Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple Heart Sparknotes

Gustave Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” tells the story of a maid named Félicité who endures hardships and heartbreaks one after another. Throughout her life, she loses her nephew, the children of her mistress Mme Aubain, and her parrot, Loulou. In his essay, “ Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple,” James Reynolds argues that the story of Felicite demonstrates satire and that her actions are just too good to be true. In Victor Brombert essay, “Un Coeur Simple: Tenderness and Irony,” he acknowledged that A Simple Heart is a satirical story, but Félicité is a saint-like figure. Félicité is pathetic, but extremely serving and loving. In “A Simple heart,” the story may seem to surpass both satire and sentiment, but Felicite had sympathetic hardships and is too …show more content…
Not only did Félicité mocked Virginie without knowing what she’s doing, but Loulou mocked her too. Having a bird mocked parrot mocked her shows how it belittles her. There’s an ironic parallel between Felicite herself and the parrot: “Her capacity for identifying scenes from life around her with scenes in gospel paralleled by her tendency to identify herself with others and thus attain an almost miraculous self-abnegation”(Brombert 238). She does not understand what common sense are and same with the parrot not knowing what he was saying, but just mocking Felicite with those three phrases. After LouLou passed away, Felicite had the parrot’s body stuffed with worms eating at him and rotting demonstrated the amount of love she’s capable of giving which makes her an object of ridicule. Even when she’s on her deathbed brought Loulou to say goodbye to him. She kisses the parrot. “She thought she could see, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.” Felicite at her deathbed she believed that the Holy Spirit is watching thinking that Loulou was the holy spirit. There’s the joke of Felicite still thinking that the parrot is the substitution of the holy