Cette stratégie narrative est notamment manifeste dans un passage capital pour tout traitement de la question du genre dans L’éducation sentimentale. Cet article soutient que dans L’éducation sentimentale, par le biais d’une confrontation avec ce qu’il appelle «l’idée de la prostitution», Flaubert choisit le commerce sexuel comme lieu privilégié pour décrire cette crise de la mémoire. Rosanette’s memory scene offers us a unique female perspective on sexual commodification and serves as a remarkable example of counter-discourse in a novel that is otherwise dominated by male-gendered experiences of memory.įlaubert croyait qu’une crise de la mémoire, particulièrement remarquable autour de la période de la Révolution de 1848, fut le fléau de sa génération. In the process, it contests L’éducation sentimentale’s famous conclusion where the two main male characters, Frédéric and Deslauriers, reflect on their lives in general and on their dealings with prostitutes in particular. This narrative of a little girl’s image-driven experience amounts to a rare moment of self-reflexivity in the novel.

There Rosanette, one of the two main female characters, tells the story of how she was sold into prostitution by her family as a child. Such a strategy is notably discernable in a scene that is crucial for the treatment of gender in the novel. The essay argues that, in the context of confronting what he refers to as the “idea of prostitution,” Flaubert chose sexual commodification as the privileged locus to portray that crisis of memory in L’éducation sentimentale. Flaubert believed that a crisis of memory, which was particularly acute during the period of the Revolution of 1848, plagued his generation.

L education sentimentale