Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) has long been credited with revitalizing French literature by introducing a scathing realism that brought the Romantic era to its close.  More recently, with the advent of feminism, Flaubert is acknowledged for defining the curtain of alienation drawn between men and women, a motif that will be picked up by the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth-century and the Surrealists of the early twentieth.  The fact that one writer’s creative pessimism and artistic authority could impact so definitively on art history proves the author’s ability to endure well beyond the medium of words.
                       

    At a time when many important relations were being established between nineteenth-century literary and visual aesthetics, the artists and writers of French Realism sought to blur the boundary between literature and art.  This was most often pronounced among the writers and artists who sought as their goals the project of Modernism.  Their movement away from the Académie spurred a revolutionary union of artist and writer, a union in which art historian Linda Nochlin finds the alignment of such writers as Baudelaire, the Goncourts, and Flaubert with the artists Daumier, Courbet, and Manet in promoting the social issues of the day. Nochlin reminds us that it is Flaubert, through such characters as Dussardier, in Sentimental Education, who best represents the “selfless and unselfconscious leftist worker.”[1] Then too, the cynical tone he uses to portray the French bourgeoisie in Bouvard and Pécuchet and Madame Bovary, defines Flaubert as the leading left-bohemian of his day.  I would like to pick up where Nochlin left off by adding that Flaubert’s characters were not only social revolutionaries but libertines who demolished conventions of sex and gender in a fashion informing some of the most vital work of the last two centuries. 

We should begin by acknowledging that Flaubert denounced the notion that any of his works were Realist. “I hate what is conventionally called realism,” he remarked, “though people regard me as one of its high priests.”[2] Writing to Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant, “Do not speak to me of realism. I am fed up with it. What empty nonsense,”[3] his attitude toward realism is worth a closer, more critical eye.  For, arguably, a good portion of Flaubert’s writing is as close to the Symbolists and Surrealists after him as it is to the Realists.  Rightly, his body of work can be divided into two camps: the social realism of Sentimental Education, Madame Bovary, Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Surrealistic flights of imagination found in The Temptation of Saint Antony, Salammbô and Herodias.  The underlying commonality shared among the main characters in these six works is Flaubert’s quest to portray a more general truth about the gender imagery of male and female.

Although The Temptation of Saint Antony, Salammbô and Herodias are here considered for their imagery and influence on the French Symbolist artists like Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, Flaubert’s literary and visual formalism can as well be seen at play in the photography of Man Ray and André Kertész, due in no small part to the impact that Symbolism had on the Surrealists.   For this to become clear, we need only to look briefly at Flaubert’s writing.