The Destruction Of Desire - Flaubert's Historical Novel "salang Bo"

After the novel Madame Bovary was published, Flaubert who was far away from modern times he disliked and turn into the magnificent ancient world created a historical novel Salammb. The novel and the process it was created are the main embodiment of the author's conscious of history and the history embodied obviously. However, the view different from historicism in traditional sense or rationalistic historical view was reflected in Salammb by Flaubert. This thesis aims to explore the real theme of the novel with a lack of historicism and Flaubert's love and reasons of the theme of the destruction of desire in his novel creation.The first part of the thesis is the proof of the lack of historicism in the historical novel Salammb. In order to create this novel, Flaubert spent so much time and energy that was rare for writers to try his best to respect for historical truth by reading books, field trips and rewriting. Flaubert's main purpose was not to do it for the history reappearance, but to satisfy his own habit of detail description. However, what this stylized catharsis bring is the lack of significance, and these pieces of history makes the novel's real theme difficult to get by readers. Meanwhile, Flaubert chose an atypically historical context in the novel. Without any relationship with history essence, the writer chose"the most ugly war that both the God and the human beings all can not bear"in the history books only to made a red great background for the novel. Last but not least, the novel's hero and heroine are lack of historical consciousness, and Matt and Salammb's behavior and their impact on the history are lack of a relationship with purpose.The second and third parts of the thesis are the proof that Flaubert is a veritable"desire historicist", and the real theme of this novel's description is"the destruction of desire". There is a lot of desire description in Salammb, for example, the scene of gluttonous eating, the process of eating body flesh, and the erotic feeling of the hero and heroine, and so on; meanwhile, the writer uses three symbolic images which are water, snake and the clothes of the Moon God to make desire show a new structure of meaning. At the end of the novel, the hero Matt was executed on his lover's wedding, while the heroine also lying on the ground died because of"Touching the clothes of the Moon God"in front of her lover's body. At last, they were all destroyed. According to Hayden White and other New Historical Critics'view, referencing Flaubert's view of history, I believe that there are full of historical metaphor in this novel, and the real theme of this novel is"the destruction of desire".The fourth part of this thesis refers to Flaubert's other works of the subject of"the destruction of desire", and the reasons the writer love this subject so much. In fact, Flaubert's other novels, such as Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, St. Anthony's Temptation, and so on, all involved in the subject of"the destruction of desire". The writer's love on the subject has relationships with Flaubert's growth environment, personality and ideology and the social conditions at that time.