Bovarysme is
a disposition towards escapist day dreaming in which one imagines oneself as a
heroine or hero of a romance and
refuses to acknowledge everyday realities. This condition (a later version of
Don Quixote's madness) can be found in fictional characters before Emma Bovary,
the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary (1857), gave
it her name: for example, Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
(1818) makes similar confusions between fiction and reality. Novelists have
often exposed bovarysme to ironic analysis, thus warning against the delusive
enchantments of the romance tradition.