Comparing Flauberts A Sentimental Education and Henry James’ The Portr

Comparing Flauberts A hokey Education and Henry crowd The Portrait of a Lady Henry James wrote of A Sentimental Education, Flaubert takes Frdric Moreau on the threshold of life and conducts him to the extreme of matureness without appargonntly suspecting for a moment either our wonder or our protest--Why, why him? Frdric is positively too poor for his charge and we chance with a kind of embarrassment, certainly with a kind of compassion, that it is somehow the business organization of a protagonist to prevent in his designer an excessive expend of faith. . He spoke harshly, alone with no little authority on the subject his own The Portrait of a Lady takes Isabel Archer from this threshold to, if not quite the extreme of maturity, then to a point which serves the same novelistic purpose. As, at the end of Sentimental Education, the reader understands that Frdrics novelistic life, his potential to rally a narrative, (his limited potential, as James might agnize it), is over , so the reader is given to understand the same of Isabel at the end of Portrait. In considering James evaluation of Frdrics worthiness as a protagonist, bingle cannot deny that the basis of his criticism is valid Frdric is the low-down human specimen James says he is, and there are quantify in the novel when we do want to ask, Why him?. But we moldiness also ask whether Flaubert was not fully conscious of his heros pathetic nature, and whether the post of such a character at the center of his novel was not an utterly intentional, and perhaps ultimately brilliant, stroke of authorship. This question, and the comparison of cardinal bildungsromans with two such contrasting heroes, leads to the interesting and more fundamental question of the work on of a r... ... his life trying to obtain a future to adapt with the loftiest of his dreams now that he is no longer at the threshold tone forward, he has no where to cast his dreaming, idealizing eyes but back, and not just into hi s past, but even beyond the narrative bounds of the novel. Thus excluded from the last scene, we are in a sense abandoned to Frdrics fate, looking back with longing to a time that never existed. There is a way in which Sentimental Education, so utterly devoid of transcendency or redemptive spirit, chillingly effects the reader in a oft deeper way, resonates in a much darker place than The Portrait of a Lady. Finally, we see that Isabel has learned what the novel had to teach her Frdric has not, and the brutal schmalzy education is ours. Works CitedJames, Henry. A Portrait of a Lady. 1908. New York Houghton Mifflin, 1963.