SOURCE: Stipa, Ingrid. “Desire, Repetition and the Imaginary in Flaubert's ‘Un Cœur simple.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31:4 (fall 1994): 617-26.

In the following essay, Stipa explores the literary symbolism underlying the serving-maid's obsessive infatuation with a dead parrot in Flaubert's story “Un Cœur simple.”

While the writer's ironic perspective hovers incessantly above the story of “Un Cœur simple,” the carefully crafted narrative protects Felicite from its potentially venomous bite. A pattern of incremental repetitions played out within a network of strategic semiotic moves prepares the most important event of Felicite's life, her love relationship to a parrot. The carefully crafted structure combines with a mode of cognition Lacan would call “Imaginary” in that it allows the protagonist to process reality primarily through images, visual projections, and material objects rather than through a symbolic system based on arbitrary linguistic signs. Together they facilitate the transformation of Loulou...