Madame Bovary

The great parallel — adultery, provincial suffocation, a woman destroyed by desire. Tolstoy moralizes where Flaubert refuses to; compare their treatment of their heroines directly

Edna Pontellier shares Emma's disease — romantic desire that provincial society cannot contain — but Chopin writes from inside the feminist critique Flaubert intuited from outside

Dorothea Brooke has Emma's aspirations but channels them through moral seriousness; Eliot and Flaubert represent the two paths nineteenth-century realism could take with the unfulfilled woman

The German Emma Bovary — a woman destroyed by adultery and social convention, rendered with Fontane's own brand of Flaubertian restraint and irony

Flaubert's own companion piece — a young man's romantic education and its failure, set against the backdrop of the 1848 revolution; the male version of bovarysme

James learned directly from Flaubert — Isabel Archer's constraint within marriage echoes Emma's, but James uses a consciousness more aware of its own entrapment