
			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 
 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.
 

