Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina might belong to the genre of the novel of adultery and we could simply read them as a more or less vulgar story of a domestic betrayal within the range of the realistic novel. Running from desire for adventure to true love, adultery at first stands as liberation and after it has consumed its love parable, as guilt. Paralleling Wang Anyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrows with Flaubert’s and Tolstoy’s work, we shall reconsider them as novels of disillusionment based on false fatalism and self-deception. This article suggests a theoretical arch linking up Western modern realism and Chinese postmodern realism into an a-historical dimension of desperation.

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