Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert is invoked as a literary touchstone in the narrator’s reflections on class, artistic life, sexuality, and gender. He is not presented through a continuous biography; instead, remembered maxims and judgments make him a figure through whom other writers’ contradictions become visible. His pronouncements appear authoritative, but the narrative repeatedly tests them against the lives and ideas of Virginia Woolf and the narrator’s deceased friend.

Artistic Ideals and Bourgeois Comfort

Flaubert enters a discussion of the contemporary writer’s class position. The narrator recalls being shown the brownstone home of the deceased friend, with its built-in bookcases and handsome rugs laid over aged walnut floors, and thinking about how bourgeois contemporary writers had become. At a dinner in another writer’s home, guests considered Flaubert’s well-known rule that a writer should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod. The narrator questions how well that ideal fits Flaubert himself, whose life is described as wild and unlike that of an ordinary bourgeois. The maxim therefore arrives with an unresolved contradiction: it makes material comfort compatible with exceptional thought, while its author seems to resist the very ordinary life the formula prescribes.

The dinner conversation also places that contradiction in a changing literary culture. The host suggests that the feckless bohemian has largely given way to the knowing, taste-conscious hipster, and that many writers now feel embarrassment or shame about their work. The narrator’s recollection of the deceased friend’s dismay at Brooklyn becoming a brand extends the problem: a place can become so available to parody that even earnest writing about it risks seeming parodic. Flaubert’s formula does not resolve these anxieties; it serves as an older ideal against which the contemporary writer’s cultivated comfort and self-consciousness can be measured.

Food, Poverty, and Indifference

The discussion of Virginia Woolf’s assertion that good dining is necessary for thinking, loving, and sleeping well shifts the focus from bourgeois comfort to deprivation. The narrator grants the force of the claim but counters that the starving artist was not always a myth, and that thinkers have lived and died in poverty. Flaubert is then placed beside Keats in Woolf’s account of geniuses who suffered acutely from the world’s indifference to them. In this recollection, literary distinction offers no guarantee of recognition or material security.

Flaubert’s presence in this comparison is deliberately unsettled. The narrator asks what he would have made of Woolf, given his contemptuous judgment of female artists. The contrast is not simply between two writers’ opinions: Woolf identifies Flaubert as a figure who suffered indifference while also recording a view that dismisses women’s artistic work. Both writers created characters who take their own lives, and Woolf herself would later die by suicide. The juxtaposition makes artistic suffering and gendered judgment coexist without turning one into an excuse for the other.

Sexuality as a Theory of Work

Flaubert also appears in an argument about whether sexual life diminishes artistic productivity. The narrator’s deceased friend treated romantic intensity as essential to his work and rejected the idea, associated with Flaubert, that orgasm drains a man’s creative energy. Flaubert’s position is presented alongside Balzac’s lament that a night of passion had cost him a book, as part of a tradition in which choosing work over life seemed to require sexual abstinence.

The deceased friend countered that if these fears were sound, monks would be the world’s most creative people. He also pointed to writers known for strong sexual appetites and maintained that he wrote best during periods of satisfying sex. In his own life, the beginning of an affair often coincided with a productive spell. He even used writer’s block and a deadline as an excuse for cheating, without being wholly serious; he considered the trouble caused by his womanizing worth the cost and did not seriously contemplate changing. Flaubert’s theory thus functions less as a settled account of creativity than as one side of a dispute over whether artistic work demands renunciation. The friend’s experience supplies a counterclaim, though it also becomes a justification for conduct that brought trouble into his life.

Narrative Role

These allusions make Flaubert a recurring measure of the gap between literary ideals and lived circumstances. His bourgeois-demigod formula is tested against both contemporary writers’ comfort and the poverty of artists; his account of sexual abstinence is set against the deceased friend’s belief that desire could accompany productivity. His contempt for female artists, meanwhile, sharpens the contrast with Woolf, even as both writers’ fiction is linked to characters’ suicides. Flaubert’s role is therefore not to provide a stable doctrine for the narrative to adopt, but to give its reflections a pointed, sometimes self-contradictory authority: each remembered position becomes more complicated when placed beside the lives and judgments of other writers.