Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are two of the most famous female protagonists in Western literature. Though their stories are vastly different, there are some key similarities that can be drawn between them.
Both Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are married to men who are not their equals. Madame Bovary is married to a small-town doctor who is dull and mediocre, while Anna Karenina is married to a wealthy but aging man who is unable to provide her with the love and attention she needs.
Both women are ultimately unhappy in their marriages and turn to affairs as a way to escape. Madame Bovary has an affair with a young man who represents everything that her husband is not, while Anna Karenina has an affair with a wealthy aristocrat.
Both Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are eventually caught and their affairs are exposed. This leads to Madame Bovary’s suicide and Anna Karenina’s exile from her husband’s house.
Though their stories have different endings, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina both represent the plight of the unhappy wife in a loveless marriage. Their experiences show that even in different times and cultures, women can still be oppressed by the men they are supposed to love.
Reading provides a release for individuals from the banality of daily existence. Emma and Anna Karenina, dissatisfied with their lives, used reading to pursue their desires of ecstasy and love. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary began making active choices about their futures at the start of both novels, but these decisions were not always logical. As their relationship went south, Emma and Anna attempted to fulfill their ambitions through reading.
Madame Bovary wanted to live an extraordinary life, with wealth and love. She accomplished this by reading novels, which gave her unrealistic viewpoints of relationships and romance. Madame Bovary’s husband was a simple man who could not provide the excitement that Madame Bovary craved.
Madame Bovary thought that if she had money then all her problems would go away. Anna Karenina also turned to reading as an escape from reality, she often went to the country house where there were many books. Tolstoy writes “She turned over the pages, seeking a formula for her own sorrow…”(Tolstoy 78).
Madame Bovary Madame Bovary is the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The eponymous heroine lives amidst the confines of a stifling marriage, and struggles against society’s expectations to fulfill her dreams of passion and excitement.
Anna Karenina Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, first published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Tolstoy clashed with editor Mikhail Katkov over political issues that arose in the final installment; therefore, the novel’s first complete appearance was in book form in 1878. Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Anna Karenina is known for its psychological insight into the central character, Anna, and her doomed affair with the dashing Count Vronsky.
Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are two novels that have been hailed as masterpieces of realist fiction. Both novels deal with the struggles of women who are confined by society’s expectations and long for more passion and excitement in their lives.
Emma Bovary is a wife and mother who turns to adultery to escape the boredom of her life, while Anna Karenina is a married woman who has an affair with a younger man. While both women suffer from the consequences of their actions, Emma Bovary’s story ends in tragedy, while Anna Karenina’s story ends in redemption.
Anna Karenina was a vivacious and active woman at the start of Leo Tolstoy’s novel. When we first meet Anna, she seems to be the model of perfection: a lady in command of her own destiny. He felt compelled to review her again – not because she was beautiful, or because she had elegance and unassuming grace, but because her lovely face expressed something especially sweet and tender while going past him.
Tolstoy describes Madame Bovary as an unsatisfied women who was always looking for something more. Madame Bovary caused her own downfall, she never learned from her mistakes and she paid the ultimate price. Tolstoy shows Anna Karenina as a tragic heroine who was destroyed by her own passions and desires.
Emma is a woman who is in love with the idea of being in love. She wants excitement and adventure, but does not want to work for it. Anna is a woman who is torn between her duty and her desire. She wants to be with Vronsky, but also does not want to leave her son or husband. In the end, Anna chooses her desire over everything else and pays the price.
In the following chapter, Anna appears to satisfy Tolstoy’s expectations regarding Dolly and Oblonskys marriage when she mend it. , but as with Emma, Anna has a shortfall in her reasoning: She can’t be satisfied with ordinary aspects of life such as her marital status or social gatherings. Anna longs to live out the same kind of romantic vision of life that Emma had read and imagined about. reading and comprehending everything didn’t give pleasure to Anna; that is, following the reflection in other people’s lives did not bring enjoyment.
What she wanted to get from reading was a confirmation of her own happiness and her right to happiness. And as she could not find this in ordinary life, she fancied that it might be found in the life of another, quite different sort of people among extraordinary circumstances and with peculiar surroundings (Tolstoy, 1899: p. 134). Tolstoys Madame Bovary has been read as a criticism of the bourgeois way of life and more specifically the ideology of romantic love.
The character Emma embodies many of the characteristics associated with the bourgeoisie: upward social mobility, materialism, individualism, superficiality, emotional instability, and self-indulgence. Anna Karenina can also be seen as a critique of the Russian aristocracy. Tolstoy creates a picture of an idle, self-indulgent, and immoral upper class. The characters in Anna Karenina are often compared to those in Madame Bovary. Tolstoy himself said that Madame Bovary was the model for Anna Karenina.
Madame Bovary is the story of a young woman, Emma Rouault, who grows up in a provincial town in Normandy, France during the early nineteen century. Emma is bored with her life and longs for something more exciting and romantic. She marries Charles Bovary, a boring and simple man who is unable to give her the excitement she craves. Emma has numerous affairs and eventually dies of arsenic poisoning.