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Breaking the Idyll: Rereading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Agnon’s SIPPUR PASHUT Through Devorah Baron’s “Fradl”

Tue, December 18, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 1

Abstract

It has been a commonplace in the criticism and interpretation of the fiction of Devorah Baron (1887-1956) to refer to her fiction as a form of poetry in prose, or as an “idyll” that poetically represents a static shtetl past. This paper “breaks the idyll,” showing how Baron’s ambitious fiction reshapes the narrative perspective, plot and motifs of her several layers of (male) canonical tradition. Part of a larger comparative study of the fiction of S.Y. Agnon and Devorah Baron, the paper focuses on Agnon and Baron’s shared admiration for and common intertextual engagements with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856-1857), as seen in Baron’s translation of the classic novel, in Agnon’s realist novel, Sippur pashut (1935) and Baron’s “Fradl” (1946). A close reading of Baron’s later story “Fradl” discloses the intertexual traces of both Baron’s Madame Bovary and Agnon’s novel, references that can be read as overturning elements of Flaubert’s and Agnon’s masterworks in specifically feminist and non-idyllic ways. As one of the only early female prose writers in a company of men, Baron registered in her fiction a desire to join the (masculine) intellectual-creative tradition, even as she departed significantly and conspicuously from it, often highlighting alternative female communities. The presence in many of her stories of a controlling, first-person female narrator, one who lives apart from the world being described, who employs multi-layered intertextuality and ars-poetic reflection, suggests an effort to craft an image of the woman writer capable of intervening in and reconfiguring the past. Indeed, Baron’s story counters many of assumptions and plot elements of Flaubert and Agnon’s works offering a story about a woman who suffers in a misbegotten marriage but eventually finds happiness, about the community of women that witnesses her trials, including the writer-narrator of the story who, in writing, defies Fradl’s silence and suggests an alternative to her provincial way of life.

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