Everything she wanted, was a great love that was going to last a life time. Unfortunately her fate never gave her the kind of love she used to read about in her favorite books. Solitude and discontent pushed her to start an inexorable search of her true Love, but at the same time she was pushed in many lovers arms that never knew how to make her feel loved. This is how she started to take refuge in her books, to daydream and believe that true reality was the one she used to imagine and not the sad one she was actually living; a state of suffering that drove her to commit suicide. The novel “Madame Bovary” provoked a new phenomenon called bovarism, a tendency toward escapist daydreaming. Bovarism represents a personification in novel's characters, the creation of a parallel reality in which we are the main characters.
This phenomenon has suffered a strong literary criticism, especially because it has been considered to be the expression of a bored bourgeoisie of the 19th century and the incapability of accepting reality. Nowadays, we are in an epoch were rationalism took over, we all feel far from the possibility to take refugee in an ephemeral and imaginary world, like the one we can find in novels. But are we really sure that bovarism is a phenomenon that only belongs to the past and not in the present?
I'm sure that most of the people would answer that it is impossible for a modern man to think about taking refuge in novels imaginary worlds, but what about if we substitute the word “book” with the word “movie?" At this point we would have few doubts about affirming that bovarism doesn't exist anymore! Who have never imagined to impersonate a movie character?
Who have never dreamed of an admirer like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, a dance with Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, to have super powers like Superman, or to discover new worlds as in Star Trek? Bovarism is not only a literal concept we can find in literature's books, but in my opinion it is a growing phenomenon, especially in the contemporary reality where wars and economic crisis have contributed in creating a terror's state of mind, from which we try to escape more and more day by day, taking refugee in a movie instead of a book. Movies are the main characters of the modern bovarism, that can only be good, by letting us forget about the anguishes and torments of modern life.
Enjoy the trailer attached. Sucker Punch is about a little girl who is trying to hide from the pain caused by her evil stepfather and lobotomy. She ends up in a mental institution and while there she starts to imagine an alternative reality. She plans to escape from that imaginary world but to do that she needs to steal five objects before she is caught by a vile man. The story is set in the 1950's. As we can see....Bovarism is alive and well...