# Six Set Books: Candide to A Doll’s House

Literature I · Great Works of World Literature · https://tryals.app/learn/literature-i/six-set-books-candide-to-a-dolls-house

## What the Nineteenth Century Learned to Do

The six set works run from 1759 to 1925 and, read in order, show the novel and the play acquiring their modern instruments.

**Voltaire, *Candide* (1759).** A philosophical tale rather than a novel: characters are positions, catastrophes arrive at absurd speed, and the target is Leibniz's claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss keeps the doctrine intact through earthquake, war, disease and execution, and his imperviousness is the joke. The ending — *il faut cultiver notre jardin*, we must cultivate our garden — refuses both optimism and despair in favour of work.

**Goethe, *The Sorrows of Young Werther* (1774).** Epistolary, and almost entirely one-sided: we get Werther's letters and not his correspondents' replies, which seals us inside a consciousness we can see is distorting. It caused a documented wave of imitative behaviour across Europe, the first recorded instance of a book being blamed for its readers' actions.

**Flaubert, *Madame Bovary* (1857).** The technical landmark. Flaubert perfects **free indirect discourse**: third-person narration that takes on a character's language and judgements without quotation marks or attribution. The reader is inside Emma's evaluations and outside them at once, and the irony needs no narrator to point it out. Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity and acquitted.

**Dostoevsky, *The Gambler* (1866).** Written under contract in twenty-six days to pay gambling debts, the author's situation and his subject are the same. Its interest is the psychology of compulsion: the gambler does not want to win, he wants the state of playing, and Dostoevsky renders that from inside.

**Kafka, *The Trial* (written 1914–15, published 1925).** Unfinished, and published posthumously against Kafka's instructions by Max Brod. Only the first and last chapters have certain positions; the middle chapters were left in a disputed order, which is more appropriate to the book than any settled arrangement would be. Josef K. is arrested without being told the charge, and the horror is procedural rather than violent.

**Ibsen, *A Doll's House* (1879).** Three acts. Nora discovers her marriage is a performance and walks out, and the door slamming at the final curtain was described as the sound heard around the world. Ibsen was pressured into writing an alternative ending in which she stays; he called it a barbaric outrage and it is not performed.

| Work | Year | The instrument it demonstrates |
|---|---|---|
| *Candide* | 1759 | Satire by relentless accumulation |
| *Werther* | 1774 | One-sided epistolary immersion |
| *Madame Bovary* | 1857 | Free indirect discourse |
| *The Gambler* | 1866 | Compulsion rendered from inside |
| *The Trial* | 1925 | Procedural horror; deliberate incompletion |
| *A Doll's House* | 1879 | The problem play, and an ending that refuses comfort |

> **Common pitfall:** reading free indirect discourse as the narrator's own opinion. When *Madame Bovary* calls something beautiful in Emma's vocabulary, the narrator is reporting her judgement, not sharing it, missing this makes the novel sentimental rather than devastating.

## Practice questions

7 of this lesson's 12 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Arrange the six set works in order of publication.

**Answer:**

1. Candide (1759)
2. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
3. Madame Bovary (1857)
4. The Gambler (1866)
5. A Doll’s House (1879)
6. The Trial (1925)

**Why:** The order matters for the instruments: epistolary immersion precedes free indirect discourse, which precedes interior compulsion, which precedes Kafka’s procedural nightmare. Each technique needed the previous one to exist.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/six-set-books-candide-to-a-dolls-house/arrange-the-six-set-works-in-order-of-publication

### 2. Candide closes with the injunction to 'cultivate our garden', turning away from philosophical debate towards physical labour. What does this conclusion achieve within Voltaire's critique?

A. It claims individual labour eventually creates the best of possible worlds
B. It replaces philosophical reflection with retreat into complete isolation
C. It rejects both total optimism and despair in favour of practical activity
D. It demonstrates that philosophical optimism is correct if backed by labour

**Answer:** C. It rejects both total optimism and despair in favour of practical activity

**Why:** Dismissing the ending as quietist retreat misses Voltaire's point: practical effort provides meaning without requiring metaphysical excuses for suffering, avoiding both Panglossian denial and total defeatism.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/six-set-books-candide-to-a-dolls-house/candide-closes-with-the-injunction-to-cultivate-our-garden-turning

### 3. In free indirect discourse, a third-person narrator adopts a character’s language without quotation marks. What does this achieve in Madame Bovary?

A. The narrator directly and openly condemns Emma’s moral failings
B. The reader is inside Emma’s judgements and outside them at once
C. All subjective and evaluative language is stripped from the text
D. The narrative shifts entirely into an intimate first-person voice

**Answer:** B. The reader is inside Emma’s judgements and outside them at once

**Why:** It puts the reader **inside and outside at once**. When the prose describes something in Emma’s vocabulary, we get her evaluation and, simultaneously, the distance that shows what it costs her. The irony needs no narrator to point it out, which is why the technique was such an advance.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/six-set-books-candide-to-a-dolls-house/in-free-indirect-discourse-a-third-person-narrator-adopts-a

### 4. Werther gives us both sides of the correspondence, so the reader can check Werther’s account against his correspondents’.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False.** We get Werther’s letters and almost nothing coming back, which seals us inside a consciousness we can see is distorting without being given any external correction. The one-sidedness is the technique, and it is why the book affected readers so powerfully.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/six-set-books-candide-to-a-dolls-house/werther-gives-us-both-sides-of-the-correspondence-so-the-reader-can

### 5. Which are true of Candide?

A. It ends by recommending work over speculation
B. It is a realist novel of psychological development
C. It targets the claim that this is the best of all possible worlds
D. Its characters function as positions rather than psychologies

**Answer:** A. It ends by recommending work over speculation; C. It targets the claim that this is the best of all possible worlds; D. Its characters function as positions rather than psychologies

**Why:** Candide is a *conte philosophique*: characters are positions, catastrophes arrive at absurd speed, and Pangloss’s imperviousness to evidence is the joke. Psychological development would defeat the form. Pangloss has to be unchangeable for the satire to work.

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### 6. Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler under contract in how many days, to the nearest day?

**Answer:** 26 (within ±2)

**Why:** **26 days**, dictated to a stenographer to meet a contract that would otherwise have cost him the rights to his existing works. He was in debt from gambling while writing a novel about gambling debt, and the stenographer, Anna Snitkina, later married him.

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### 7. Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity over Madame Bovary and acquitted.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True.** He was prosecuted in 1857 and acquitted, and the trial did what such trials generally do, the publicity made the novel an immediate success. Baudelaire was prosecuted the same year over *Les Fleurs du mal* and was not so fortunate.

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