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Madama Bovary & Anna Karenina: Compare

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  she was very beautiful not because of her elegance and unassuming  grace which was evident in her whole figure but because their was  something specially sweet and tender in the expression of her lovely  face as she passed him. (Tolstoy 76.)

In the next chapter Anna seems to fulfill expectations Tolstoy  has aroused in the reader when she mends Dolly and Oblonskys marriage.  But Anna like Emma has a defect in her reasoning, she has an inability  to remain content with the ordinariness of her life: her marriage to  Karenin, the social festivities, and housekeeping. Anna longs to live  out the same kind of romantic vision of life that Emma also read and  fantasized about.  Anna read and understood everything, but she found no  pleasure in reading, that is to say in following the reflection in other people’s lives. She was to eager to live herself. When she read  how a heroine of a novel nursed a sick man, she wanted to move about  the sick room with noiseless steps herself. When she read how Lady  Mary rode to hounds and teased her sister-in-law, astonishing everyone  by her daring, she would have liked to do the same. (Tolstoy 114.)

Anna Karenina was a romantic who tried to make her fantasies a  reality. It was for this reason she had an affair with Vronsky. Like  Emma her decisions were driven by impulsiveness and when the  consequences caught up with her latter in the novel she secluded  herself from her friends, Vronsky, and even her children. Anna and  Emma both had character flaws that made them view the world as fantasy  so that when their fantasy crumbled they resorted to creating a new  fantasy by living their lives through the books they read.  Books allowed Emma Bovary to withdraw from her deteriorating  life. They allowed her to pursue her dreams of love, affairs, and  knights; from the wreckage of her marriage with Charles. Emma’s,  experience at La Vaubyessard became a source of absurd fantasy for  Emma, and ingrained in her mind that the world that the novel’s she  read depicted was with in her reach.  She devoured without skipping a word, every article about  first nights in the theater, horse races and soirees; she….. was interested in the debut of every new sing, the opening of every new  shop. She new the dress of the latest fashions and the addresses of  every new tailor, the days when one went to the Bois or the Opera.  (Flaubert 55.)

This passage shows the absolute absurdity of Emma’s obsession  with reading. Emma while living in her remote French village in her  mind was living out the life of a Parisian. As Emma decisions  continued to sink her further into debt and deceit she began to live  more and more through the novels she read. Her affair with Leon was  undertaken partially to fulfill the fantasies of the novels she read.  The room she rented for her rendezvous with Leon she decorated in the  opulence that her novels bespoke, and she spent vast sums of money to  continue the fantasy the novels she read described. Emma’s continued detachment with reality made her unable to make rational decisions or  even allow her to deal with her problems. The fantasy in which she  lived made her unable to take action for herself.  She blamed Leon for her disappointed hopes, as though he had  betrayed her; and she even wished for a catastrophe that would bring  about their separation, since she did not have the courage to take any  action herself. (Flaubert 251.)

Finally, Emma lost all control over her life as she became  instead of the active character in the novel merely the observer of  the consequences of her actions. And like the heroines of the novels  she read she saw her only salvation would be through a dramatic  suicide. Emma’s obsession with reading lead her to make decisions that  escalated her unhappiness and further paralyzed her from dealing with  reality.  Anna Karenina like Emma Bovary turned to novels to provide an  escape from her unhappy life. Anna wracked with guilt over abandoning  Seryozha and shunned by society turned to morphine and reading to  provide a fantasy life when her own life was crumbling around her.

When Anna and Vronsky’s relationship further disintegrated in the  novel Anna turned more inward. She ventured with Vronsky to Italy to  try to repair their relationship and then to a country estate. The  country estate was lavish but for Anna it was a lonely place.  Anna devoted as much time to her appearance, even when they  had no visitors, and she read a great deal, both novels and serious  books that happened to be in fashion. She ordered all the books that  received good notices in the foreign papers and periodicals they  subscribed to and read them with the attention that is only possible  in seclusion. (Tolstoy 640.)

Anna’s relationship with Vronsky continued to crumble. But  both Anna and Vronsky were unable to take action to do anything either  to save their relationship or deal with her divorce with Karenin. Anna  like Emma became so trapped in her fantasy world she was unable to  deal with reality. Anna in the last parts of the novels watches as her  life disintegrates but she continues to take no action as she delves  into the morphine and novels that provide a palliative for reality. It  is critical to realize that both Anna and Emma are aware that they are  living in fantasy, and is precisely because they are aware of reality  that they despair and kill themselves when they see that they have in  their minds no escape from their troubles.

Both Anna and Emma also  attempt to use reason to escape from their problems, “Yes I am very  troubled and reason was given to us to escape from our troubles,” says  Anna Karenina. But both Anna and Emma’s reason is so distorted by the  fantasy in which they live that they see little escape from life but  through death.  Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary live out their dreams and  fantasies through reading novels which serve as palliatives for their  painful lives. Reading novels is not the primary theme in their lives  nor is it the primary reason they kill themselves. But their use of  reading as an escape from reality is critical to Anna and Emma’s  characters.

It is Anna and Emma’s reading of novels which allows them  to abandon their husbands and pursue their fantasies both in life and  in their minds. It is reading which prevents them from using reason to  correct their troubles. It is reading which distorts their reality and  forces them to become dissatisfied and bored with the ordinary  pleasures of life. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are books  ironically about the dangers of reading.

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