Although his ‘weak vessels’ have often attracted critical disapproval, Flaubert himself suggests an important connection between moral and aesthetic values in so-called ‘simple’ characters:

Flaubert writes into his works an almost explicit argument on behalf of such characters, whose simplicity invariably takes the form of an extreme linguistic disadvantage. If language itself is sometimes blamed for difficulties of self-expression, inarticulate characters are more usually seen to have a personal problem. It is not that the right words do not exist, but that they do not have access to them. They are not good at translating their experience of the world into speech, and are especially unable to use language to communicate with other people. Nor is this because their thoughts are too profound for expression – the same characters clearly lack intellectual capacity as well. Yet Flaubert uses them to incarnate positive values such as single-mindedness, silence, immobility and imaginative sympathy. These values seem, in Flaubert, to possess a traditional moral sense, but all also have aesthetic connotations.