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Essay on Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant was a French novelist and short-story writer, of a prehistoric Norman family. He worked in a government office at Paris and became known c.1880 as the most brilliant of the circle of Zola. He poured out a prodigious number of short stories, novels, plays, and travel sketches until 1891, when he went mad. He died in a sanitarium. Maupassant's style and treatment of subject resemble those of Flaubert in classic simplicity, clarity, and objective calm. Maupassant is a modern exemplar of traditional French psychological realism; he portrays his characters as unhappy victims of their greed, desire, or vanity but presents even the most sordid details of their lives without sermonizing. Maupassant’s varied juvenile work includes erotic work (poems deflating sentimental idealizing of sexuality, a one-act pornographic farce), as well as more serious works.
A one-scene play Histoire du vieux temps [A Tale of Time Past] was well received in 1879, and Maupassant continued to write intermittently, either on his own or in collaboration for the stage: his stories often show a theatrical imagination, with their effective use of dialogue, of tension, and of confined spaces. He published poems in reviews, and saw the threatened prosecution of “Au bord de l'eau” [“At the Water's Edge”] for “outrage to public morality” as “excellent free publicity” for his forthcoming volume Des vers [Poems]; but it was the publication of “Boule de Suif” in the same month (April 1880) that made his name widely known as a writer of stories.
For Maupassant, the short story is the honored form for encapsulating those moments when confidence in some ultimate justice “in a benevolent Providence and human rationality” (“Boule de Suif”) is shattered. The insight gained through an individual event reveals some general aspect of the human condition. The world cannot be changed....
