Formative Essays. FR109
1.) ‘It is the tense alternation of feeling, of pathos and irony, of intimacy and estrangement, that makes up the sweet and sour pleasure of Madame Bovary’. (Michèle Roberts) Do you agree with this statement about the ambiguities of Flaubert’s novel? Justify your answer with reference to the text.
2.) ‘But I no more wanted this book to be an accusation than an apology. I refrained from passing judgement’. Discuss the ramifications of this statement, from the author’s preface to Gide’s L’Immoraliste, on your reading of the text.
3.)‘In time, creative and destructive, Proust’s narrator finds himself as an artist’. Discuss with reference to Combray.
4.) In what ways do you consider the narrative structure of La Nausée to be important in conveying the philosophical ideas contained in Sartre’s novel?
5.) Explore the ways in which two or more of the texts you have studied for this module use the technique of narrative voice.
6.) Write a commentary on the following excerpt from Madame Bovary:
And, though full of mockery for the show, Rodolphe, to get about more freely, showed the gendarme his blue ticket, and even stopped now and then in front of some fine specimen that Madame Bovary scarcely appreciated. He realised this, and now began to make jokes about the ladies of Yonville and their way of dressing; he apologised for his own careless style. It was that mingling of the everyday and the exotic, which the vulgar, usually, take for the symptom of an eccentric existence, of unruly feeling, of the tyranny of art, always with a certain scorn for social conventions which they find seductive or exasperating. Thus, his cambric shirt with the frilly cuffs that puffed out over his grey linen waistcoat with the wind and his broad-striped trousers that showed off his nankeen boots at the ankle, with the gaiters of patent leather. They were so well-polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled in them through the horse dung, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his straw hat at an angle.
- Anyway, he added, when you live in the country…
- There’s no point, said Emma
- Very true! replied Rodolphe. To think that not one of these good people is capable of appreciating so much as the style of a coat.
And they talked about the mediocrity of all things provincial, of the lives it stifled, the illusions that perished there.
- That’s why, said Rodolphe, I’m sinking into a miserable…
- You! she said in astonishment. But I thought you were very cheerful?
- Oh yes, so I seem, because with other people I have learned how to hide my face with a joker’s mask; and yet, how many a time, when I see a cemetery, in the moonlight, have I asked myself if I’d not be better off side by side with those laid to rest…