Flaubert's Descendants

Flaubert's influence on later fiction is so pervasive it is almost invisible. Henry James, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov all acknowledged their debt to him. The whole tradition of literary realism — fiction that depicts ordinary life with precision and without moral commentary — flows from Madame Bovary. The term "Bovarism" — the tendency to see yourself as something other than what you are, confusing daydream with reality — even entered psychology. Emma endures as one of fiction's most discussed characters because she embodies a universal flaw: the belief that real life should match our fantasies, and the spiral that follows when it cannot.