Madama Bovary & Anna Karenina

A detailed Summary of Madama Bovary & 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

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

Emma's already impaired reasoning and disappointing marriage

mind was living out the life of a Parisian. As Emma decisions

shed floods of tears.(Flaubert 31.)

more and more through the novels she read. Her affair with Leon was

attempt to use reason to escape from their problems, "Yes I am very

suicide. Emma's obsession with reading lead her to make decisions that

herself from her friends, Vronsky, and even her children. Anna and

But Anna like Emma has a defect in her reasoning, she has an inability

Approximate Word count = 1779
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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