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    A Study Guide for Gustave Flaubert's "Simple Heart"
    A Study Guide for Gustave Flaubert's "Simple Heart"
    A Study Guide for Gustave Flaubert's "Simple Heart"
    Ebook36 pages25 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gustave Flaubert's "Simple Heart"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gustave Flaubert's "Simple Heart," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 6, 2016
    ISBN9781535833172
    A Study Guide for Gustave Flaubert's "Simple Heart"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Gustave Flaubert's "Simple Heart" - Gale

      2

      A Simple Heart

      Gustave Flaubert

      1877

      Introduction

      A Simple Heart (Un Coeur Simple), by French writer Gustave Flaubert, is one of the stories in his Three Tales (Trois Coxites), published in 1877. It received admiring reviews at the time and has continued to be second only to his novel Madame Bovary (1857) in recognition and acclaim.

      Originally entitled Le Perroquet (The Parrot), A Simple Heart is the story of one woman’s apparently fruitless existence. The protagonist, a hardworking, good-hearted, poor and uneducated woman named Félicité, is said to have been modeled after a maid employed by Flaubert’s family during his childhood, a much beloved woman of tremendous character. The story is unusual among the author’s writings because it is about goodness. In this story of a simple housemaid’s life and death, the reader is invited to view a world of boundless, if not reciprocated, love and spirit. Félicité, a woman of simple mind and devoted heart, suffers tremendous loss but continues to her last breath to love unconditionally. Some critics have suggested that Félicité’s apparently meaningless life and misplaced worship of the parrot, Loulou—whom she adores and whom she imagines, in her dying moment, to be an incarnation of the Holy Ghost—reflect Flaubert’s melancholy and disillusionment with life and with organized religion, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. Most critics agree that this is a poignant account of a sweet, simple, and unrewarded life, one which may have been happy precisely because it was unexamined. It does not matter that Félicité may have misinterpreted or simply not interpreted many of the events in her life: she dies smiling, and thus lives up to her name to the last.

      Author Biography

      Much has been made of the relationship between Flaubert’s life and his depiction of the servant in A Simple Heart. There are several notable parallels. During the time Flaubert was writing the story, he suffered some of the greatest loss and depression of his life. His friend and fellow writer George Sand, for whom he undertook the story, died before it was finished, and Flaubert’s mistress, the poet Louise Colet,

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