The French and World Literature have gone through an enormous transformation during the Nineteenth Century. The exquisite writing of Flaubert shows us, beyond its aesthetic importance, a new way of writing, reading and representing the man in the modern world. The careful composition of the text, using plastic images and figures of speech, in the same time that the narrator hides himself in the free indirect speech are characteristics of a Flaubertian writing. In A Simple Heart, the author introduces a portrait of Félicité, a poor woman from the countryside, virtuous model of an evanescent ethic. As he follows her in the tale through her steps and misfortunes, under a new narrator lens, we try to highlight the conditions that revolve around the appearance of a scientific-objective look to the human subjectivity, soon transformed into object of a just born Psychology.
Subjectivity; Literary theory; French literature; Realism; Reading