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Allusions
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Félicité’s Past:
Flaubert includes one flashback in “A Simple Heart.” After establishing in Chapter 1 that Félicité is a housemaid who works for Madame Aubain, Flaubert uses Chapter 2 to tell the story of how Félicité came to find herself in this role. Flaubert introduces the flashback in the following way:
Like other girls, she had once fallen in love.
Her father, a stonemason by trade, had been killed falling from some scaffolding. Following this, her mother died and her sisters went their separate ways. A farmer took her in and, even though she was still a very young girl, he would send her out into the fields to look after the cows.
This flashback is important to the plot of the narrative, as it establishes Félicité’s tragic background. As the narrator describes, Félicité “had once fallen in love.” What the flashback later reveals is that the man she fell in love with—and became engaged to—promptly abandoned her in order to marry a wealthy widow who could pay for him to avoid military conscription. This passage also notes how both of Félicité’s parents died when she was just a child, leading her to work for a farmer who exploited (and ultimately violently abused) her when she was still “a very young girl.”
The information in this flashback helps readers understand just how much tragedy Félicité has experienced in her relatively short life before the tragedies that take place later in the story (such as the deaths of Victor, Virginia, Madame Aubain, and her beloved parrot, Loulou). This is important because, as readers witness over the course of the story, Félicité does not lose her open-heartedness or joie de vivre. While many people would become cruel or lifeless under such challenging circumstances, Félicité chooses love time and time again. For this reason, Flaubert hints that she will be rewarded in the afterlife.
Related Themes:
