Flower Imagery in L'Éducation sentimentale

In several works, most notably in the Ecrits de Jeunesse and the definitive Education sentimentale, Flaubert exploits a conventional floral code that was widely acknowledged in the nineteenth century. He concentrates on the figurative impact of roses and violets especially, and to a lesser degree heather, box and camellias. Other flower types that appear in Flaubert's prose fiction – lilas, iris, hyacinthe, acacia, cactus and many more all have conventional significations in a floral code that was popularized by "Mme Charlotte de la Tour" in the early nineteenth century, and which Flaubert exploits in a muted fashion. The conventional signifieds of all these flowers are perpetuated by him, however, but their unobtrusiveness stems from his own private encoding of flowers (which always corroborates traditional symbolism) that is effected by a structural craftsmanship, establishing parallels and oppositions between various flowers in a highly poeticized manner, so deflecting from conventional codes and foregrounding, rather, his own "private" textual floral poetics. The possible coexistence of beauty and ugliness is one of Flaubert's chief obsessions and he probes the symbolic potential inherent in flowers to show how man compulsively adulates the attractive but experiences an equally powerful compulsion to taint or destroy the ugly, the shocking or the repellent. This phenomenon is touched upon in many works, but it is extensively explored in a conte philosophique of 1836, Un Parfum à sentir. In the apprentice pieces which are the Ecrits de Jeunesse, Flaubert is already engaged in a good deal of experimentation with regard to the symbolic effects flower motifs can generate and his findings are gradually refined to produce a finely honed weft of floral allusion embedded in the narrative fabric of L'Education sentimentale. (PAT)