This is a longer post than usual, a defence of Flaubert,
originally written in 2005 in response to a derogatory comment about his short story A Simple Heart from my husband. I don't remember exactly what his comment was, but I do remember my white hot fury. I found the essay yesterday and showed it to him again, and now he says that it ought to appear on my blog.
Were
this remodelled as the story of an educated woman, it might then be
read as tragic or inspirational. Since it is “only” the story of
a simpleton, readers tend to find Félicité’s delusions
ridiculous, as do the “superior” people in the fictional world of
the story. At first glance, she comes across as a caricature, and in
all likelihood it is her crazy ideas about the Parrot that will
stick longest in our minds after we’ve finished reading about her.
But the author wants us to think again. He once explained that he
wrote it, “pour faire pleurer les âmes sensibles, en étant
moi-même une” (to make sensitive souls weep, of whom I myself
am one).
Take
her name, Felicity. This was obviously chosen by the author for
ironic purposes. Or was it? She does have her moments of bliss; they
may be few and far between but they’re very intense. Maybe the
title is meant to have more than one layer of meaning, too. By the
time we have read the whole story we see that her simplicity has
connotations of purity and straightforwardness as well as of
stupidity. What’s more, perhaps she isn’t as “simple” as she
seems at first sight, either; perhaps she has hidden depths, only
hinted at in the text.
Note
that the title itself focusses on the “heart” of this person
rather than what she might outwardly seem to be. Like the trappings
in the church – outward and visible signs of an inward and
spiritual grace? – perhaps her Quakerly, grey dress and her ageless
face are mentioned in the first chapter in order to convey this
woman’s subdued, unassuming nature. Or is she merely “a wooden
doll driven by clockwork” (next line). Flaubert often makes us look
at the world in more than one way at a time. In any case the
introductory description of her in middle age is more to do with her
job, giving elaborate details of the house she keeps in order, than
her personality (or lack of it); this bias mirrors the kind of life
she’s leading.
Felicité’s
appearance is only ever sketchily outlined. Physically, she’s a
shadowy figure, especially at the start of the story, exactly as a
servant would appear to her employers, not even altogether human, a
mechanical presence. Immediately though, the author begins to
disabuse us of this notion by telling us about her youth, her
sordidly pathetic “love affair” (a deliberate misnomer) with the
exploitative Théodore, who then vanishes from the story exactly as
he does from her life. However, his interference with Felicity has
left enough of an impression to make us realise that she can suffer,
with outbursts of “frenzied grief” that no longer tally with the
doll-like automation described in the first chapter.
Back
to the Aubains’ house, as if that former “love story” were just
a fleeting memory in Félicité’s mind, distressing while she
thinks back, but soon dismissed from her mind because “her pleasant
surroundings had dispelled her grief,” or so she imagines.
The
subsequent short and random depictions of the people who sometimes
visit the house are similarly brief intrusions into Felicité’s
consciousness, and hence into ours, the readers’. We only glean
snippets of information about them because this is exactly how she
experiences other people in the world and indeed the world itself,
like the arbitrary illustrations the children have shown her in their
geography book. The solicitor, M. Bourais, for example, is vaguely
portrayed to us, and to her, as a somewhat awesome presence (probably
the impression she gets from hearing Mme Aubain talk about him) but
we’re not given any corroboration of this, and in fact, by the time
we come to the mention of his death in Chapter 4 we realise what a
worthless object of the women’s devotion he has been. Félicité’s
not the only one who’s duped in the course of this story. Mme
Aubain, likewise. We may even feel let down ourselves, when we
realise that Flaubert’s adjective “outstanding,” to describe M.
Bourais’ personality, was a sarcastic epithet all along. This is a
writer who, by degrees, trains his readers not to take anything we’re
told at face value.
The
children Paul and Virginie are brought into the narrative as examples
of Félicité’s objects of devotion. (Their names, incidentally,
are an ironic allusion to a popular sentimental novel by
Chateaubriand, entitled Paul et Virginie). The
description of the children limits itself to the details their maid
would have noticed: Paul’s trapping birds in the barn, Virginie’s
embroidered knickers, etc. The children’s tutor likewise is merely
mentioned as being “famous for his beautiful handwriting and ...had
a habit of sharpening his penknife on his boots,” exactly the sort
of details that would have stuck in any servant’s mind, when she
came across him.
Suddenly,
in the story as in the life, we are into the incident of Félicité’s
heroism with the bull in the field, although, “it never occured to
her that she had done anything heroic,” so we don’t dwell on it
for long. Félicité’s never mentioned in the description of the
family’s visit to Mère Liébard; in fact she’s ignored by
everyone present in this scene of the story as well. To extrapolate
from the details given, however, we’re seeing the farm through her
quietly observant eyes. Once they get to Trouville, the verbal
description gives the effect of an impressionist painting, with all
our senses appealed to; we’re not limited to visual impressions
either – Flaubert alludes to the heat of the sun as well as the
“dazzling bars of light” shining through their blinds, the
hammering on the boats and the smell of tar, the wind catching the
sails of the boats, the splashing waves, as well as the “quivering
fish” in the fishing nets. This seaside episode is one of the
absolute highlights of the little life that’s being described in
this story, hence the intensity of the description. Félicité, if we
think about it, is actually a very sensual woman. One of the most
terrible things about her life is that this sensuality is so
frustrated and that this was so typical of the women of her station.
Even
in the happy situation at Trouville, we’re given inklings of the
predominantly sombre side of her life, with Félicité’s relatives,
the Leroux family, making an appearance, “bent on getting all they
could out of her” and Virginie starting to cough, the first hint
that this child won’t live long. Typical Flaubert! (Thomas Hardy's
novels have the same pessimistic tone.)
In
Chapter 3, Félicité’s “education,” casually begun in a
vicarious way via the children’s geography book, etc, continues,
when she takes Virginie to her communion classes. Virginie is very
young still, and so is her maid, developmentally speaking. So she
learns about religion from a child’s perspective and weeps as she
listens, Flaubert informs us, leaving us to draw our own conclusions
about how the Gospels speak with familiarity to her simple soul. From
fatigue (she falls asleep during the religious instruction) if not
sheer lack of intelligence, she fails to grasp the Catholic dogma
(“neither understood nor tried to understand anything”); thus,
with her Simple Heart, she bypasses all the unnecessary baggage of
Christianity and comes straight to its essence. Is Flaubert
indirectly reminding us of Jesus telling the disciples: “Except ye
be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into
the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18, v.3)? Félicité will have no
such problem. We’re given a hint here of how the story will end, as
her literal mind tries to picture the Holy Ghost as a bird, a fire, a
breeze or “the sweet music of the bells” – her sensuality
alluded to once again, as she delights in the “coolness of the
walls and the quiet of the church.”
The
secondhand way in which she experiences life is spelled out in a
direct manner during the First Communion scene, as Félicité watches
Virginie approach the altar it seems “she herself was in the
child’s place” and she (the mere watcher) almost faints in
appreciation of what Virginie is supposed to be experiencing. This
could be seen as spirituality of a high degree, or it could just be
that she’s overexcited by a special event. Flaubert leaves it to us
to decide. Spelling out the possibilities of interpretation would be
too intrusive here, and would ruin his detachment as narrator; as his
readers, we must make the connections for ourselves.
When
Virginie goes off to school she kisses her mother goodbye. There’s
no such mention of the child kissing her maid, who will be likewise
stricken when she’s gone. Mme Aubain has “all her friends” to
console her for the absence of her little girl, whereas Félicité’s,
perhaps equally motherly sense of loss is ignored by everyone (except
by the author, of course, and his more sensitive readers) and she
carries on with her usual stoicism. The only evidence of her distress
is that we’re told her clumsy fingers break the threads when she
tries to make some lace and that she can’t sleep very well. Her
emotions are trivialised by one means or another throughout the
narrative, which means that as readers we must use our imagination,
aided by a few hints. How strong her futile affection for her nephew
Victor is, we can only work out from the fact (as we learn much later
in the narrative) that she keeps his little gift of a shell box all
her life long and that she walks ten miles after work to see him off
on his ship, and arrives too late (another very Hardy-esque moment).
Unlike
Mme Aubain, constantly worrying aloud about Virginie, the maid
doesn’t mention her anxiety for Victor. She only does so when she
thinks “her own example would comfort her [mistress]” but of
course it doesn’t and Mme Aubain is offended by the comparison.
“Who cares about a young, good-for-nothing cabin boy? Whereas my
daughter...” This is cruel, but Flaubert understates Félicité’s
response. The only description of her hurt feelings is that she was
“indignant with Madame, but she soon forgot.” Does this show
ox-like stupidy, necessity, self-deception or stoicism?
A
few paragraphs further on, we may deduce that Mme Aubain later feels
guilty for her indifference to Félicité’s feelings. When the news
of Victor’s death comes and Félicité almost collapses from the
shock, we read that “Mme Aubain was trembling slightly.” Perhaps
from the realisation that someone could care for the
good-for-nothing cabin boy.
Félicité
has tried to visualise the young man in Cuba, so that she can pray
for him, and for a moment we see her through the eyes of an outsider,
M. Bourais, who humiliates her by roaring with laughter at her
ignorance, wanting to find Victor’s house on that page of the
atlas. Flaubert's narrative, however, is subtle enough here to give
us an insight into M. Bourais’ unattractive character as well, at
this point. There’s even the hint that Félicité may not be as
stupid as we (or M. Bourais) would like to think, maybe she simply
has the unconventional, inquiring mind of a child; at any rate, the
narrative indirectly gives us M. Bourais’ opinion of her, “...whose
intelligence was so limited that she probably expected to see
an actual portrait of her nephew...” (my italics).
Félicité
pulls herself together when she hears of Victor’s death and gets on
with the washing. This is not from shallowness, but courage. We are
told “She held back her grief...until the evening.” This low
point in the story is immediately followed by another, the death of
Virginie, for which goodbye Félicité once again arrives too late,
but she does the necessary things in the place of the mother, a
weaker character altogether, it seems. The two women’s lives have
overlapped now. Félicité, the better educated in grief, is
temporarily the one in control of the other. n gratitude, Mme Aubain
gives her maid Virginie’s old hat, and in a moment of revelation,
the women recognise one another as equals and embrace. Flaubert
concludes this part of the story: “...henceforth [Félicité] loved
her mistress with dog-like devotion and religious veneration.”
Having identified with her mistress, she is putting herself back into
the subservient position, whether consciously or not, at the same
time finding another love to replace the loves she has lost,
incidentally also hinting (by the inclusion of “henceforth”) that
she may not have felt very devoted to her mistress before. All this
is implied by the carefully chosen words, not directly stated.
And
now, after the one-line paragraph that ends: “...as time went by,”
Félicité’s story begins to accelerate, just as life does, when
when it becomes mostly monotonous, or when a person ages. There is no
reference to historical events in the story, although the temporal
setting is given.
We
next read about a regiment in the village – something that may have
distracted Félicité momentarily from the general monotony – and
of Polish refugees: “one of [whom] expressed a desire to marry
her”... this is an astonishing revelation, but on second thoughts,
obviously not something to be taken seriously, and not very
important. The text simply goes on to state that they “fell out”
because she caught him eating one of her salads!
“After
the Poles it was Père Colmiche,” the it here presumably
meaning the next object of Félicité’s attention, and we’re
plunged into another startling paragraph, describing the squalor in
which this unexpected character lives, “in a ruined pig-sty.”
Flaubert piles on the harrowing detail in order to contrast this with
the saintly manner in which Félicité looks after him “without
annoying Madame,” who presumably doesn’t know anything about it.
The “poor old fellow” (Félicité’s? Flaubert’s view of him?)
promptly dies, again leaving Félicité’s existence without a
focus; then in the next paragraph comes the first mention of the
famous parrot.
Her
parrot is her alter ego as well as a symbol for everything she
worships, whether mistakenly or not. Like her, the parrot is
ridiculed: “Every sneer cut [her] to the quick,” says the
narrative, though this was not stated about Félicité when her own,
far realer sufferings were sneered at. The bird refuses to talk,
though she does teach him to say “Hail Mary!” and “Your
servant, sir!” which probably just about represents the limits of
her own conversation and the two strands of her outward and visible
life. Loulou doesn’t conform to people’s ideas of what a parrot
should be, not having a suitable name. He “laughs” at M. Bourais,
who in his turn gives it “far from tender” looks (note Flaubert’s
humour!). Félicité begins to sympathize with what she imagines are
the parrot’s feelings. She is afraid the bird’s antics will make
him giddy. When Loulou goes missing for a few hours, she searches for
him frantically, “death in her heart”. Is this too extreme a
phrase? Perhaps not. We’re thus forced to realise what the parrot
means to her and we have our suspicions reinforced when we’re told,
“she never really got over it.” The situation thus described is
very sad; on the other hand, this could be another instance of
Flaubert's sarcasm.
In
her pathetic conversations with the recaptured Loulou she speaks
“from the heart” (the heart, again!) disconnected phrases that
the bird replies to, with the only three phrases that he “knows.”
This is clearly ridiculous, but at the same time, a serious business,
because she is now deaf: “In her isolation, Loulou was almost a son
or a lover to her,” an relationship which, as we know, she has
never experienced in reality. This shocking comparison is the sort of
analogy that caused Flaubert’s contemporaries to accuse him of bad
taste, even of indecency. As she talks to the parrot, she even begins
to look and behave like him, so closely does she (subconsciously)
identify with him. Flaubert conveys this idea through a description
of her clothes and gestures.
The
bird inevitably dies and we read of her nightmare journey to Honfleur
to get him stuffed. She is nearly killed in a traffic accident, but
“fortunately nothing had happened to Loulou,” so she reassures
herself on regaining consciousness. This is the ultimate irony; she’s
thus shown to care more about a bird that’s already dead
than about herself. Either she is being stupid beyond reason or she
has become so selfless that she is capable of enduring any degree of
suffering with equanimity. At least she tries to ignore the pain, it
seems, by eating a “crust of bread”she has brought along. But all
the miseries of her past, now associated with the death of her
parrot, well up at the sight of Honfleur in the distance, and like
Mme Bovary at her moments of crisis, Félicité feels faint and
breathless again.
Solace
comes to her with the delivery of the newly stuffed parrot. She makes
a sort of altar for him in her room or sanctuary, itself stuffed
with various other rubbishy objects of adoration, symbolising her
whole life, all her veneration of hopeless, helpless creatures. But
by contemplating this room, she manages to remember “the smallest
details of insignificant actions, not in sorrow but in absolute
tranquility.” Therefore from amidst the pathetic muddle of her
life, it now seems she has learned to find peace of mind, a
remarkable achievement. It is at this point that Flaubert’s
narrative starts to describe Félicité’s (blasphemous) confusion
of the Holy Ghost with a parrot, this dead one in fact, to whom she
begins to pray.
She
is by this late stage of her life living in a sort of trance, “in
the torpid state of a sleep-walker” only to be aroused by the
routine, religious celebrations of the parish and by the death of Mme
Aubain, another isolated woman by this time with no further mention
of “all the friends” who consoled her once, when her daughter
went away to school. Félicité is apparently her only real mourner,
being the one person who knew her by heart and the only one who seems
to understand how and why the revelations about M. Bourais have
destroyed her.
When
Paul and the daughter-in-law come to pack up Mme Aubain’s things,
Félicité is, as so many times before, “numbed with sadness” and
the understatement continues, she sways, and is “obliged to sit
down.” It must be something as serious as a stroke. Flaubert
doesn’t actually say so, though a couple of paragraphs later he
describes her “dragging her leg,” as she struggles about the
empty house. At this desperate point, there is a measure of salvation
or respite in the progression of her last moments, because another
old lady – not previously mentioned in the tale – takes pity on
her and begins to look after her. This is Mère Simon “whose
grocery business had come to grief,” presumably someone who can
therefore feel for others in a sad plight. She must have been known
by, but been of very peripheral importance to Félicité before this;
suddenly she becomes essential, and that is presumably why the author
introduces us to this additional character at such a late stage in
the story. Other nineteenth century novelists, such as Tolstoy,
Thomas Hardy and Dickens, also used this structural technique.
Dying
in squalor like a Père Colmiche, and in pain from pneumonia like her
former mistress, Félicité is troubled by thoughts of “sin” and
sends for the priest. Whatever is this sin? Only the unlikely
suspicion that Fabu, the butcher’s boy, may have killed her parrot!
She asks for his forgiveness. This is a parody of classic deathbed
scenes, with a vengeance. Flaubert cannot leave his sardonic humour
alone.
The
stuffed parrot is now just a worm-eaten corpse with the stuffing
leaking out, and broken wings, all highly symbolic of Félicité’s
own condition. But being too blind to realise (blind in more than one
sense), she tenderly kisses the parrot’s “forehead” and presses
him against her cheek. Though she can neither see nor hear, she can
still feel touch and her imagination is still active. She visualises
the church procession outside her window “as clearly as if she had
been following it.”
This
last chapter, describing the death of Félicité, is to a large
extent still written from the main character’s own point of view –
we readers share her vision of the Parrot as Holy Ghost at the end –
but Flaubert also shows us the scene from the viewpoint of her
friend, Mère Simon, who knows that “one day she would have to go
the same way,” and so shall we; we share this uncomfortable
knowledge with both fictional characters. The village’s outdoor
altar or shrine is described in this chapter without irony, indeed as
something rather beautiful, as if Flaubert could not bring himself to
detract from the solemnity of the occasion by making fun of it... or
so we might assume, until the final paragraph.
Félicité
has lost the use of all her other senses but she can still smell, and
with her last breath she inhales in the scent of the incense from
outside “with a mystical, sensuous fervour.” Here, finally,
Flaubert is no longer pulling any punches; he speaks of this poor,
deluded servant woman as a mystic. Who is to say the chosen
vocabulary is inappropriate? Then, as if scoffing at his own
pretentiousness, he shocks us out of the sense of awe he has created
by adding, at the very end, “...she thought she could see, in the
opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.”
What
are we to think? In the following century, Bert Brecht was to work
the same trick in his plays, deliberately mocking the pathos of a
situation, employing what he called the Verfremdungseffekt
(Alienation Effect) to stop us becoming over sympathetic with his
characters, to shock us into being objective in our judgement of
them. Flaubert is a realist in his descriptions, a romantic idealist
too, however. He inserts these Brechtian, sardonic touches at the
very points where his prose might be in danger of slipping into
sentimentality. He does not always do this blatantly, the irony often
being very subtle, but the effect on his readers is that, as we read
about the characters he describes, we swing from admiration to
disgust, from pity to wry amusement. Besides being able to entertain
or intrigue us with this story of the eccentric old dear and her pet
parrot, he turns a very searching spotlight on the character of this
woman, presenting his subject from more than one perspective, and in
doing so he teaches us -- whether deliberately or not -- how to pay
closer attention to people we might know in the real world, above all
to humble souls like Félicité.
1. Actual dates are mentioned. The story having been
written in 1875, let us assume that Félicité’s death must take
place no later. Guessing from clues given in the text, Félicité
enters Mme Aubain's service in 1809 at the age of eighteen. Her life
could therefore be dated from, say, 1791 to 1874.
