SOURCE: Wing, Nathaniel. “Reading Simplicity: Flaubert's ‘Un Coeur simple.’” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 21, nos. 1-2 (fall-winter 1992-1993): 88-101.

In the following essay, Wing explores Félicité's metonymic relationship to the world in “Un Coeur simple.”

Cen'est pas une petite affaire que d'être simple.”

—Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 20 Sept, 1851

It has become commonplace in modern readings of Flaubert to observe that the protagonists of his texts are themselves readers, represented as interpreters of the world of the fiction and that the realization of their desires depends upon the ability to understand and manipulate the codes that constitute the intelligible world. From Emma Bovary, whose sensibility and understanding have been formed by the stereotypes of Romantic literature, to the minor characters of L'Education sentimentale, whose intelligence is represented as a Babel of borrowed nineteenth century aesthetic and political theories, to the mythic figures of Salammbô and Mathô, who...