Madame Bovary and The House of the Spirits

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Recommended: Madame Bovary Analysis

Gustave Flaubert of Madame Bovary and Isabel Allende of The House of the Spirits both manipulate elements of genre, dialogue, and style in relation to suspense in order to comment on the romantic ideas of destiny and fate. While they both use these techniques in relation to suspense and anticipation, Flaubert minimizes the importance of fate while Allende seeks to promote it. Flaubert builds suspense for a large amount of time and suddenly destroys or ignores it, but Allende destroys anticipation almost immediately. The realist elements, the ironic and misleading dialogue, and the contradictory syntax in Madame Bovary allow Flaubert to build suspense and then remove it to downplay the importance of fate. On the other hand, the magic realism techniques, the prophetic dialogue and narration, and the flat diction throughout The House of the Spirits allow Allende to idealize the idea of destiny.

Flaubert’s realism and Allende’s magic realism techniques allow the authors to both create and destroy suspense in order to mirror their respective attitudes towards fate. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert consistently builds anticipation with the extreme detail common to the realist genre. After building up the suspense to an almost unbearable intensity, he ends the section with a flat statement that destroys any suspense in an ultimately anticlimactic way. These endings frustrate the reader, but also mirror Emma’s journey and her romantic ideals. Flaubert parallels the plot and its implications on the idea of fate with detail. Emma and Leon, when first flirting, go to the house of the nurse for Berthe, but Flaubert describes the hedges on the way there in excruciating detail: “They were in bloom, and so were the speedwells, eglantines, thistles...

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...adding on extraneous information because since the events are already fated to happen, there is no point in further complicating matters.

Overall, both Gustave Flaubert and Isabel Allende use their specific genres, their characters’ dialogue and narration, and their writing style to promote their feelings towards destiny. Flaubert, unfailingly anti-fate, believes that the idea of something being destined to happen is silly and goes along with the bourgeois he hates so much. Allende, his exact opposite, judges that fate is an important part of life and should not be muddied up with anything other than what is destined to occur. Even though Flaubert and Allende have differing views on whether fate should be minimized or promoted, they both use the theme of suspense or anticipation in addition to the literary techniques to fully emphasize their beliefs on destiny.

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