Do humans like to fantasise? Is the pope a Catholic?

CULTURE SHOCK:EMMA IS, like, so disconnected from the real world. She spends half her time immersed in virtual realities, drooling over vacuous celebs or obsessed with romantic fantasies. In her head she lives in an artificial universe, an elaborate network of fictions. It's not surprising that she has no patience for actual human relationships in all their messy imperfections.

Emma is the sum of all fears about what immersion in an online culture is doing to our brains in the early 21st century. There is now a widespread sense that we are experiencing something radically new in cultural history: the possibility of living much of our lives in parallel mental universes that become more real and urgent than day-to-day existence.

Pope Benedict crystallised some of these fears last week, when he warned of the dangers that accompany the benefits of online social networks, “the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence . . . dangers such as enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence . . . the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself . . . Does the danger exist that we may be less present to those whom we encounter in our everyday life? Is there a risk of being more distracted because our attention is fragmented and absorbed in a world ‘other’ than the one in which we live?”

Emma embodies all the pope's anxieties quite precisely. Her sense of self is fragmented by her absorption in a parallel mental existence. And this will have disastrous consequences for her own life – consequences that will drive her to suicide. If you know Emma, you will realise the pope is spot on. And you can in fact know her very well, for she is the protagonist of one of the great novels, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It was published in 1856 and is set two decades earlier.

Emma Bovary’s brain is shaped by her exposure to (in Lydia Davis’s splendid new Penguin translation) “the greasy dust of those old lending libraries”.

She is steeped in cheap novels: “Lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions”. She becomes obsessed with what we now call celebrities: “Theirs was a life elevated above others, between heaven and earth, among the storm clouds, something sublime. As for the rest of the world, it was lost, without any exact place, as though it did not exist.” People have been living in virtual worlds for as long as they have had the luxury of doing so – certainly since the dawn of modernity.

Even if we go back all the way to Chaucer's Canterbury Taleswe find the Prioress, the supposed acme of virginal propriety but in fact a devotee of the fashionable modes of courtly love. She observes the niceties of fashionable courtly dress and manners. And attached to her rosary beads is a shiny gold brooch engraved with the decidedly inappropriate motto Amor Vincit Omnia– love conquers all. This is a piece of mediaeval bling, the motto the equivalent of a celeb's tattoo.

Who embodies the danger of becoming "absorbed in a world 'other' than the one in which we live" better than Don Quixote(1605)? He lives in the virtual world of knightly romances. "Is it not an amazing thing," asks the curate, "to see how ready this unfortunate gentleman is to give credit to these fictitious reports, only because they have the air of the extravagant stories in books of knight-errantry?" Cervantes's deluded knight gave his name to a moral panic of the 18th and 19th centuries: the the dangers of novels being read by impressionable females.

Emma Bovary is the ultimate “female Quixote”, a phrase first used in the title of Charlotte Lennox’s novel of 1752, though the idea goes back well into the 17th century. Women, especially young women, would have their minds so badly turned by endless hours spent in the virtual realms of romantic fiction that they would become deluded fantasists, unable to function as wives and mothers.

Two 18th-century Irish writers tapped the comic potential of these anxieties. Biddy Tipkin in Richard Steele's The Tender Husband (1705) has a head "full of Shepherds, Knights, Flowery Meads, Groves and Streams" from her devouring of fashionable French novels. Lydia Languish in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals(1775) is entirely under the sway of the novels she is reading: The Fatal Connection, The Mistakes of the Heart, The Tears of Sensibility, The Delicate Distressand so on. She will not marry the hero if she knows he is rich and respectable, and therefore unlike a fictional lover, so he has to pretend to be penniless.

Not only does Lydia Languish remind us of those who live in online fantasies, but Sheridan also mocks the moral panic over the effects of excessive immersion in virtual worlds. Sir Anthony Absolute sees novels as the spawn of the devil and claims “a circulating library in a town is the evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge”. While we now see public libraries as one of the great achievements of the Victorians, it is no harm to remember that their growth evoked fears similar to those now expressed about social networks: “Many are the crimes brought about by the disordered imagination of a reader of sensational . . . rubbish, whilst many a home is neglected . . . owing to the all-absorbed novel-reading wife.”

So, yes, some people get excessively absorbed in a virtual existence online, in the romance of celebrity, or both. And, no, this is not a good thing. But it’s not a new thing either. Cultures, technologies and contexts change immensely, but the human mind doesn’t change that much. It is always drawn to worlds of its own making and always tempted to obliterate the one that exists beyond itself.

As Andrew Marvell wrote in the 17th century: “The Mind, that Ocean where each kind / Does straight its own resemblance find; / Yet it creates, transcending these, / Far other Worlds, and other Seas; / Annihilating all that’s made.”