Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert by Kathryn Oliver Mills (review)

Abstract

Kathryn Oliver Mills, Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. 200 pp. Scholarly and other professional achievements strengthen a faculty member's teaching and make The University of the South a vital intellectual community. Kathryn Mills has the skills to make significant contributions to her academic discipline as a scholar and critic. She has enjoyed several accomplishments in the area of scholarship during the past years. She made available her research by publishing articles and by attending conferences to gain favorable peer recognition within her discipline of nineteenth-century French literary studies. Most important, she completed a book entitled Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, from the University of Delaware Press. The book deals with these two authors' novelty and modernity, defined as a reconfiguration of the generic boundaries between poetry and prose, by bringing formal, thematic, and historical considerations to bear on Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and Gustave Flaubert's Trois contes, as well as by setting those works in the context of the authors' other works of literature and literary criticism. Kathryn Mills argues that the critical studies, which recognize that Baudelaire and Flaubert were at the crossroads of a traditional era and a modern one, emphasized endings in Les Fleurs du mal, Madame Bovary, L'Education sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pecuchet by defining these works with respect to the past. Such literary masterpieces have helped define modern poetry and the modern novel, but the technical innovations of these novels were deployed within the traditional genres of the novel and of poetry in verse. In other words, critics focus on the literary structures Baudelaire and Flaubert were looking back at, and moving away from, rather than on the new forms toward which they were moving. Kathryn Mills positions herself against a certain trend of critics who have defined Baudelaire and Flaubert's contributions to modernity as an innovative ability to modulate traditional forms in order to express the inadequacy of those forms in the face of modern times. She claims that both writers' interest in finding a new literary form ultimately went further than variations on standard literary structures. Changing times and thoughts both elicit and require new literary forms. Le Spleen de Paris and Trois contes, for a variety of reasons, have been less represented in general discussions of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and Kathryn Mills demonstrates that the extent to which Baudelaire's prose poems and Flaubert's poetic tales diverge from the rest of their works is also the extent to which these works are particularly striking embodiments of their authors' artistic ideals. For these two seminal authors, the language of modernity involves an exploration of the boundaries between poetry and prose. Kathryn Mills's compelling argument even goes further, daring to venture that Baudelaire and Flaubert launched what amounted to a formal revolution--hence her title. Each writer advocated a revolution in form. For both writers, formal revolution turned around the heightened importance of prose. Baudelaire and Flaubert were both born in 1821, and Kathryn Mills argues that Flaubert is Baudelaire's counterpoint in the medium of prose. They had echoing sentiments about the need for a new, modern form in a changing day and age. The book is divided into six chapters. The first four are on Baudelaire, and the last two, on Flaubert. In the first chapter, Kathryn Mills launches her thesis and explains that Baudelaire's last Voyage in verse at the end of Les Fleurs du trial fails to discover something new on practical, existential, and literary levels. In her second chapter, she establishes new and definitive links between Constantin Guys and Joseph de Maistre's works and Baudelaire's Le Peintre de la vie mode me, whose composition and publication not only coincided chronologically with Baudelaire's interest in these works, but occurred in parallel with the poet's transition to prose poetry. …