Welcome to CyberEssays Website

The Influence Of Reading On Anna Karenina And Madame Bovary.

        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....