The Influence Of Reading On Anna Karenina And Madame Bovary
...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.)Footnote1
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...
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