Chapter 4 - Flaubert’s Lyric Happiness (L’éducation sentimentale, Un coeur simple)

Summary

Ch 4: Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale and Un coeur simple are the subject of the fourth chapter, which examines the various ways in which the lyric representation of landscape can convey human happiness: an activity of free movement, as well as the creation of intimacy through spatial effects. This is a way of placing lyric effects outside the self, making it available to a reader who can reenact the imagining of happiness. This occurs despite Flaubert’s famous pessimism. Realism, which is so often connected to this attitude, achieves a kind of guide to how we can think of happiness.