Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

For instance, Madame Bovary was put to trial on a charge of immorality, for the
authorities feared that the reader would be influenced by the main character’s incestuous
and destructive behavior. Although there had been precedents, such as the wave of
suicides that accompanied the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther,
which could have justified the course of action taken by the authorities, for most readers,
it seems rather perplexing that the authorities would actually fear that someone would be
influenced by a heroine who was so apparently foolish and who ended up putting an end
to her days in ghastly circumstances. Yet what the officials saw in the novel at the time
was that the character was never actually condemned throughout the story, that the
narrator, and the author, sympathized with the heroine by making her the object of
detailed and elaborate descriptions without once flatly saying that she was wrong and
deserved the end she administered to herself. What the authorities of the Second Empire
saw in the absence of moral voice in the narrative was a truthfulness that some may find
offensive, a “tell it like it is” approach that they believed was uncanny and could be
unsettling for those who would not be prepared for it. Ironically, as Mario Vargas Llosa
points out, “the sinister Puritanism imposed by men of the cloth in the Second Empire
brought before the bar of justice the two great books of that era: Madame Bovary and Les
Fleurs du Mal” (22). What Baudelaire and Flaubert also have in common is that they
were later considered to be the precursors of the Modernist sensibility in French
literature: ensuing generations of critics believed that their aesthetic approaches, the very
transgressions for which they were put to trial (their respective “obscenity” and
“immorality” regarding their treatment of sex taboos), were actually a rejection of the
prevailing aesthetics of Romanticism and the moral codes inherited from the
68