{{Short description|Term describing fanciful romantic daydreaming}} '''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.<ref>Baldick, Chris (2008). ''Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms''. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press</ref>
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."<ref>{{Cite book|title=T.S. Eliot Selected Essays|last=Eliot|first=T.S.|publisher=Faber and Faber|year=1999|isbn=0-571-19746-9|location=London|pages=131}}</ref> 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".<ref>{{Cite web |title=Bowaryzm – definicja i przykłady występowania — Pani Bovary |url=https://poezja.org/wz/interpretacja/7546/Bowaryzm_definicja_i_przyklady_wystepowania |access-date=2024-08-24 |website=poezja.org}}</ref>
The term bovarysme collectif was used by Arnold van Gennep (1908) to critique self-perception of Liberian people and by 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.
==See also== *Walter Mitty
==References== <references />
{{Madame Bovary}}
Category:Daydreaming