PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ventura, Răzvan
TI  - Enjoyment and sensuality of light in Flaubert's descriptive work Journey to the Pyrenees and Corsica
DP  - 2017 Jun 1
TA  - Romanica Olomucensia
PG  - 121--130
VI  - 29
IP  - 1
AID - 10.5507/ro.2017.009
IS  - 18034136
AB  - Flaubert's creation has its origin in the attempts of his youth, when he tried to go beyond a pure romanticism, adding the marks of a constitutive skepticism. One could argue, as many critics have already done, that Flaubert's creation is set up around an eternal tension between conflicting tendencies. The story of Flaubert's journey to the Pyrenees and Corsica relies on a fundamental tension that structures the perceptual universe of the young man. Flaubert endeavours to reveal the light, which, for him, becomes a sense of freedom, of the romanticism of perception and nature, thus contrasting the freshness and darkness pertaining to cold classicism and civilization. In this way the light becomes the first instrument to change reality, a guarantee of what is to come, able to shape an outline of reality; Flaubert overcomes the ordinary ecstasy in front of the all-inclusive light; he tends towards an extreme sensuality that determines him to transform the object of his perception. Light acquires a sensual and even a sexual dimension, and also the topoi by which it is made visible make reference to a highly sexualized perception of the universe. The personality of Flaubert's light relates rather to the wild than to the domestic nature and the future hermit of Croisset favours a sexualized relationship with the universe, a conflicting vision outweighing the harmonized conception of the world.