MAUPASSANT, (Henri Rene Albert) Guy de (LITERATURE)

Born: the Chateau de Miromesnil, near Rouen, France, 5 August 1850. Education: Educated at Lycee Imperial Napoleon, Paris, 1859-60; Institution Ecclesiastique, Yvetot, 1863-68; Lycee Pierre Corneille, Rouen, 1868-69; studied law, University of Paris, 1869-70. Military Service: Messenger, then orderly, in the army, 1870-71. Career: Clerk in Ministry of the Navy: in library, 1872-73, and in Department for the Colonies, 1873-77; transferred to Ministry of Education, 1878-82. Also writer, especially for Gaulois and Gil-Blas newspapers; introduced by Flaubert to Zola and other Naturalist writers. Attempted suicide, January, 1892; confined to insane asylum, Passy, 1892. Died: 6 July 1893.

Publications

Collections

Works (in English). 1909-.

Complete Works, translated by Alfred de Sumichrast. 9 vols., 1910.

Collected Novels and Stories, edited and translated by Ernest Boyd. 18 vols., 1922-26.

Works, translated by Marjorie Laurie. 10 vols., 1923-29.

Oeuvres completes. 29 vols., 1925-47.

Novels and Tales. 18 vols., 1928-.

Contes et nouvelles, edited by Albert-Marie Schmidt. 2 vols., 1956-57.

Romans, edited by Albert-Marie Schmidt. 1959.

Complete Short Stories. 3 vols., 1970.

Contes et Nouvelles, edited by Louis Forestier. 2 vols., 1974-79.


Romans, edited by Louis Forestier. 1987.

A Parisian Bourgeois’ Sundays, and Other Stories, translated by Marlo Johnston. 1997.

Fiction

La Maison Tellier (stories). 1881.

Mademoiselle Fifi (stories). 1882.

Une vie. 1883; as A Woman’s Life, translated anonymously, 1888; numerous subsequent translations including by Marjorie Laurie, 1942, Antonia White, 1959, and H.N.P. Sloman, 1965; as Une Vie, translated by Katharine Vivian, 1981; as A Life: The Humble Truth, translated by Roger Pearson, 1999.

Contes de la Becasse (stories). 1883.

Miss Harriet (stories). 1883.

Clair de lune. 1884.

Les Soeurs Rondoli (stories). 1884.

Tyette. 1885.

Bel-Ami. 1885; as Bel-Ami, translated 1891; several subsequent translations including by Eric Sutton, 1948, Brian Rhys, 1958, H.N.P. Sloman, 1961, and Douglas Parmee, 1975; also translated by Margaret Mauldon, 2001.

Contes et nouvelles. 1885.

Contes du jour et de la nuit (stories). 1885.

Monsieur Parent (stories). 1885.

Toine. 1886.

La Petite Roque. 1886.

Mont-Oriol. 1887; as Mont-Oriol, translated 1891; edited by Ernest Boyd and translated by Storm Jameson, 1924; translated by Marjorie Laurie, 1949.

Le Horla. 1887; as ”The Horla,” translated by Jonathan Sturges, in Modern Ghosts, edited by G.W. Curtis, 1890; also translated by Ernest Boyd and Storm Jameson, in Eighty-Eight More Stories, 1932; Ronald de Levington Kirkbride, in The Private Life of Guy de Maupassant, 1961.

Pierre et Jean. 1888; as Pierre and Jean, translated by Clara Bell, 1890; also translated by Hugh Craig, 1890; Leonard Tancock, 1979; translated by Lowell Bair, 1994; translated by Julie Mead, 2001.

Le Rosier de Madame Husson (stories). 1888.

La Main gauche. 1889.

Fort comme la mort. 1889; as Strong as Death, translated by Teofilo E. Combs, 1899; as The Master Passion, translated by Marjorie Laurie, 1958.

L’Inutile Beaute (stories). 1890.

Notre coeur. 1890; as Notre Coeur (The Human Heart), translated by Alexina Loranger Donovan, 1890; also translated by Marjorie Laurie, 1929.

Eighty-Eight Short Stories, translated by Fanny Rousseau-Wallach. 1909; also translated by Ernest Boyd and Storm Jameson, 1928.

Eighty-Eight More Stories (includes ”The Horla”; ”Boule de Suif”; ”Mlle. Fifi” and others), translated by Ernest Boyd and Storm Jameson. 4 vols., 1932.

Miss Harriet and Other Stories, translated by H.N.P. Sloman. 1951.

The Diamond Necklace and Four Other Stories. 1967.

Tales of Supernatural Terror, edited and translated by Arnold Kellett. 1972.

The Diary of a Madman and Other Tales of Horror, translated by Arnold Kellett, 1976; as The Dark Side of Guy de Maupassant, 1989; as Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, translated by Arnold Kellett, 1997.

A Day in the Country and Other Stories, translated by David Coward. 1990.

Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories, edited and translated by David Coward. 1992.

Plays

Une repetition. 1879.

Histoire du vieux temps (produced 1879). In Des vers, 1880.

Musotte, with Jacques Normand, from a story by Maupassant (produced 1891). In Oeuvres completes illustrees, 1904.

La Paix du menage, from his own story (produced 1893).

Verse

Des vers. 1880.

Other

Au soleil. 1884.

Sur l’eau. 1888; as Afloat, translated by Laura Ensor, 1889; also translated by Marlo Johnston, 1995.

La Vie errante. 1890.

Correspondance, edited by Jacques Suffel. 3 vols., 1973.

Correspondance, with Gustave Flaubert, edited by Yvan Leclerc. 1994.

Selection of the Political Journalism: With Introduction and Notes, edited by Adrian C. Ritchie. 1999.

Selections of the Chroniques (1881-87), edited with introduction and notes by Adrian C. Ritchie. 2002.

Critical Studies:

Maupassant: A Biographical Study by Ernest Bond, 1928; Maupassant: A Lion in the Path by Francis Steegmuller, 1949; Maupassant the Novelist, 1954, and Maupassant: The Short Stories, 1962, both by Edward D. Sullivan; The Private Life of Guy de Maupassant by R. de L. Kirkbridge, 1961; The Paradox of Maupassant by Pal Ignotus, 1967; Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Descriptive Techniques in the Works of Guy de Maupassant by John R. Dugan, 1973; Maupassant by Albert H. Wallace, 1973; Maupassant by Michael G. Lerner, 1975; Maupassant: Pierre et Jean by Robert Lethbridge, 1984; A Woman’s Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant’s Fiction by Mary Donaldson-Evans, 1986; Style and Vision in Maupassant’s Nouvelles by Matthew MacNamara, 1986; Love and Nature, Unity and Doubling in the Novels of Mauspassant by Bertrand Logan Ball, 1988; Guy de Maupassant: Boule de suif by P.E. Chaplin, 1988; Bel-Ami: Maupassant by Christopher Lloyd, 1988; Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors by T.A. Le V. Harris, 1990; Struggling Under the Destructive Glance: Androgyny in the Novels of Guy de Maupassant by Rachel Mildred Hartig, 1991; Comme Maupassant by Philippe Bonnefis, 1993; Rhetoric of Pessimism and Strategies of Containment in the Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant by David Bryant, 1993; Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century by Richard Fusco, 1994; The Art of Rupture: Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant by Charles J. Stivale, 1994; Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction by Nancy H. Traill, 1996; Guy de Maupassant by Jean-Marie Dizol, 1997.

Guy de Maupassant’s literary apprenticeship ended in 1880 with the appearance of ”Boule de suif” (”Ball-of-Fat”). His literary preceptor and friend, Gustave Flaubert, rightly characterized the work as evidence of the arrival of a new master of the short story. Flaubert’s death that same year firmed the young writer’s resolve to be, at whatever cost, a worthy disciple of his dear friend. For about eight years Maupassant dedicated himself totally to his work, a tribute to Flaubert’s influence, and also possibly because of a premonition of how especially desperate was his own race with time.

The great stream of stories, novels, travel accounts, and essays that flowed from his pen is astonishing for its high quality. The mediocre offerings, substantial in number in the vast outpouring, seem proportionately insubstantial when measured against the accomplishments, and pose no threat to the high place he occupies among 19th-century writers.

He has attracted a large and appreciative audience among general readers and critics with his highly developed powers of observation. They are a result of Flaubert’s insistence that the artist observe his subject until he can distinguish in it the one feature that sets it apart from all similar subjects. Then he must represent this feature with the exact language that only it calls into use. Maupassant did not approach the latter ideal as closely as did his master, but he demonstrated the ability to penetrate the meaning of his subject by observation to a degree that few other writers have.

Maupassant had little fondness for the unaccomplished individuals who are his subjects. His popularity among this group certainly does not derive from flattering suggestions of some great redeeming virtue in their kind. The privileged class was affronted that those it scorned and cast out were the very ones Maupassant depicted in a favourable light. He is saying that real virtue is something people have; it is not something they talk about. Elizabeth Rousset (”Ball of Fat”), Irma (”Bed 29”) and Rachel (”Mademoiselle Fifi”), prostitutes to whom it would never occur to define courage, have it when it alone will serve. Maupassant was contemptuous of social institutions whose product was more often than not fruitless talk; doubtless this attitude contributes to his popular following. It offended many of his contemporaries who saw it as a narrowly unfair and prejudiced attack on the system.

Heroic efforts are monopolized by women characters in Maupassant’s stories. It was evident to him that conventional morality was shaped in such a way as to suppress the female in favour of the male. The struggle of women in society produced the dramatic and courageous defiance that Maupassant wished to portray. With considerable understanding he depicts the situation of the unhappy and unfulfilled married woman. For her, unlike her husband, the discovery of her unhappiness means the end of the prospect that her life might have meaning; she is trapped. Defiance is the only way out. Merely the courage to defy convention is not enough in the case of Mme. Roland in Pierre et Jean (Pierre and Jean)—she needs, not just a lover, but one who satisfies the ideal she had hoped to find in marriage, for the severe consequences of being found out far outweigh the temporal satisfactions of a mediocre affair. Maupassant depicts the husband in such a way that the reader is rather pleased to see him cuckolded: trust in one’s wife is no virtue if it is merely a manifestation of vanity. Though Maupassant more generally breaks with tradition in his depiction of adulteresses and prostitutes, occasionally he presents the conventional image of her as the corrupter of the species. In his personal life he had the reputation for being a misogynist. But the real Maupassant is to be found in his writing which treats cuckoldry as a situation that is not at all amusing.

Most of his characters are Norman peasants, Parisian bureaucrats, soldiers, and sailors. All have a diminished belief in a Higher Order and in their dreams. But on their holidays and weekends they resurrect these dreams as if reality had never marked them for death. The consequences of these momentary delusions run the gamut from the amusingly petty to the soberingly tragic. He has no favourite ending, for life has none. He merely chooses one from the possible endings that reality imposes and which he has verified by observation. The presentation of a distinct image of what he has seen with his eyes is his first purpose. If what a character does cries out for a reason hidden in his mind, then, and only then, does Maupassant entangle himself in the web of psychological speculation.

Pathological behaviour calls for psychological explanations. Maupassant wrote stories about madness with tragic authority. ”Le Horla” (”The Horla”), ”Lui?” (”Him?”), and ”Qui sait?” (”Who Knows?”), with heroes subject to autoscopic hallucinations, pathological loneliness, and suicidal tendencies, reflect some of the pain of his own struggle with the fatal malady. The anguished conviction that existence was pointless evidences itself progressively in his work until it becomes a crushing presence. In La Vie errante [In Vagabondia] he is continually troubling himself with the question of why mind was given dominion over its own futility, just as the hero of the masterpiece, Pierre and Jean, troubles himself over the absurdity of being forced to accept the unacceptable. Such, for Maupassant, was the profit of giving thought to the meaning of life. That is why he preferred to observe and present what could be seen with the eye.

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