"Story of a Farm Girl" (original French title: Histoire d'une fille de ferme) is an 1881 short story by Guy de Maupassant, and is one of his earlier published stories. It is a medium length short story, about 20 pages in my translation, detailing the life of a peasant girl in 19th century Normandy over a half-dozen years.
Rose is a young woman who works on a farm, who is seduced and impregnated by a field hand, who then deserts her. Rose gives birth to her baby and leaves it to a foster mother to raise, and returns back to the farm. Practical and hard working, Rose manages to save the farmer money by her careful management of the farm. Impressed by this, the farmer proposes marriage to her, and when she refuses, rapes her:
"She certainly did not consent, but she resisted weakly..."
Which means she gets married to him. After some time married together, he becomes angry, because she is not getting pregnant. Finally, she reveals that she has a hidden child, and he happily accepts raising her previously-unknown child as his own.
And that is the story, more or less. It sounds straight-forward in my description, and it is equally so in the story. The tone is plainly descriptive, with a lack of emotion or flowery description. This is my first exposure to the works of Maupassant, and while I know little about his background or literary style, I know he is acknowledged as a master of the short story format. And I can see why: this story was clear, concise and explained its premise easily.
The biggest point of interest to me is what is the main message here. As I mentioned while reviewing an even older work, it is natural for modern readers to think an author is sympathetic to their modern sensibilities in matters of ethics. For a modern reader, reading about how Rose is repeatedly sexually assaulted and trapped in a web of shame and illiteracy, it seems that the book is making a political or social statement about the treatment of women, or of the poor. But that is me as a modern reader: at the time, maybe the repeated abuses that Rose lives through would have been seen as just another type of misfortune, regretable, but certainly not tied to larger political and social problems. To the writer, and the reader, maybe being raped would be no different than being thrown from a horse.
From this text alone, it is unclear to me whether Maupassant's dry, direct writing style meant a lack of interest in exploring the psychological and social implications of what he was writing about, or whether they were a stylistic choice to present things in a manner where the reader could understand the point without extraneous display. I will continue to read the volume of short stories I have to find out more about Maupassant's milieu and beliefs.