Breaking the Idyll: Rereading Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Agnon's Sippur pashut through Devorah Baron's "Fradl"

Abstract:It has been a commonplace in the criticism and interpretation of the fiction of Devorah Baron (1887–1956) to refer to her fiction as a form of poetry in prose, or as an "idyll" that poetically represents a static shtetl past. This article breaks the idyll, so to speak, showing how Baron's ambitious fiction reshapes the narrative perspective, plot, and motifs of several layers of (male) canonical tradition, specifically. Part of a larger comparative study of the fiction of S. Y. Agnon and Devorah Baron, it focuses on their shared admiration for and common intertextual engagements with Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856–57), as seen in Baron's translation of the classic novel, Agnon's realist novel Sippur pashut (1935) and Baron's "Fradl" (1946). A close reading of Baron's later story "Fradl" discloses the intertextual traces of both Baron's Madame Bovary and Agnon's novel, references that can be read as overturning elements of Agnon's and Flaubert's masterworks in specifically feminist and non-idyllic ways. The presence in many of her stories, including "Fradl," of a controlling first-person female narrator, one who lives apart from the world being described and employs multilayered intertextuality and ars-poetic reflection, suggests an effort to craft an image of the woman writer capable of intervening in and reconfiguring the literary past.