Crossing Literary Borderlines in “A Simple Heart” by Gustav Flaubert

Abstract

How can we speak of borderlines in a work of fiction? What are the spaces that stories demarcate? Who introduces us, the readers, to these spaces and makes us cross their borders? Along with a brief review of some spatial approaches to fiction and their treatment of the notion of borderlines, this essay will focus on a story by Gustav Flaubert. Following the movement – both physical and mental – of the story’s protagonist in the everyday space she inhabits, enables one to reflect on the meanings of boundary crossing in fiction. In the course of the discussion, the notion of borderlines will expand beyond its denotation as a mapping practice, as the story’s character and form present a challenge to other kinds of borders, such as the boundaries of subjectivity and personality. The servant Félicité in Flaubert’s tale “A Simple Heart” (1877) misses her nephew, Victor. On the day of his departure, she had rushed to the harbor in Honfleur, where his boat was docked. On her way, Félicité has a vision of horses in the sky. These were the horses – she later discovered – that were hauled up into the air by a derrick and dumped into the boat. The boat sails, however, before she has the chance to bid farewell to her nephew. As Félicité’s knowledge of the world comes from an illustrated geography book presented to her mistress’s children by the lawyer Monsieur Bourais, she has only a vague notion of Havana – the destination Victor’s vessel had reached: