The novel Sentimental Education, written in 1869, depicts the life and maturity of a young man, Frederic Moreau. This novel can be characterized as a bildungsroman portraying the story of a young man and his “life education” through adventures and travels. Broadly defined, the bildungsroman is “the novel of youth, the novel of education, of apprenticeship, of adolescence, of initiation, even the life-novel” (Buckley 4). Sentimental Education can be characterized as the bildungsroman because it is identified with the development of character from early adolescence to young adulthood, the period when the person works out questions of identity and career. The character of Frederic Moreau develops through the novel and changes at the end, influenced by new social values and norms acquired through adventures.
Sentimental Education can be seen as the bildungsroman because it portrays the education and ‘self-education’ of Frederic, which leads him to maturity and self-actualization. The learning and growth process of Frederic can be charted through its most characteristic feature, its elusiveness, alternations of insights, its sense of confusion and inconsequentiality. Flaubert’s character tries to find his way through a maze, detoured from where he wants to go; his mind divided in different directions, he attempts to find what others want of him, while he’s learning and growth process takes place against overwhelming obstacles. Meanwhile, lack of confidence and the need for self-assertion impede Frederic’s progress, even as his personal struggle to give expression to his creativity. Frederic recollects:
‘Do stop going on about your wretched “reality”. What does the word mean anyway? Some people see things black, others see them blue, and the mob sees them stupid! What could be less natural than Michelangelo, yet what could be more wonderful? All this concern for externals is the hallmark of our loathsome modern world, and if things go on, being like this art’ll become a sort of stale joke” (Flaubert 52).
This passage shows that Frederic is educated, accepting the need for social constraint. His particular road to self-knowledge leads him to self-realization, which reflects the structure of the bildungsroman. Frederic’s self becomes recognizable only after an arduous search and finds an identity that will enable him to act upon his discoveries.
Sentimental Education is the bildungsroman because it reflects the total growth process and cultivation of the self, which involves more than formal lessons or schooling. Through the character of Frederic, Flaubert depicts that the expectations in the bildungsroman loom importantly, even if more for the absence than for the palpable presence of education. Formal education was virtually non-existent, his education depending mainly on self-study and his own eager exertions.
Schooling, however, plays a major role for the male hero, whereby his steps are directed toward an eventual career goal. The stimulation of ideas and knowledge had to come through access to the male world. A distinction is made between diffused experience, on the one hand, and the conscious efforts, on the other, of the hero to acquire knowledge of the world both inside the schoolroom and outside in society. Educating himself to function in that society, the hero thus is taken into account as they contribute to his total growth process. Frederic describes his ideas: “To take him down a peg, Frédéric told him he had similar plans, and once he’d made sure that his future colleague had set his sights on the provinces, the showman declared he was at his service to take him around the clubs” (Flaubert 327).
The self-development of the main character is closely connected with life experience and love relations between Frederic and Madame Arnoux, Rosanette and Madame Dambreuse. These women play a major role in Frederic’s life, roles that perforce, take on romantic love, as well. Although, he terminates his affairs with Rosanette and Madame Dambreuse. The world developed by Flaubert is transformed into a universe against whose social and historical setting Frederic grows and develops.
Psychological strains undermined faith and are expressed by a new wave of factions and groups; in the air are new philosophical inquiries: social change and political struggle marked the world Frederic entered. Frederic does not change greatly, unable to be honest and truthful towards himself and other people. Thus his life experience creates new values and morals typical for society.
Inner directedness, as an element of the bildungsroman, is manifested in Frederic early in their work. Thus, in contrast to the traditional structure of the bildungsroman, Flaubert does not portray great changes in Frederic’s personality. The bildungsroman: ‘portrays the Bildung of the hero in its beginnings and growth to a certain stage of completeness” (Buckley 65). As Frederic matures, his inner direction will continue to help shape and form his personality and affect his whole development.
The two forces, inner and outer, often meet and come into conflict in the course of the hero’s quest in the form of societal and ideological influences. Through inner directedness, Frederic discovers again his allegiance to the individual, who always wins out in the conflicting debate of ideologies. His mandate finally is to safeguard his individuality which he always has seen as being threatened, since boyhood, whenever anyone expected him to conform to some notion he found alien.
Sexuality and sexual desires are a part of the maturity process and self-development. Flaubert, His love affair with Madame Arnoux, reveals his maturity and changes in personality. This is the juncture where Frederic’s inner directedness, too, leads him to discard some of the heavy luggage encumbering his quest. Flaubert’s actual depiction of Frederic’s search for an identity slowly develops in the area of male-female relationships as seen through Frederic’s eyes. Flaubert describes his inner state:
“Frédéric had been expecting to be thrown into raptures of delight, but in unfamiliar surroundings, passions wither and decay, and seeing Madame Arnoux in the circumstances different from those in which he had first known her, she seemed to him diminished, somehow vaguely degraded, in fact, to be no longer the same woman” (Flaubert 119).
The full impact of roles can best be appreciated in one of many scenes. Nonetheless, Frederic’s’ sexuality is a subtle presence in several stages of his development. Thus, in the end, Frédéric rejects his ideal love, Madame Arnoux, and accepts the fact that his life fails. To some extent, these negative feelings can be seen as self-development and search for self so important for the bildungsroman. Frederic does not, as other people see himself as a “sexual object.”
However, Flaubert gives some hints that in Frederic’s relationship with Madame Arnoux, that sexuality does play an important role. Moreau recognizes himself as a subject of desire; he supposes that his autonomy will always be enfolded in indeterminacy. Insofar as Frederic’s struggles with his beliefs and material desires affect his relations with others, clarify his understanding of himself, and reveal his awareness of social forms and institutions, of patriarchy, in particular, this becomes an area crucial to the formation of personality. Flaubert depicts Frederic as a dreamer: “He’d think up grotesque plans, such as taking her by surprise in the night, using false keys and drugs; anything seemed easier than having to face her disdain” (Flaubert 186).
Having followed the hero through his stages of self-development, his exertions in education, his testing of ideologies, and setting forth his goals, Flaubert tests each part against Frederic’s spiritual quest and philosophy of life and death. Frederic’s philosophical views and spiritual struggles are hard-won during the long process of his aesthetic and psychological growth. “’And suppose there was, anyway? When your loveliest dreams collapse, you have to make do with second best!” (Flaubert 291). Rather than passing through one major crisis, as occasionally might occur in a bildungsroman, Frederic’s journey and his rebellion against organized society occur through a series of mystical insight, revelation, and enlightenment.
In sum, the uniqueness’ of Flaubert approach is that he does not portray a positive experience of the main character but unveils that a negative experience can be seen as a source of self–development and self-formation. The novel depicts the learning experienced through ‘life’ based on a journey through confusion and self-doubt. The adventure of Frederic shows the conflict between individual desires and the demands of society.
At the end of the novel, this conflict is resolved when Frederic is coming to understand the need to live in a way that fulfils his personality. The term Bildung belongs to the main hero and defines a culture that is to become associated with introspectiveness and consciousness. Sentimental education rests upon certain thematic features describing the process of development and education of a single protagonist from childhood through adolescence, leaving him at the threshold of maturity. Sentimental Education is the bildungsroman in its form and the main stages of the character’s development.
The story of Frederic shows that new options for learning may present themselves as the adolescent reaches out into the world around him. Generally, the protagonist is shown in conflict with generations and with ‘educators’ within the community, especially as contact with the outside world is made.
Works Cited
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Flaubert, G. A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man. Oxford University Press, 2000.