Reading provides an escape for people from the ordinariness .

             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.