Despite the increasing interest for a notion that turned out to be not only a literary but a wider cultural phenomenon worldwide, Greece has long remained an unchartered territory. Greek literature though and Modern Greek intellectuals in general couldn’t remain indifferent for something that shortly after its first «declaration» at the beginning of the 20th century by French philosopher Gilles de Gautier, who has coined the term after G. Flaubert’s famous heroine, gained rapidly momentum. Defined by Gautier as «the will to imagine oneself other than (s)he is», bovarysme depicted the inherent tendency to create an imagined or unrealistic conception of oneself, following Emma’s own predisposition — and the resulting sense of continuous unfulfillment — due to an abuse of reading romantic fiction. Modern Greek novelists didn’t fail to grasp the notion’s potential in terms of social psychology and literary characterology. They offered a whole array of different representations, using them as a spectre in order to comprehend and comment on society’s recurrent derailments and misconceptions. I will trace an outline of bovarysme’s presence as a leitmotiv in the works of major as well as minor Μodern Greek authors during the twentieth century, which will prove quite revealing not only of the struggles for symbolic power within the Greek literary field but also of the cultural and political tendencies and variations it led to before and after the Second World War.