Flower Poetics in the Works of Gustave Flaubert by Gustave Flaubert , Paul Andrew Tipper (review)

Abstract

252 Reviews his treatment of Un debut dans la vie. It was Balzac who warned that the arrival of the locomotive would threaten many traditional businesses, 'et surtout celles qui concernent les differentsmodes de transport en usage pour les environs de Paris' (La Comedie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976-81), 1, 731). This threat was yet to materialize in the 1820s and 1830s, however, when the fictional Pierrotin rises from being a simple driver to become the owner of a stagecoach company. Ostensibly his success can be attributed to the acquisition of a faster coach. What underpins this achievement, though, is his willingness to protect another instrument of communication, a sales contract with which the shrewd comte de Serisy hopes to purchase a piece of farmland. The re? maining chapters explore the role of the English thoroughbred horse and the optical telegraph in Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen, and the skill for overland and water travel displayed by Edmond Dantes, in Le Comte de Monte-Christo. The concluding sec? tion steams onwards to the depiction of railway travel in Zola's La Bete humaine, in which the speed of a train so disturbs the character Jacques Lantier that he is left to wonder whether the murder he witnesses from outside the onrushing carriages is real or imaginary. A short bibliography and index complete a volume that is cogently argued and well presented throughout, despite a slight imbalance of material created by Bell's obvious, and perhaps unavoidable, affection for the Balzacian texts. The technical background has also been carefully researched, furtherenhancing the value of a book that both private scholars and university libraries will wish to acquire. University of Bristol Andrew Watts Flower Poetics in the Works of Gustave Flaubert. By Paul Andrew Tipper. (Stu? dies in French Literature, 63) Lampeter, Lewiston, NY, and Queenston, Ont.: Mellen. 2003. vi + 37ipp. ?74.95; $119.95. ISBN 0-7734-6728-9. In this patient work Paul Tipper brings together his knowledge of nineteenth-century flower lore, his love of Flaubert's stylistic artistry,and his familiarity with Flaubert scholarship ofthe past century,reachingback to Demorest's 1931 L'Expression figuree et symbolique dans I'oeuvre de Flaubert, to analyse chronologically Flaubert's use of floral imagery in his prose fiction. He begins with the youthful writing and takes us through Bouvard et Pecuchet, lingering longest with Madame Bovary. The method of his study is partly a quantitative taxonomy and partly a qualitative evaluation. Quantitatively, Tipper counts the number of flower references in each work, calculates a per-page average, considers whether the flowers are generic or typed, what the significant variables are, such as the flowers' colour, scent, season, and finally,whether the flowers' references are literal, figurative,artificial,or fantasized. Their absence in certain parts of a text is considered to be as motivated as their presence in other parts. In all of the works that he studies, Tipper counts an aggregate of six hundred flower references and ninety types of flowers,with roses and violets being the most frequent types, and red and blue the most frequent floral colours. The qualitative aspect of Tipper's method concerns the contexts of the floral im? agery. In close readings, he evaluates flowerimagery's contribution to the construction of character, to the meta-commentary on character, to the thematic dialectic of the work, and hence to its philosophical coherence. Where helpful or merely pleasurable, Tipper includes forthe reader the extra-textual, conventional connotations of various flowers as documented in flower-language dictionaries popular in Flaubert's time. The chronological approach enables Tipper to trace in Flaubert's writing craftever greater use of flower references over time and an increasingly large repertory of kinds of flower. In addition he finds increasingly private over conventional connotations MLR, 101.1, 2006 253 given to the flowers, and for increasingly ironic and deflationary as opposed to senti? mental, romantic purposes. While itis a well-known feature of Flaubert's writing style that authorial voice gives way to the language of objects, and that Flaubert uses these objects both mimetically, to produce the effectofthe real, and symbolically, to provide...