In reply to:

1934 T. S. Eliot Eliz. Essays, 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. 1936 A. Huxley Olive Tree, The French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier, has said that one of the essential faculties of the human being is ‘the power granted to man to conceive himself as other than he is’. He calls this power ‘bovarism’ after the heroine of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. Ibid. People have bovarized themselves into the likeness of every kind of real or imaginary being. Ibid. Realizing, if only in words, his bovaristic dreams. 1952 H. Levin in Ess. in Crit. If to Bovarize is simply to daydream. Ibid. An all-pervasive state of mind: Bovarism.

I notice each of the sources explains Bovarism for their readers. Does this mean that each thought of it as a nonce word they were creating rather than as using a word that was already part of the lexicon?

Bingley


Bingley