ABSTRACT
While Sartre’s study is generally sensitive to the ambiguity of Flaubert’s fiction, his approach turns him into a case study and reduces his fiction to an examination of neurosis. He claims that Flaubert ‘tortures’ the two main characters in Madame Bovary, ‘because they are himself, and also to show that other people and the world torture him. He also tortures them because they are not him and he is anyway vicious and sadistic and wants to torture others.’5 This sadomasochistic complex is complicated by Sartre’s view that Flaubert was caught between conflicting forces: Flaubert denounced stupidity but identified it in himself (he claimed ‘I find myself revoltingly banal’6), and he was torn between a religious sensibility (stemming from his mother) and the scientism of his father whom he both respected and despised. These themes are certainly evident in Flaubert’s fiction. But, while Sartre makes some perceptive insights, by searching for Flaubert’s unwavering mirror image in his fiction he cannot escape the closed circle of neurosis he sets out to identify.
