Knowledge in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet

Abstract

Abstract This article considers late-nineteenth-century questioning of the progressive power of accumulated knowledge by examining two novels: Gustave Flaubert’s final, incomplete novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72). Few scholars have analysed Eliot and Flaubert comparatively. Indeed, there is a habit in criticism of regarding them these exact contemporaries as almost antithetical authors. The comparative analysis provided by this study shows that the authors share similar and complex preoccupations regarding the nature of accumulated knowledge and its efficacy. The article examines Bouvard and Pécuchet’s attempts to master various domains of knowledge and their contented relapse into copying alongside the failed scholarly and scientific endeavours of Eliot’s characters Brooke, Casaubon, and Lydgate. Eliot’s character Will Ladislaw, with his superficial approach to knowledge, is seen as the emblem of a progressive future. This study underlines the common ground between Flaubert and Eliot in their focus on the topic of accumulated knowledge whilst also examining the divergence in their responses to this theme, a divergence marked perhaps most significantly at the level of narrative voice.