Bovarysme
Bovarysme is a motif of French literature and was named after the heroine of the novel Madame Bovary . Moeurs de province (1857) named by Gustave Flaubert .
After the novel, the French philosopher Jules de Gaultier (1858–1942) coined the term bovarysme , which was given an exemplary meaning: Mme Bovary suffered from an exalted imagination , which was induced not least by clandestine reading of novels and which led to everyday life in her petty bourgeois and provincial conditions no longer mastered. Her imagination was shaped by cheesy novels that were all about love and lovers, in which women passed out in lonely pavilions, postilons delivered love letters that were full of prayers, heartbreak, sobs, tears and kisses, moonlight and the chirping of nightingales, the moaning of dying swans, the sound of harps over night-black lakes, falling autumn leaves, pure virgins and noble men, courageous as lions and gentle as lambs with tear-stained cheeks. Charged with these inflated expectations, she had to be disappointed by her modest life in the provinces and by her good but insignificant husband inevitably and fail because of reality. Mme Bovary finally took her own life after various attempts to escape from her empty existence ( escapism ).
Other important examples are Hedda Gabler ( Ibsen , 1890) and Edna Pontellier ( Das Erwachen , Kate Chopin , 1899).
With a variant from Normandy transposed into the present, Roger Grenier shows that the bovarysme has not lost its relevance.
literature
- J. de Gaultier: Le Bovarysme. La psychologie dans l'œuvre de Flaubert. Paris 1892.
- B. Klinger: Emma Bovary and her sisters. The misunderstood woman. Variations of a literary type from Balzac to Thomas Mann . Rheinbach 1986.
- Patrice Delbourg: Annie Ernaux . Le bovarysme est un humanisme. In L'Événement du jeudi . January 23-29, 1997
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stephen Heath: Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary . Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-32805-5 , pp. 142 . ( limited online version in Google Book Search - USA )
- ^ Nouvelle Revue Française , February 1988, no. 421