Sartre read Flaubert’s vocation as a response to bourgeois exclusion

Evidence

The Family Idiot is a multivolume life of Gustave Flaubert, in which Sartre prioritised — as before — the question of what leads a writer to become a writer. But he approached it differently. Sartre traced Flaubert’s way of writing to his childhood in a bourgeois family who had dismissed him as an ‘idiot’ because of his tendency to stare blankly into space for long periods, daydreaming or apparently thinking about nothing. In labelling him as idiot — a typical bourgeois act of exclusion — they cut him out of normal social intercourse. Sartre compares the infant Flaubert to a domestic animal, partly absorbed in human culture and partly separated from it, and haunted by what he is missing. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 700

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘domestic animal’ figure — how being categorized as an outsider in one’s own family shapes a creative vocation — as a lens on artist-origin stories from Flaubert to Genet.
• XREF: Connects to the Sartrean concept of the ‘gaze’ and being-for-others: Flaubert is defined by the familial label placed on him. — connects to: Sartre traced Flaubert’s artistic drives to a loveless childhood — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 701; Sartre’s lost book on Mallarmé would have exceeded his Flaubert biography — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 298; Nerval and Flaubert’s Orient was pre-shaped by personal and aesthetic mythology, not direct encounter

Broader Connections

• Nerval and Flaubert’s Orient was pre-shaped by personal and aesthetic mythology, not direct encounter #expands (0.78)
• Sartre’s lost book on Mallarmé would have exceeded his Flaubert biography #expands (0.75) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 298