Flaubert and Don Quijote

This book tells the story of how Flaubert's admiration for Cervantes' Don Quijote unfolded, and how profoundly it shaped and influenced Flaubert's ambition and his approach to all his major works, beginning with his breakthrough novel Madame Bovary. It thus fills a major gap in the history of the novel and explores, for the first time, just what Flaubert meant when he said, while writing Bovary: "Je retrouve toutes mes origins dans le livre que je savais par coeur avant de savoir lire, Don Quichotte" (I can trace all my origins back to the book I knew by heart... ). Several cultural and personal factors converged to establish the prominent place of Don Quijote in Flaubert's imagination, and these are dealt with in depth in the book. But it is the profound parallels between the two novels that clearly illustrate how Don Quijote permeates Madame Bovary in both subject and approach. One such parallel is Alonso Quijano and Emma Bovary's desire to imitate fiction, which reflects a kind of literary madness in which the attempt to impose the narrative conventions of romances on life only leads hero and heroine, respectively, to destruction, disappointment, and ultimately death. The borrowings and the transpositions are substantial and endless; and indeed the influence did not stop at Bovary, for Flaubert's later grands romans, including the rewritten Education Sentimentale and Bouvard et Pecuchet, also display the quixotic hallmark. This study situates each author in his respective historical and aesthetic context, and provides key examples from Don Quijote and Madame Bovary, Flaubert's Correspondence, as well as his earlier novels. Flaubert's letters and novels show how the French author penetrated deeply into Cervantes' novelistic approach and how his relationship to Don Quijote directly shaped his success at the crux of his career.

"A fascinating, authoritative study of Don Quijote and Madame Bovary, written with precision and clarity. Richly defining their cultural, social, and historical contexts, professor Fox develops a highly intelligent analysis of Cervantes' influence on Flaubert's novel and offers fresh insight concerning their differences, especially the contrast between the authors' conceptions of their central characters." --David Kleinbard, professor emeritus, City University of New York

Soledad Fox is professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Williams College. She has published articles and lectured on Spanish and French literature, and on exile and autobiographical writing. She spent 2004 as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar researching the life of Constancia de la Mora. This study combines personal documents (unpublished letters, memoirs, and photos) and official government files (from the FBI and the Comintern), and brings together previously unavailable archival materials.