Bovarysme is a term derived fromGustave Flaubert'sMadame Bovary (1857), coined byJules de Gaultier in his 1892 essay on Flaubert's novel, "Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l’œuvre de Flaubert". It denotes a tendency towardsescapistdaydreaming 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 suggestedOthello's last great speech as an example: "I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed thisbovarysme, 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 byArnold van Gennep (1908) to critique self-perception of Liberian people and byJean Price-Mars in the 1920s to critique Haitian populations' embrace of French forms and rejection of local (Haitian as African diasporic and indigenous) forms.