SOURCE: Dugan, J. R. “Flaubert's Salammbô, A Study in Immobility.” Zeitschrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur 79, no. 3 (September 1969): 193-206.

In the following essay, Dugan analyzes the style, imagery, symbolism, and form of Salammbô, concentrating on the novel's rendering of aesthetic immobility.

Since the publication of Salammbô, critics have been faced with the difficulty of categorizing it. There is evidence from within the work to support any one of a number of points of view—a historical novel in the great tradition of Sir Walter Scott, a long prose poem with a markedly «Parnassian» flavour, or simply a novel in the most conventional sense of the word.

Any such interpretation is of course subjective in the final analysis, and in fact has very little meaning. The intention of the present study is not to label the book but to look in some detail at one aspect of...