Bovarysme

Bovarysme is a motif of French literature and was named after the heroine of the novel Madame Bovary. Called Moeurs de province ( 1857) by Gustave Flaubert.

Based on the novel by the French philosopher Jules de Gaultier coined (1858-1942) the term bovarysme who received exemplary significance: Mme Bovary suffered from an exalted imagination, which was not least induced by clandestine reading novels and that caused them everyday in their kleinbourgeoisen and provincial conditions no longer mastered. Your imagination was dominated by cheesy novels, where it was all about love and lovers, when ladies fell in lonely pavilions fainted Postillons over brought love letters, which was full of shock prayers, heart pain, sobs, tears and kisses, moonlight and nightingales singing, the complaints of dying swans, harp on night-black lakes, falling autumn leaves, the pure virgins and noble men, brave as lions, gentle as lambs with tear-stained cheeks. Charged with these inflated expectations they had to be inevitably disappointed by their modest life in the province and of their brave but insignificant husband and fail to reality. Mme Bovary committed suicide after various attempts to escape from their unfilled existence ( Escapism ) finally suicide.

Other important examples are Hedda Gabler ( Ibsen, 1890) and Edna Pontellier ( The Awakening, Kate Chopin, 1899).

Roger Grenier indicates a transposed into the present version ( Normandy, in " La Nouvelle Revue française ", in February 1988, no. 421 ) that the Bovarysme its relevance has not lost.