The escape of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina Reading offers people an escape from the ordinariness of everyday life. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, dissatisfied with their lives, pursued their dreams of ecstasy and love through reading. At the beginning of both novels Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary made active decisions about their future, although these decisions were not always rational. As their lives began to disintegrate, Emma and Anna tried to live out their dreams and fantasies through reading. Reading served like morphine allowing them to escape the pain of everyday life, but reading like morphine isolated them from the rest of the world by preventing them from making rational decisions. It was Anna and Emma's loss of reasoning and isolation that pushed them towards their downfall. Emma at the beginning of the novel was someone who made active decisions about what she wanted. She considered herself master of her destiny. Her relationship with Rudolphe came about after her decision to live out her fantasies and escape the ordinariness of her life and her marriage to Charles. Emma's active decisions, however, were increasingly based on her fantasies, as the novel progressed. The lust he falls victim to is the product of the debilitating adventures his mind undertakes. These adventures are fueled by the novels he reads. They were full of love stories, lovers, mistresses, haunted women fainting in lonely country houses, postmen killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, dark forests, throbbing hearts, promises, sobs, tears and kisses, boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the bushes and gentlemen as brave as lions, as gentle as lambs, as virtuous as no one truly is, and always ready to shed rivers of tears. (Flaubert 31.) Emma's already weakened reasoning and disappointing marriage to Charles caused Emma to retreat into book reading, fashioning a life based not on reality but on fantasy. Anna Karenina at the beginning of Tolstoy's novel was a bright and energetic woman. When Tolstoy first introduces us to Anna, she appears as the model of virtue, a woman responsible for her own destiny.