Bovarysme

Bovarysme is a term derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), coined by Jules de Gaultier in his 1892 essay on Flaubert's novel, "Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l’œuvre de Flaubert". It denotes a tendency towards escapist daydreaming in which the dreamer imagines themself to be a hero or heroine in a romance, whilst ignoring the everyday realities of the situation. The eponymous Madame Bovary is an example of this.^[1]

In his essay "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca" (1927), T. S. Eliot suggested Othello's last great speech as an example: "I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare."^[2] Polish researcher, Grzegorz Przepiórka, describe bovarysme as: "a post-romantic phenomenon characterized by an escape from reality into the sphere of illusion, as a result of the influence of cultural texts".^[3]

The term bovarysme collectif was used by Arnold van Gennep (1908) and Jean Price-Mars in the 1920s to critique Haitian populations' embrace of French forms and rejection of local (Haitian as African diasporic and indigenous) forms.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Walter Mitty

References

1. Baldick, Chris (2008). Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press
2. Eliot, T.S. (1999). T.S. Eliot Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber. p. 131. ISBN 0-571-19746-9.
3. "Bowaryzm – definicja i przykłady występowania — Pani Bovary". poezja.org. Retrieved 2024-08-24.