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.[1]
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."[2]
The term bovarysme collectif was used by Arnold van Gennep (1908) and 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.