Show, Not Tell, And Embrace Simplicity

One of the messages that dance through my mind while reading about Felicite is “embrace simplicity”. Since reading it from the Tao Te Ching more than a year ago, the message had stayed dormant in my thoughts. But how come it came back? Well, Felicite herself is quite a simple character, hence the title, the story, and everything in it. Still, simplicity isn’t quite adamant in every sense. “She kissed them several times and would not have been greatly astonished had Virginia opened them; to souls like this the supernatural is always quite simple. She washed her, wrapped her in a shroud, put her into the casket, laid a wreath of flowers on her head and arranged her curls” (3). The sentence evokes simplicity, but is it itself simple? It is clear how Flaubert’s use of punctuation is a very useful technique he uses to play with the story’s pace. Hence, making the how it’s told and what it’s told permanently interrelated with each other.

In the case of this sentence, we take the word simple. The word itself is describing the souls, characterizing Felicite, and narrating her life’s and the plot’s simplicity. The word, in this case, also divides two different sentences. The first one, rather two different ideas amalgamated by a semi colon, while the second one is mostly predominant of commas. We could infer that before ‘simple’, the sentence is simple, while after it becomes more elaborated. Before and after the word two different approaches to a sentence collide, one simpler than the other. But then, is the idea being transmitted simple? The idea might be simple, like the character, and the title, but thus far into the story I’ve only read the word ‘simple’ once. To show not tell. He is embracing simplicity by showing the reader Felicite’s life is simple, not telling.