Which of Gustave Flaubert's books teaches the most about technique?

Start with Madame Bovary, which Lubbock treated as the fixed pole of technical criticism, because its mixed method is visible on the page: a woman's limited vision governs the book while a sharper intelligence quietly supplies what she cannot see. Read Sentimental Education next. It has the walking observer and the detail that arrives at two speeds at once. A Simple Heart is the short course in economy, since it builds a whole life out of a barometer, a parrot and a handful of rooms. Salammbo belongs on the list as the cautionary case. Read forty pages of it and you will feel what happens when the search for the exact word outlasts the story's need to move.

How does free indirect style create irony?

There are three ways to put a thought on the page. Quoted thought sets it in speech marks. Reported thought flags it with a tag such as he thought. Free indirect style drops the flag, so the narration keeps its third-person grammar while it takes on the character's own words and priorities. The irony arrives with the missing flag, because you now see through a character's eyes while also seeing more than those eyes can. Wood argues that this is one workable definition of dramatic irony, which explains why the technique dies the moment a writer sneers. Mockery tells a reader where to stand. The value of the device lies in leaving that choice to the reader.

Why does Gustave Flaubert's prose feel objective when it is clearly judging?

Booth separated three things Flaubert had bundled together. Neutrality is unavailable, since rejecting one scale of value implies another. Impartiality is something Madame Bovary does not practise. Impassibilite is a temperament, with no necessary link to any technique at all. What produces the effect on the page is the calm of the narrating voice combined with judgment relocated into structure, into what gets shown, what gets repeated, and where the emphasis falls in a sentence. Wood adds the paradox that keeps the whole thing honest. The author who wanted to be invisible wrote the most conspicuous sentences of his century, and his fingerprints are traceable on every page even where they are not visible.

How does Gustave Flaubert hold tension in a novel where little happens?

By making consequence arithmetical rather than dramatic. Lheureux the draper sells Emma goods on credit and renews her notes, and the reader watches a total grow that she has stopped watching, so each new purchase reads as a countdown. Around that Flaubert stages the few scenes where hope is allowed to act: Homais talks Charles into operating on the stable boy's club foot, the leg is lost, and the family's one chance of standing higher is spent. The tension comes from a pattern the reader extrapolates faster than the characters do. You do not need a threat. You need a trajectory the reader can see and the character cannot.

Can you use Gustave Flaubert's methods in a plain modern voice?

Yes, and the sentence music is the part that will not transfer. His rhythms are French, built on a tense that fuses habit and event, and Vargas Llosa's advice about writers you love is to copy the discipline and leave the cadences alone. What travels is everything structural: the withheld interior, the two braided registers, the one word that belongs to the character, the flat close. Journalism and film took the two-speed detail long ago. They use it in the plainest prose available. Test any of these in a page of your own flattest diction. If the effect survives without ornament, you took the method rather than the paint.

Why is Madame Bovary called the beginning of modern narration?

Four habits that now look like the nature of prose arrived together in it. Visual noticing carries the argument. Composure holds under material that invites sentiment. The narrator withdraws from commentary the way a good servant leaves a room. Good and bad get weighed by placement rather than by announcement. You can find some of them in Defoe or Austen or Balzac. Wood's formula for the split is that there is a time before Flaubert and a time after him, and Nabokov drew the line of descent bluntly by saying that without Flaubert there would have been no Proust in France and no Joyce in Ireland.

Fiction

Gustave FlaubertWriting Style

Born 12/12/1821 – Died 5/8/1880

One exact detail per beat. The truth arrives by inference rather than by statement.

Write like Gustave Flaubert

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Gustave Flaubert: voice, themes, and technique.

A closed cab circles Rouen for an afternoon. Emma and Leon are inside it. Flaubert stays out on the street. He gives you the driver's growing bewilderment, the sweating horses, the same streets for the second time, and at last a bare hand that comes out under the blind and scatters torn paper over a field of clover, and no sentence reports what either passenger feels. The whole method fits in that scene. The judgment is in the arrangement.

His prose runs on selection under pressure. He chooses the object that carries a social fact and sets it where a reader trips over it, then keeps the narrator's opinion out of the sentence so the verdict arrives as the reader's own. Emma's dancing slippers come back from the ball at Vaubyessard yellowed with wax from the floor. The book declines to gloss it.

The range is wider than the reputation. Madame Bovary runs a mixed method, since Emma's vision has to govern the book while a sharper eye than hers supplies the town she could not have described. Sentimental Education hands the work to Frederic, a young man with time to walk and look. Most third-person novels have borrowed that posture since. A Simple Heart spends its whole economy on an ageing servant and her stuffed parrot. Nothing in it strains for pathos.

What separates him from the other great realists of his century is not the quality of the noticing. Balzac notices in bulk. Flaubert tunes the distance between reader and character clause by clause, deciding at every turn how much sympathy you are allowed and how much you have to earn for yourself, and that dial is the thing worth stealing from him.

How to Write Like Gustave Flaubert

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Gustave Flaubert.

1
Decide what your narrator will refuse to know
Pick one thing the narration will not report in your next scene: a motive, a feeling, a decision. Write it from outside, using only what a bystander on the pavement could see and hear. That is how the cab was written through Rouen. Hand it to one reader. Ask them what the character wanted. If they can answer, the withholding works and you can leave it alone. If they cannot, resist the urge to explain, add one placed object where the scene turns, and put the page in front of a second reader.
2
Braid the official voice against the private one
Find a scene where somebody wants something badly and set a public performance beside it: a ceremony, a staff meeting, a sales pitch, a school assembly. Alternate the two in short strips, close enough that phrases from each land on top of each other. Flaubert's fair does it twice over, between the square and the chamber and between two vocabularies of cliche. Test the braid by covering one strand. Sarcasm or sentiment on its own is the sign that the braid was holding both in check.
3
Plant one word that belongs to the character
Write a paragraph of third-person narration about somebody who is deceiving themselves, then change a single word to one that only they would use. James Wood's example is a man who watches an orchestra through stupid tears. Stupid is the watcher's embarrassment at his own crying rather than the author calling him a fool, and a reader cannot cleanly assign the word to either of them. That undecidability is the effect. One such word per paragraph is enough. Past the second one, the character starts to read as a target rather than a person.
4
Give the paragraph two clocks
Write down six details from a place your character moves through in the scene you are drafting. Mark each one as habitual or one-off. Rewrite so both kinds arrive in one glance, and close on the one-off, stated flatly. This is the engine behind the revolution scenes in Sentimental Education, and behind most war reporting written since, from Stephen Crane to the Dunkirk pages of Atonement. Keep the sentence that names the one-off fact short. The length of that sentence tells the reader how much emotion the scene has earned.
5
Read it aloud at volume, then cut what only sounds good
Flaubert shouted his sentences in an avenue near the house at Croisset, loud enough that the avenue ended up named after the shouting, and he let his ear rule on whether sound and sense agreed. Do it at whatever volume your household tolerates. Mark the places where the mouth enjoys itself more than the meaning requires. Cut there first. One warning comes attached to the habit. Salammbo is the book he produced when the hunt for exactness outlasted the story, and Ursula Le Guin described that novel as choked to death by words.

Gustave Flaubert's Writing Style

Breakdown of Gustave Flaubert's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Two clocks run inside one Flaubert sentence. A long clause gathers perception, then a short one names a fact and stops. In the Latin Quarter walk in Sentimental Education, the women behind their bars cannot be yawning for as long as the washing quivers or the newspapers lie unread, and he smooths the recurrent and the momentary together anyway, as though a single eye had caught them in one look. His French helped him, since the imperfect past carries habitual and one-off action at the same time, a point Proust singled out and Nabokov prized. The same build carries his worst news. When the fighting reaches Paris the Seine flows on, the sky stays blue, birds sing in the Tuileries, and then Frederic feels something soft underfoot and it is a sergeant's hand. The syntax refuses to raise its voice. Copy the shape rather than the ornament. Gather for as long as you like, then name the fact, and keep the naming shorter than the gathering.

Vocabulary Complexity

His diction is a measuring instrument for rank. Charles Bovary walks into the first chapter under a cap built from too many borrowed parts, a hat that cannot decide which kind of hat it is, and the paragraph convicts him of a class position before he has said anything. Flaubert also lets his characters borrow their language from print, and he leaves the loan visible. Homais the pharmacist talks like a trade circular. Rodolphe courts Emma in the stock phrases of the romances she has been reading since the convent. For a farewell letter he raids a box of old ones and drops water on the page. The drop counterfeits a tear. The mot juste habit was about fit rather than finery, since one word had to hold register, rhythm and implication together, which is why a synonym that shifted a sentence's social class was no synonym at all. Flannery O'Connor kept pointing at his list slippers on clerks, a detail small enough to sound accidental and exact enough to make a provincial town exist.

Tone

Cold is the wrong word. Flaubert spares Emma nothing, not the debts, not the taste, not the death, and he still forbids you the comfort of feeling superior to her wanting. Wayne Booth stated the imbalance plainly. Madame Bovary, he wrote, is unfair to almost everyone in the book except Emma herself. The unfairness is deliberate work, because sympathy in this prose is rationed and pointed somewhere. A Simple Heart puts the same ration on a servant whose life contains almost nothing. The page declines to invite a smile at her expense. Then look at the last page of Madame Bovary. Two people the book has followed are dead, Berthe has been sent to work in a cotton mill, Homais has his decoration, and the flat delivery of those last two facts is as close to a verdict as you will get.

Pacing

Percy Lubbock counted only a handful of fully dramatised scenes in the whole of Madame Bovary. The ball, the agricultural show, the cathedral, the deathbed. What lies between them is picture, Emma's experience reflected and compressed for pages at a time. The scenes are placed to affirm the structural lines of the story. That ratio is the lesson. Years go by in a clause once the pattern is set, and an afternoon takes a chapter when an illusion is being made or broken. Nabokov noticed the joins too. Dickens moves from one subject to the next between chapters, which gives the reader a staircase. Flaubert moves inside the chapter, so a reader feels waves instead of steps and stops noticing where summary ends and scene begins. Slow is not the same as still. The Rouen cathedral scene stalls on purpose, with a beadle marching Leon and Emma past tombs while Leon works at steering her towards the door, and the postponement does the work that event does elsewhere.

Dialogue Style

His characters rarely say what they mean. Many of them have nothing of their own to say. The agricultural show in part two of Madame Bovary is the scene to study first. Down in the square there are prizes for manure and for an old farm servant's lifetime of work, up in the council chamber Rodolphe murmurs his seduction, and the councillor's official platitudes and Rodolphe's romantic ones take turns drowning each other out. Neither strand would survive alone. The fair on its own curdles into sarcasm, the seduction on its own into paperback romance. Braided, each keeps the other plausible. Flaubert spent his working life collecting received phrases for a dictionary of accepted ideas, and his dialogue treats a cliche as evidence rather than filler, so a speech tells you which newspaper or pulpit or shop counter a character learned their inner life from.

Descriptive Approach

Roland Barthes went after one object in A Simple Heart, the barometer on Madame Aubain's wall, and read it as pure decor whose only message is that reality is present. The answer from Nuttall, which James Wood repeats in his own book, is the better one. The barometer asks whether it is not exactly the thing you would expect in exactly that house, and that question is a social fact rather than an atmosphere. Flaubert describes at that level throughout. He does not furnish a room. He picks the two or three things that locate its owner in a system of money and taste, then lets one of them return later under changed light. Wood's caution belongs here too, because the tradition Flaubert founded produced a great deal of decorative noticing. The working test is short. Can the object carry a different meaning on the second occasion a reader meets it?

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Gustave Flaubert uses across their work.

The composite object

Assemble one object out of too many parts. Let the last part be the tawdry one. Charles's cap in the opening chapter cannot decide which kind of hat it is, and the description sentences its owner before he speaks. Use it where you would otherwise state what somebody is. The difficulty is the order of the layers, which have to accumulate as though the narrator were merely being thorough, so a reader feels the object turn ridiculous without being told that it has.

The object that returns under new light

Choose one physical thing, then bring it back two or three times over the length of the book, altered only by what has happened in between. The wax on Emma's slippers is aspiration. Rodolphe's box of old letters is a filing system for previous women. The blind beggar from the Rouen road returns under her deathbed window. This carries development that would otherwise need a paragraph of reflection. It also breaks easily, since a thing that returns five or six times announces itself as a symbol, and at that moment the reader stops believing in the room and starts reading a diagram.

The reliable set piece

One passage of straight authority calibrates the irony everywhere else. Booth's example is the portrait of Doctor Lariviere, who arrives late in Madame Bovary and is drawn without a trace of mockery, so his reading of that household becomes the measure the rest of the book is read against. A page like this works as a tuning fork. Writers who sustain irony for a whole book often skip it, then wonder why readers cannot locate them, and the repair is usually one paragraph, placed late, where the narration means exactly what it says.

The interrupted appointment

Put a functionary between two people who want to be alone. A beadle walks Leon and Emma around the tombs of Rouen cathedral while Leon works at steering her towards the door, and the delay supplies the tension the scene would otherwise buy with incident. The tool fits any scene where desire has to wait, so the interrupter can be a nurse, an usher, a landlord, a colleague with a story about their car. One condition makes it hard. The interrupter has to be doing their job well and in good faith, because a rude obstacle turns the scene into comedy and a stupid one turns it into farce.

The received phrase, copied exactly

Write the cliche the way your character would say it. Lay no improving hand on it. Homais talks in the prose of a trade journal, the councillor at the fair in the prose of the prefecture, Rodolphe in the prose of the novels his lover has read, and none of the three gets corrected. This is how a page carries stupidity without the author performing intelligence. The trap is the urge to add a wink. The moment narration signals that it knows better, a reader stops overhearing a person and starts watching a writer score a point.

The flat final fact

End on information instead of feeling. Madame Bovary closes on a line of small news about the pharmacist's decoration, after the deaths of the two people the book has followed. The placement is the argument. The world keeps doing its bookkeeping and the survivors collect their medals. Handled well, it leaves a reader holding a judgment they were not handed. Handled badly it reads as coyness, and the difference lies in whether the fact you close on is genuinely the next thing that would happen.

Literary Devices Gustave Flaubert Uses

Literary devices that define Gustave Flaubert's style.

Free indirect style

Narration slides into a character's own wording with no announcement, and a reader is left unsure whose word is on the page. Lubbock read the result in Madame Bovary as a mixed method, demanded by the subject. Emma's vision has to govern the book, her intelligence is too fitful to give an account of Yonville, so Flaubert's sharper wit supplies what she cannot while a hint of irony keeps the reader from being lost inside her head. That irony is also the licence. It lets him climb to a fuller view whenever he pleases and drop back again, with no scene break and no tag such as she thought. The obvious alternatives cost more than they save. A first-person confession locks the reader into one stance, and an explicit verdict from the narrator settles the question the page was built to keep open.

Braided episodes

Two episodes are set so close together that each one alters what the other means. Mario Vargas Llosa named the device after linked vessels whose fluid finds one level, and his model is the agricultural show, cut into alternating strips of prize-giving and seduction. Adjacency alone does not qualify. Some line of communication has to run between the strands, or the pages stay a collage. Nabokov called the same technique counterpoint. He then followed it forward from Flaubert into the synchronised episodes of Joyce's Ulysses. What Flaubert buys with the device is a verdict delivered with no judge in the room. The reader draws it and therefore trusts it.

Habitual detail passed off as dynamic

Recurrent facts and momentary ones go down together in one glance. The women behind the bars cannot yawn for as long as the laundry hangs, and Flaubert jams the two time signatures into a single sentence, so the details feel at once noticed and unimportant, seen out of the corner of an eye. Isherwood later polished the trick into a claim to be a camera with its shutter open, and the claim is a useful lie, because his street of sprawling children in tears cannot be weeping around the clock. This is the thing that makes a page feel like life rather than like a report. It is also the most artificial thing on the page.

The walking observer

Frederic walks the city with nothing urgent to do and the novel takes its material from his eye. Wood calls the figure the author's porous scout. It settles a problem that every third-person novel has to solve, which is whether the writer or the character is doing the noticing. Fuse them well and readers promote the character to the writer's eye. The price is a character who has to be plausibly interested in the whole street, which is why the type keeps arriving as a young man with time on his hands, from Baudelaire's stroller onward through the city novels that followed.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Gustave Flaubert.

Hunting the exact word until the book stops moving

Flaubert's revision habits are the most quoted thing about him, so imitation tends to start at the level of the word and stay there. He wrote the book that shows the cost. Le Guin's verdict on Salammbo is that it was choked to death by words, its author foundering in a quicksand made entirely of exact ones. The failure is structural rather than verbal, because precision without motion produces pages that are correct in every clause and inert as narrative, since nothing in them requires the next paragraph. Get the chain of scenes working first. Then hunt words where a reader's understanding has to turn.

Treating impersonality as absence

The credo about an author being present everywhere and visible nowhere gets read as an instruction to hold no opinions, which yields prose with no pressure in it. Booth is the useful corrective, because he shows Flaubert intruding constantly: an aside about a district that makes the worst cheeses in the region, a line about what Emma was incapable of understanding, a dip into her father's memories at the wedding that quietly appraises the marriage to come. The consequence for an imitator is what Booth called a confusion of distance. Readers who cannot locate a writer's judgment do not experience freedom. They experience a page they have no reason to trust.

Collecting details that go nowhere

Detail is the easiest part of this style to copy. It is also the easiest to get wrong. What comes out is what Wood calls a necklace of noticings, a procession of accurate observations that leaves a reader unable to see anything. Flaubert's own economy is tighter than his reputation suggests, since the objects carrying his major scenes could be counted on two hands. Before you keep an observation, ask two questions of it. Can it mean something else on its second appearance, and does it tell a reader anything about the person who owns it? An observation that fails both is furniture.

Copying the seam without controlling it

Free indirect style looks like a switch. Writers flip it and leave it on. Two failures follow. Either the narration takes the character's voice everywhere, which flattens irony into ventriloquism, or the author's own diction leaks into a mind that could not have produced it. Wood's exhibit for the second failure is Updike's teenage jihadist, who thinks of God as described in the ninth sura of his own scripture, a citation no devout schoolboy makes to himself. Flaubert keeps the seam moving. He opens it for a sentence and closes it for the next, and that opening and closing is what regulates how much sympathy a reader is granted from one moment to the next.

Books

Explore Gustave Flaubert's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Gustave Flaubert's writing style and techniques.

Which of Gustave Flaubert's books teaches the most about technique?: Start with Madame Bovary, which Lubbock treated as the fixed pole of technical criticism, because its mixed method is visible on the page: a woman's limited vision governs the book while a sharper intelligence quietly supplies what she cannot see. Read Sentimental Education next. It has the walking observer and the detail that arrives at two speeds at once. A Simple Heart is the short course in economy, since it builds a whole life out of a barometer, a parrot and a handful of rooms. Salammbo belongs on the list as the cautionary case. Read forty pages of it and you will feel what happens when the search for the exact word outlasts the story's need to move.
How does free indirect style create irony?: There are three ways to put a thought on the page. Quoted thought sets it in speech marks. Reported thought flags it with a tag such as he thought. Free indirect style drops the flag, so the narration keeps its third-person grammar while it takes on the character's own words and priorities. The irony arrives with the missing flag, because you now see through a character's eyes while also seeing more than those eyes can. Wood argues that this is one workable definition of dramatic irony, which explains why the technique dies the moment a writer sneers. Mockery tells a reader where to stand. The value of the device lies in leaving that choice to the reader.
Why does Gustave Flaubert's prose feel objective when it is clearly judging?: Booth separated three things Flaubert had bundled together. Neutrality is unavailable, since rejecting one scale of value implies another. Impartiality is something Madame Bovary does not practise. Impassibilite is a temperament, with no necessary link to any technique at all. What produces the effect on the page is the calm of the narrating voice combined with judgment relocated into structure, into what gets shown, what gets repeated, and where the emphasis falls in a sentence. Wood adds the paradox that keeps the whole thing honest. The author who wanted to be invisible wrote the most conspicuous sentences of his century, and his fingerprints are traceable on every page even where they are not visible.
How does Gustave Flaubert hold tension in a novel where little happens?: By making consequence arithmetical rather than dramatic. Lheureux the draper sells Emma goods on credit and renews her notes, and the reader watches a total grow that she has stopped watching, so each new purchase reads as a countdown. Around that Flaubert stages the few scenes where hope is allowed to act: Homais talks Charles into operating on the stable boy's club foot, the leg is lost, and the family's one chance of standing higher is spent. The tension comes from a pattern the reader extrapolates faster than the characters do. You do not need a threat. You need a trajectory the reader can see and the character cannot.
Can you use Gustave Flaubert's methods in a plain modern voice?: Yes, and the sentence music is the part that will not transfer. His rhythms are French, built on a tense that fuses habit and event, and Vargas Llosa's advice about writers you love is to copy the discipline and leave the cadences alone. What travels is everything structural: the withheld interior, the two braided registers, the one word that belongs to the character, the flat close. Journalism and film took the two-speed detail long ago. They use it in the plainest prose available. Test any of these in a page of your own flattest diction. If the effect survives without ornament, you took the method rather than the paint.
Why is Madame Bovary called the beginning of modern narration?: Four habits that now look like the nature of prose arrived together in it. Visual noticing carries the argument. Composure holds under material that invites sentiment. The narrator withdraws from commentary the way a good servant leaves a room. Good and bad get weighed by placement rather than by announcement. You can find some of them in Defoe or Austen or Balzac. Wood's formula for the split is that there is a time before Flaubert and a time after him, and Nabokov drew the line of descent bluntly by saying that without Flaubert there would have been no Proust in France and no Joyce in Ireland.

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