irreconciliable; nor could she live with either alone, hence she resorted to the absurd, to conflict-killing self-murder, leaving the problem behind her - but there was no more behind for her. We might wonder, Would she have despaired to the same conclusion if she had known that the reality she flew from was also an illusion, that illusion is the only reality we can know? Perhaps not, providing she did not worship the false idol "Truth."
Gaultier wrote, "If, after having brought out the universality and fatality of the bovaryc illusion, we carefully avoided formulating here a pessimistic evaluation of life and its conditions, one must recognize that the very disclosure of this fact would be of a nature to motivate a different judgment in the immense crowd of human beings who live by their confidence and ardor, assure the progress of life in its different phases. The latter do not become disheartened when some particular illusion becomes apparent to them and the best of them only strive to retrench it. This task gives them an aim, which, once attained, procures them joy. But their courage would doubtless fail, if they had to verify that all their efforts only serve to replace one illusion with another and that the very conditions of phenomenal life condemn them to ceaselessly create more or less false perspectives. It is because these people are led by a major belief which is the mainspring of their activity: under names more or less symbolic and concrete they believe in TRUTH and all their effort proposes to reduce the modes of life to this ideological conception, to impose this yoke on phenomenal life; the yoke of truth..." (Bovarysm)
The "truth" Madame Bovary believed in was that her fantasies of happiness must be realized in one man whom she must depend on and live happily ever after with. Her truth was a popular illusion; it corresponded to the romantic ideal and the double-standard sexual politics of her day; her faith in that truth certainly did not incline her to flee alone to Paris, don trousers, grow a mustache, and take up the life of a bisexual libertine - no, she must be under the protection of a man, one man. The commonplace reality she must not have discreet recourse to is continuous adultery. Well, then, she might have taken up writing novels rather than reading the ones that ruined her; she might have imagined her husband Charles to be more like the rakish lovers who appealed to her, at least in bed.
Indeed, when we lay down someone's novel and face the business of life, we are left with the usual questions. How can one succeed living an imaginative, creative life? Many do not succeed according to the conventional, bank-account index of success. We look to the exceptions for examples, the creative artists, and many of them seem to be disturbed people who are rebelling against the collective illusion of reality, against the conventions that safeguard the herd - no wonder so many fall short of their dreams, for they revolt also against their selves. How can anyone succeed as an artist guided by Gaultier's "sensibility", guided by his instinctive, inner morality, guided by his freedom instead of the mundane market that demands cheap trash and grinds organic artistic instinct to digital dust? Flaubert had his stipend to fall back on. People with means can afford to dabble in art, just as the noble aristocrats dabbled in art and science in the old days. Yes, a few starving artists produce great works, many of them not appreciated until the artists were dead - why do we love people more after they are dead? In fact, many enduring works of art endured because their creators despised "real" wealth. Nevertheless, few are graced with the love of Lady Poverty - we prefer the visitations of Lady Fortuna. Most people do not have the leisure to be serious artists. Besides, is there not something infantile and narcissistic in the urge to avoid reality and to be somebody other than an employee, homemaker, television viewer and sports fan? Yes, a few geniuses can produce something of value, but most so-called artists should get a job and a life and stop acting like spoiled children. In fact, artists on the whole should not be supported; they should be faced with starvation because art is really unreal and useless.
Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher who had a marked influence on Gaultier, had this to say about the child:
"Every genius is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest....
"To be useless is the mark of the genius, its patent of nobility. All other works of men are there for the preservation or alleviation of our existence; but this alone is not enough; art alone is there for its own sake; and is in this sense to be regarded as the flower, or the pure essence of existence. That is why in its enjoyment our heart rises, for we are thereby lifted above the heavy earthen atmosphere of necessity."
The quotations of Schopenhauer are taken from Havelock Ellis' remarkable book, The Dance of Life. In its concluding chapter, Ellis discusses Gaultier's Bovarysm and the social utility of the aesthetic attitude. The comtemplative attitude of the artists is "the highest attitude attainable by man towards life is that of aesthetic contemplation," writes Ellis. Furthermore, "The aesthetic instinct, as Jules de Gaultier understands it, answers the double demands of our needs to-day, not, like religions and moralities, by evoking images as menaces or as promises, only effective if they can be realized in the world of sensation, and so merely constituting another attempt to gratify the possessive instinct, by enslaving the power of imagination to that alien master. Through the aesthetic instinct Man is enabled to procure joy, not from the things themselves and the sensations due to the possession of things, but from the very images of things."
I am tempted to pause here to discuss the relation between spiritualism and romanticism, between religion and art, and to delve at book length into the fascinating Iconoclasm controversy, but I will save that extensive excursus for separate treatment. Until then, please remember that the terms "image" and "imagination" are meant in the broadest sense; that is, not limited to visualization or physical representation.
But to continue: neither I nor the authors I have quoted are suggesting we can make a living by doing nothing except imagine things. No doubt our basic needs must be addressed before entertaining our wants. Yet no fine line or universal distinction can be drawn between needs and wants. Humans need the imaginative art to subsist. Furthermore, an unwanted reality is not worth living, a least not for the courageous. This leads me to wonder if those of us who are more fortunate than others are wasting our opportunities or wanting the wrong things; allow me to put it this way:
"Fortunately, WE, the most deserving denizens of the First World, the superior civilization led by the United States of America, upon which any violent attack is a grievous affront to Civilization itself, have ample leisure time to satisfy our wants. But WE tend to satisfy them in the old way, as if they were basic needs without which we would perish. Instead of working, say, three hours a day for modest subsistence, then employing ourselves otherwise in enjoyable and worthwhile pursuits, WE devote ourselves to the frantic competitive production and consumption of what the aristocratic artist in us would politely call mountains of unnecessary garbage, trash, and junk. The classified advertisement is full of musts: WE 'must work under pressure'; WE 'must be team players'; WE 'must work in a fast-paced environment'; WE 'must be willing to work long hours'; WE 'must have pushed that sequence of buttons before' and so on."
As if our life depended on the bad life. As if there is no alternative to the competitive war of all against all. As if any large gap in the resume not devoted to mass production and consumption devalues the applicant to the status of peon or unemployable. How absurd and destructive that Reality and Truth is. Not only must that Way be shoved down other people's throats, they must swallow it as they "adjust" to becoming welcome mats for our inevitable changes as we destroy the world.
But there is another way to satisfy the insatiable desire for life, besides global pollution, overproduction, overpopulation, and peace through global terror led by our great nation. It is the heavenly way with infinite possibilities for joy. Gaultier believed the excessive developments of insatiable desire could be sublimated towards the more human end of aesthetic joy; in fact, he insisted that the evolutionary development of the aesthetic sense, which he believes is based on physiological conditions, is crucial to the survival of civilization. Thus the will-to-illusion, when in harmony with our moral sensibility unhindered by the deadly, pathological illusions or idols called "Truth", is our salvation and not our curse, and should be supported for the blessing it really is.
The aesthetic sense, says Havelock Ellis, "based, like the other instincts of egoism, it, yet, unlike the other instincts, leads to no destructive struggles. Its powers of giving satisfaction are not dissipated by the number of those who secure that satisfaction... By aiming at a different end, the aesthetic sense yet attains the end aimed at by morality... The artist for art's sake... is really engaged in a task none other can perform, of immense utility to men... The artist, as Gaultier would probably put it, has to effect a necessary Bovarism. If he seeks to mix himself up with the passions of the crowd, if his work shows the desire to prove anything, he thereby neglects the creation of beauty. Necessarily so, for he excites a state of combativity, he sets up moral, political, and social values, all having relation to biological needs needs and the possessive instinct, the most violent of ferments. He is entering on the struggle over Truth - though his opinion is worth no more than any other man's - which, on account of its universality, is brandished about in the most ferociously opposed camps."
Havelock Ellis, like others of the vitalist mode of thinking, was enthusiastic about doctrines of evolution. Noting how the aesthetic sense was being degraded with the advance of a militant industrial civilization based on the aggressive greed whereby Man would pull Sun, Moon, planets and stars out of heaven and destroy them if he could, Ellis places the blame squarely on the degenerate few who hold the many hostage. "One notes, for instance, in England, that the most widespread spectacularly attractive things outside cities may be said to be the private parks and churches.... The owners of parks and guardians of churches have found it increasingly necessary to close them because of the alarmingly destructive or predatory impulses of a section of the public.... the liberty of the whole community in its finest manifestations is abridged by a handful of imbeciles." Therefore, in order to save the true, good, and beautiful life, Ellis proposes helping evolution along by practicing eugenics - he points out that all peoples have adopted such practices as infanticide, abortion, or celibacy. He cites Jesus Christ's doctrines of select salvation as authority, claiming that, originally, Christianity was "the most aristocratic of religions"; for instance: "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the the fire... Ye are the salt of the Earth: but if the salt has lost his savour,... it is henceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under the foot of men." On the other hand, Ellis admits that "Jules de Gaultier was not concerned to put forward an aristocratic conception of the aesthetic doctrine.... He was content to suggest... a more democratic conception.... He had, indeed, one may divine, a predilection for that middle class which has furnished so vast a number of the supreme figures in art and thought...."
Ellis concludes The Dance of Life speculating on whether eugenics may be necessary to transform the modern worker's leisure into spiritual activity, and the liberated utilitarian energy into aesthetic energy. Picking up the thread of his thought a century later, many would agree that a violent minority, namely "terrorists", is trying to hold civilization hostage, and that the obvious solution is to kill and imprison them. However, the terrorists call themselves "freedom fighters"; they are practicing their own brand of eugenics in violent protest of the militant industrialism or imperialism of the West who hates alternatives and would destroy their way of life. Besides their glaring example, there exists a rising number of violent and nonviolent protestors who protest the so-called inevitable "progress" of neo-liberal corporatism as it ravages human cultures and other natural resources as it devalues diverse moralities to the common currency of production and consumption; it is a binary, either/or currency: either buy this, or buy that - not buying anything at all is not an option.
Now we begin to wonder, Which minority is really holding us hostage, the vulgar minority at the bottom or the power elite at the top? Indeed, who are the real barbarians? Which vandals are doing the most damage? The suspects are not the usual ones on the bottom rungs of the ladder leaning against the pyramid. They are at the apex. Their organized crime against humanity is legal and is vast. And when they break the laws designed to protect them, their breeches are covered up, and, if exposed, applauded for love of power and pardoned - the conviction rate is very low. As for the aesthetic sense, art is more of an investment than beauty to be beheld - if a Picasso was worth five dollars they would not want it.
Of course there are exceptions! And I am using rhetoric to deliberately turn the tables to better balance them; mind you, the middle class is sandwiched in between and does have the virtue of common sense, the very mediocrity which can be a saving grace as long as its average grade is high, well above the level of the mini-Hitler, the authoritarian personality that loves to hand down abuse. But allow me to complete my propaganda, my little balancing act. The imbeciles are NOT at the bottom, they are at the top! I speak of the hidden vampires, the Un-Dead power elite who feed on the spirit of humanity, I speak of the Extremely Un-Wise and the Curse of Credentials authorizing them to prey upon humankind. I speak of the Forces of Darkness and Tribalism which have taken cover in corporate boardrooms, in white houses, on gentleman's ranches, on private jets, in luxurious compounds.
And so on, according to the powers of imagination. And the imagination is a power to be reckoned with even though it falls ever short of realizing its ideals. Madame Bovary is a fictitious character but a real one nevertheless, one of many who literally died for our sins that we might be redeemed. She is in effect immortal. And as Gustave Flaubert said, "C'est moi." He lives on in her to our undying gratification, without hostility, without damage to the environment. The imagination is a magic power; it is not a machine, but it can create machines for all sorts of purposes. So let us all beware of the "Truth" which is death, and employ imagination well, being careful of what we ask for lest we bury our heads in the sand and expire in final finitude. Rather let us be forever inspired by the infinite mystery of our true love, our very
Life.
Biographical Notes
Mme. Louise Colet (1810-1876), poet and novelist, married Hippolyte Colet, a musician, in 1834. She was an aggressive promoter of her poetry. She was sponsored by Victor Cousin, whom she met shortly before he became Minister of Education in 1840. He helped her obtain prizes and a pension, and otherwise provided for her for eighteen years until they parted. Victor Cousin reportedly fathered her daughter; the journalist Alphonse Karr made a scandal of it, and she tried to knife him: unharmed, he hung the knife in his living room over the caption, "The Gift of Madame Colet, offered while my back was turned." Mme. Colet's salon attracted many leading lights. Her intimates included the poets Alfred de Musset and Alfred de Vigny. She had a sometimes stormy, eight-year affair with Gustave Flaubert, whom she met in 1846. She wrote her bitter novel, Him (1859), after their estrangement. His letters to her appeared under the guise of The Muse. Her best know poems are 'The Woman's Poem', What One Dreams in Love', and 'In Women's Hearts.'
Victor Cousin (1792-1867), philosopher, historian, and educational reformer was famous for his eclectical approach to philosophy. He was influenced by the Scottish Common Sense school, Locke, Condillac and Maine de Biran, as well as by Hegal and Friedrich Schelling, the last two whom he met in Germany. He became a popular and powerful force in France, dominating the field of education. His influence on educational theory extended to the United States. In his earlier years, he was the assistant of the Doctrinaire, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard. Cousin's philosophy is criticized for being "simplistic" and his categories as "arbitrary" - he sought to embrace Sense, Reason, and Emotion in his work. He alienated the Catholics by finding God in historical research instead of by means of divine revelation.
Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763-1845), statesman and philosopher, was a moderate during the Revolution; he was secretary of the Paris Commune from 1790 to 1792, leaving in 1793 when the moderate Girondins were overthrown. He taught history of philosophy, and developed his philosophy of perception, based on the theories of Thomas Reid, to refute materialist and skeptical doctrines. Thereafter, he held important political offices. In response to reactionary Royalist ministers, he became a leading proponent of a limited constitutional monarchy, developing a "Legitimist" theory: the royal authority must be legitimate - restrained - not arbitrary. Hence he was the focus of the group known as Doctrinaires. The popular meaning of the word "doctrinaire"- someone who adheres to rational ideology despite the circumstances - is contrary to the spirit of the Doctrinaires, as is, in a similar way, "ideologue" contrary to the spirit of the Ideologues - the Ideologues had no ideology except the skeptical science of ideas. The Doctrinaires had no fixed doctrine. They were moderates sandwiched between the Aristocratic Royalist Ultras and the Revolutionary Liberal Left. Louis XVIII was in the sandwich with the Doctrinaires, who did their best to moderate the demands of both sides. Royer-Collard did not sympathize with the regime after the July Revolution in 1830 - he remained a member of the Chamber but took no active part in politics.
Sources:
Gaultier, Jules, Bovarysm, Transl. Gerald M. Spring, New York: Philosophical Library, 1970
Gaultier, Jules, From Kant to Nietzche, Transl. Gerald M. Spring, New York, Philosophical Library
Ellis, Havelock, The Dance of Life, New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1923
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 119, Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers: Romanticism and Realism, 1800-1860, Ed. Catherine Savage Brosman, 'Gustave Flaubert', London
Barnes, Hazel E., Sartre & Flaubert, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981
Starkie, Enid, Flaubert: The Making of The Master, New York: Atheneum, 1967
Bart, Benjamin F., Flaubert, Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1967
Copyright 2002 David Arthur Walters
