Fictions of female adultery, 1684-1890: theories and circumtexts

305 Pages·2002·15.18 MB·English

by  Bill Overton

Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684-1890
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10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton
Fictions of Female
Adultery, 1684-1890
Theories and Circumtexts
Bill Overton 20
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Loughborough University 20
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palgrave
macmillan
10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton
© Bill Overton 2002
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ne
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First published 2002 by Co
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN av
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C17o5m pFaifnthie As vaenndu er,e pNreewse Ynotarkti,v Nes.Y t.h 1ro0u0g1h0out the world so - P
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. d t
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data en
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OveFrtioctnio, nBsi llo.f female adultery, 1684—1890 : theories and circumtexts / Bill m - li
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Ovpe.r tcomn.. ect.c
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Includes bibliographical references and index. on
ISBN 0-333-77080-3 ec
v
1. English fiction—History and criticism. 2. Adultery in literature. gra
3. Literature, Comparative—English and French. 4. Literature, al
p
Comparative—French and English. 5. French fiction—History and w.
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criticism. 6. Women in literature. I. Title. w
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10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton
Contents
Preface vi 20
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Acknowledgements ix 11-
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Literary Chronology X ect -
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Editions Used and References xiii C
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I THEORIES Pal
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1 Theorizing the Novel of Wifely Adultery 3 om
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2 Tony Tanner: Adultery in the Novel 20 ket i
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3 Children and Childlessness in the Novel of Wifely 49 bli
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Adultery ets
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II CIRCUMTEXTS Uni
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4 Adultery in Early British Fiction 71 se
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5 Ideology of Femininity and Criminal Conversation: 102 m - li
1728-71 o
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6 Adultery, Revolution and Reaction: 1773-1814 131 nn
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7 After Madame Bovary: Female Adultery in Zola 154 av
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8 Parody, Entropy, Eclipse: Huysmans, Ceard, 187 w.p
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Maupassant w
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Notes 219 al fr
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Bibliography 249 mat
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Index 265 yrig
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10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton
Preface
This book is a sequel and companion to one first published in 1996.
The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European
0
Fiction, 1830-1900^ is a comparative study of leading examples of a 4-2
0
kind of fiction that flourished in the later nineteenth century. It 11-
0
attempts to chart how and where this tradition originated, and to ct - 2
suggest why it never took root in Britain or North America; but ne
n
most of it is concerned with analysing nineteenth-century fiction of Co
e
adultery, chiefly novels, from France, Russia, Germany, Denmark, av
gr
Portugal and Spain. The wide scope of this enterprise, and the Pal
limits on what could go into a single book, made it impossible for o -
s
m
me to deal at the same time with several other important matters: in o
Tr
particular, the questions of how the novel of adultery has been and et i
k
might further be theorized, the role of adultery in earlier British ote
fiction, and the development of the novel of adultery in France after bibli
s
1860 to the point when it faded out about thirty years later. To treat et
sit
these topics is the aim of the present book, which is intended to be er
v
read alongside its predecessor and to complement it. Uni
o
A companion study also affords other benefits - I hope for d t
e
readers as well as author. One of these is the opportunity to take ns
e
c
into account work on the subject published since 1996, especially m - li
the collection of essays edited by Nicholas White and Naomi Segal, o
c
Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery From Antiquity to the 1990s, and ect.
n
n
White's The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French o
c
Fiction.2 Another is the chance to refine the phrase I used in The ve
a
gr
Novel of Female Adultery to identify the type of fiction I am al
p
investigating. The reason I employed that phrase, and put it in my w.
w
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title, is that the term used by previous critics, 'the novel of m
o
adultery', fails to indicate a fundamental fact about the fiction to al fr
which it refers: that it is a gendered form, grounded on the eri
at
representation of female experience by men. Adultery by men often m
ht
figures in novels by both male and female writers of the nineteenth g
yri
and other centuries, but it is very rarely their central subject, and op
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most writers - Tolstoy is an honourable exception - seem to take it
virtually for granted. The stock term 'novel of adultery' is therefore
at best shorthand and at worst a misnomer. Because that term
masks the gender bias inherent in the form, 'novel of female
vi
10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton
Preface vii
adultery' is better. However, there is a further complication. As I
pointed out in my previous book, 'the great majority of novels of
adultery deal with single adultery on the part of the female' -
'single' referring to adultery in which only one of the partners is
married.3 For this reason, as I should have realized at the time, a 0
2
more precise term is 'novel of wifely adultery'. This first struck me 04-
1-
when, researching the present book, I came across the phrase 01
2
'wifely adultery' at the start of Lawrence Stone's Road to Divorce: ct -
e
England 1530-1987 A Because it is more accurate, the term 'novel of nn
o
wifely adultery' is the one I employ most often here, though where eC
v
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appropriate (as in the title), and to avoid monotony, I sometimes gr
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use a phrase referring to 'female adultery', or even the term 'novel o - P
of adultery', instead. s
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This book is divided into two parts, the first of which addresses Tr
theory. It begins with a chapter discussing what is at issue in ket i
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theorizing the novel of adultery and setting out the approach and bliot
method adopted in the rest of the study. Two further chapters deal bi
s
et
respectively with the most important contribution to the field so sit
far, Tony Tanner's Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression,5 niver
and, through reference to work by Loralee MacPike and Naomi o U
Segal,6 with ways of theorizing the role in adultery fiction of ed t
s
n
patterns of childbearing and childlessness. The second part of the e
c
book considers 'circumtexts' of the novel of wifely adultery - in m - li
other words, narratives of adultery that are more or less ^marginal co
ct.
to the form itself. First, there are three chapters on adultery in ne
n
British fiction up to the Romantic period. The chief aims of these co
e
v
are to demonstrate the importance of the theme of adultery in gra
British novels up to about the end of the eighteenth century, to pal
w.
show how the theme was increasingly squeezed out, and so to w
w
further help account for its subsequent virtual absence from m
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respectable British fiction till near the end of the nineteenth century. al fr
Second, there are two chapters on adultery in later nineteenth- ateri
m
century French fiction. Here the main objectives are to show what ht
g
happened to the treatment of the theme after Flaubert, especially yri
p
during the Naturalist movement in France of the 1870s and 1880s. Co
Together, the five chapters on 'circumtexts' help define the novel of
wifely adultery more closely by considering alternatives in Britain,
before it was invented, and in France, once it was all too common.
They cast light not only on the history of the form but on the
various ideological and other imperatives behind it. I hope they are
also of interest as studies of the narratives with which they deal.
10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton
viii Preface
Some readers may be puzzled by my decision to combine in the
same book a discussion of theoretical issues and, in particular,
extended analysis of texts from two very different novelistic
traditions - different not only linguistically and culturally but also
historically. I hope the theoretical part of the book needs no 0
2
justification. Although critics have approached adultery fiction 04-
1-
from a range of theoretical positions, none has considered what 01
2
kinds of method and approach are most appropriate, and the ct -
e
complexity of the topic requires that such questions be tackled. At nn
o
the same time, since the novel of wifely adultery is a cross-cultural eC
v
a
form, it demands comparative criticism. Although it developed gr
al
furthest in France, examples occur in most other European o - P
countries in the nineteenth century, and it has important ms
o
antecedents in Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain. Any Tr
attempt to theorize the form or to generalize about it must therefore et i
k
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be based on a wide range of novels from different national ot
bli
traditions. In Tlie Novel of Female Adultery I gave part of that basis; bi
s
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here I expand it by considering not only early British and later sit
French adultery narratives, but also, in Chapter 2, Rousseau's Julie, ver
ni
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or the New Heloise and Goethe's Elective Affinities. The importance of o
the earlier British narratives is in part that, although they did not ed t
s
influence the form, they help illuminate what is at issue in it and en
c
why, in Britain and North America, adultery fiction was all but m - li
suppressed for most of the nineteenth century. co
ct.
One way of explaining why there was no Anglophone tradition ne
n
o
of adultery fiction in the nineteenth century is to say that it had c
e
v
flourished only too vigorously already - so vigorously that gra
nineteenth-century moralists were determined not only to have no pal
w.
more of it but even to forget, as far as possible, that it had ever w
w
existed. The scholarship of the last twenty or so years has done om
much to restore the loss, and the three chapters in this book on al fr
adultery in early British fiction do their best to add to the recovery. ateri
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10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the support and help without which this
study could not have been completed within the four years or so it 20
4-
has taken - or even at all. To Loughborough University and to the 1-0
1
United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Board I owe not 20
only the year's study leave that enabled progress with the project ct -
e
n
that would otherwise have been impossible, but also remission n
o
C
from my teaching that, though modest, has eased its latter stages. In ve
a
particular I thank Maurizio Calbi, Andrew Dix, and Catie Gill, who gr
al
P
have carried out various of my teaching responsibilities so well, o -
and Ian Clarke and Elaine Hobby for corresponding care with my ms
o
Padilmkiinngistotrna tiLoinb.r aIr ya lsoof aLpopurgehcbiaotreo uggreha tUlyn itvheer swityo,r ke sopfe csitaalflfy aitn thites ket i Tr
e
Inter-Library Loan Department, and of the other libraries I have bliot
used, especially the British Library and the libraries of Cambridge, sbi
et
Leicester and Nottingham Universities. sit
er
Other kinds of support have helped a lot too. Earlier versions of niv
U
parts of Chapters 1 and 3 first appeared in the Modern Language o
d t
Review, 94 (1999), and I am grateful for the comments of the se
n
anonymous reader, for the advice of Malcolm Cook as editor, and ce
for permission to revise and reprint. It is also a pleasure to m - li
o
acknowledge responses to drafts of parts of Chapters 2 and 3 from ct.c
e
colleagues at research seminars in the Department of English and n
n
o
Drama of Loughborough University, and to a draft of part of ec
v
a
Chapter 2 from members of the Seminar for Research in Progress at gr
al
the Arts Faculty of the University of Northumbria, especially Allan w.p
w
Ingram. Others who have given particular help and encouragement w
m
are Mary Orr and Jennifer Birkett; Grace, Keith, George, Henry and o
Julie Overton and Sally Andreasen; and Chris White, who advised al fr
eri
on possible cover designs, read and commented on drafts of at
m
Chapters 7 and 8, and suggested further reading for the latter. ht
g
Finally, Elaine Hobby has contributed to the progress of the book in yri
p
o
more ways than I can say, not only by reading and commenting on C
all of it in draft, in the case of some parts several times, but by
giving constant companionship and support.
IX
10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton