The influences behind A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

1869

A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale)

Gustave Flaubert

Second Empire. France. Written in French.

Flaubert's 1869 novel follows Frédéric Moreau from 1840 through the 1848 Revolution and the coup of 1851, as his lifelong unconsummated love for Madame Arnoux and his drifting ambitions come to nothing. It turns the novel of a young man's education into a study of illusion, inertia and failure.

Where it came from

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 1857 follow this thread
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes 1605–1615
Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues), Honoré de Balzac 1837–1843 follow this thread
Volupté, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve 1834 follow this thread
René, François-René de Chateaubriand 1802 follow this thread

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1605–1615

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

Spanish Golden Age. Spain. Written in Spanish.

Novel of a country gentleman driven mad by chivalric romances who sets out as a knight errant with his squire Sancho Panza.

What it handed down

To A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) (1869)

Thematic kinship, well documented.

In a letter to Louise Colet of 1852 Flaubert said he found all his origins in Don Quixote, a book he knew by heart before he could read. Frédéric, like Quixote, lives through borrowed literary images and sees them repeatedly fail against the world; the novel is a quixotic story stripped of adventure.

To Madame Bovary

Thematic kinship, well documented.

Emma Bovary's ruin by novel-reading is a feminine, provincial reworking of Quixote's madness from chivalric romances. Critics have long called Emma a 'female Quixote', and Flaubert's stated debt to Cervantes dates from these years of composition.

To Waverley

Thematic kinship, probable.

Edward Waverley's head is filled with romances from undisciplined reading, and his entry into the Jacobite rising is partly a romantic delusion. Scott frames this as a gentler version of Quixote's mistaking of fiction for life.

Where it came from

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1554

Lazarillo de Tormes

Anonymous

Spanish Golden Age. Spain. Written in Spanish.

Short first-person narrative of a poor boy serving a series of masters; the first picaresque novel.

What it handed down

To Don Quixote (1605–1615)

Stylistic influence, probable.

The galley slave Ginés de Pasamonte boasts that his autobiography will surpass Lazarillo de Tormes. Cervantes absorbed the picaresque's low-life realism and episodic road structure into his parody of romance.

Where it came from

The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses), Apuleius c. 170 CE

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c. 170 CE

The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)

Apuleius

Roman Imperial. Roman North Africa. Written in Latin.

Comic first-person novel of Lucius, turned into an ass, who passes through a series of masters before restoration by Isis.

What it handed down

To Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)

Disputed link, conjectural.

Several scholars argue that Lazarillo's first-person account of a servant passing from master to master draws on Apuleius, available in Spanish translation from about 1513. Others see the resemblance as generic.

Where it came from

The line stops here: adapts a lost Greek 'Metamorphoses' of Lucius, known only through a later epitome.

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Where it came from

What it handed down

To A Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale) (1869)

To Madame Bovary

To Waverley

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Don Quixote (1605–1615)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)

Where it came from

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