A Comparison of Escape in Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina

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Escape in Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina

Reading provides an escape for people from the ordinariness

of everyday life. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, dissatisfied with

their lives pursued their dreams of ecstasy and love through reading.

At the beginning of both novels Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary made

active decisions about their future although these decisions were not

always rational. As their lives started to disintegrate Emma and Anna

sought to live out their dreams and fantasies through reading. Reading

served as morphine allowing them to escape the pain of everyday life,

but reading like morphine closed them off from the rest of the world

preventing them from making rational decisions. It was Anna and Emma's

loss of reasoning and isolation that propelled them toward their

downfall.

Emma at the beginning of the novel was someone who made

active decisions about what she wanted. She saw herself as the master

of her destiny. Her affair with Rudolphe was made after her decision

to live out her fantasies and escape the ordinariness of her life and

her marriage to Charles. Emma's active decisions though were based

increasingly as the novel progresses on her fantasies. The lechery to

which she falls victim is a product of the debilitating adventures her

mind takes. These adventures are feed by the novels that she reads.

They were filled with love affairs, lovers, mistresses,

persecuted ladies fainting in lonely country houses, postriders killed

at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, dark forests,

palpitating hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, skiffs in the

moonlight, nightingales in thickets, and gentlemen brave as lions

gentle as lambs, virtuous as none really is, and always ready to

shed floods of tears.(Flaubert 31.)

Emma's already impaired reasoning and disappointing marriage

to Charles caused Emma to withdraw into reading books, she fashioning

herself a life based not in reality but in fantasy.

Anna Karenina at the begging of Tolstoy's novel was a bright

and energetic women. When Tolstoy first introduces us to Anna she

appears as the paragon of virtue, a women in charge of her own

destiny.

He felt that he had to have another look at her- not because

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