The Influence Of Reading On Anna Karenina

And Madame Bovary Essay, Research Paper

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.)Footnote1

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.)Footnote2

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 li

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