The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830–1900

298 Pages·1996·30.77 MB·English

by  Bill Overton (auth.)

THE NOVEL OF FEMALE ADULTERY
Also by Bill Overton
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: Text and Performance
THE UNOFFICIAL TROLLOPE
THE WINTER'S TALE: The Critics Debate
The Novel of Fetnale
Adultery
Love and Gender in Continental
European Fiction, 1830-1900
Bill Overton
Senior Lectl/rer in English
LOl/ghborough University
First published in Great Britain 1996 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A cataloguc record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-25175-9 ISBN 978-1-349-25173-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25173-5
First published in the United States of America 1996 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-16500-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Overton, Bill.
The novel of female adultery: love and gender in continental
European fiction, 1830-1900 1 Bill Overton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-16500-0 (cloth)
I. Fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Adultery in
literature. I. Title.
PN3352.A38084 1996
809.3'9353-dc20 96-27423
CIP
© Bill Overton 1996
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1996
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Produced as camera-ready copy by the author using
Impression Publisher on an Acorn Archimedes
Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgements ix
Chronology x
Editions Used and References xiii
1 Female Adultery, Ideology and Nineteenth-Century 1
Fiction
2 Towards the Novel of Female Adultery: Chateaubriand, 24
Constant, Musset, Merimee
3 The Formation of the Novel of Female Adultery: Balzac 46
4 From Old Paradigms to New: Champfleury, Feydeau, 66
Flaubert
5 Alternatives: George Sand and Others 96
6 What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov 129
7 Protestant Fiction of Adultery: BHcher, Jacobsen, 157
Fontane
8 Church and State: E<;a de Queir6s, Alas, Gald6s 187
Notes 225
Bibliograplly 247
Index 265
v
Preface
During the second two-thirds of the nineteenth century a distinct
type of novel, dealing with female adultery, was widely produced
and widely read in Continental Europe. The leading features of
novels of this type are strikingly similar. With minor variations,
each is based on a plot in which a married woman from the middle
or upper classes is seduced by an unmarried man and comes to
grief. The examples discussed in this book, which originate from
France, Russia, Denmark, Germany, Portugal and Spain, not only
achieved large circulation in their own day, in translation as well as
in their original languages, but most have also become known as
classics of European writing. The type is further characterized by
an impersonal narrative voice, and by male authorship.
In his book Adultery in tile Novel: Contract and Transgression, Tony
Tanner puts forward several far-reaching claims about the
relationship between adultery and the novel, and indeed between
adultery and Western literature in general.! The aims of this study
are less sweeping, for it is confined to the particular kind of novel,
centred on female adultery, identified above. Nevertheless, the
topic is still of sufficient breadth and complexity to demand much.
First, it requires an attempt to understand the nineteenth-century
novel of adultery in history. This means both offering a history of
this type of fiction and placing it within its various cultural
contexts. Second, and as a corollary, it calls for analysis of the
specific forms taken by novels of adultery in different national
traditions and within different ideological frameworks. Although
works belonging to the tradition have much in common, each
comes out of a distinct cultural and historical formation, and the
story told in each is by no means the same. Third, and perhaps
most important, this book aims to demonstrate the crucial role
played in nineteenth-century adultery fiction by questions of
gender.
All the writers of the novels of adultery to be discussed came
from countries in which adultery was understood as a crime which
husbands as well as wives could commit. Nevertheless, a double
standard operated in each of these countries, and in most cases this
was vested both in law and in social practice. It is not by accident,
Preface vii
then, that the novel of adultery is specifically a novel of female
adultery. Yet, though it is well established that there existed a
tradition of novels of adultery in the nineteenth century,2 the term
itself conceals the fact which is most specific to it and which indeed
chiefly defines it as a tradition. No classic novel, let alone any
fictional tradition, is based on male adultery. The widely used term
'novel of adultery' is therefore a misnomer which masks a gender
bias both in the novels themselves and in the critical discourses
within which they have been interpreted. This is why I employ the
term 'novel of female adultery' instead.
The failure to recognize sufficiently the gender bias of nineteenth
century adultery fiction is the single most important limitation of
previous critical treatments of the subject. The most interesting and
ambitious of such treatments, Tony Tanner's, provides an example.
Tanner remarks in his Introduction that 'it is almost inevitably the
adulterous woman on which [sic] many nineteenth-century novels
focus' (p. 13). Yet, although he adds that this is 'a matter for later
comment', he spends comparatively little time in the rest of his long
book addressing its implications. The rather limited priority he
gives to gender is probably connected with the fact that all of the
philosophical literature he considers concerning marriage and
adultery - including work by Locke, Maine, Rousseau and Vico - is
written from a perspective which is patriarchal if not also, as in the
case of Vico, misogynist. The generalizations which result therefore
apply to particular philosophical or, better, ideological traditions;
they are not universally valid. Tanner does not recognize that the
view that 'adultery threatens all social bonds' (p. 29) is no absolute,
but the product of a way of thinking which is culturally and
historically produced. His assertion that 'society depends' on the
'interfamilial exchange of the daughter in marriage' (pp. 28-9) is
not true of all societies, whether pOSSible, historical or existing. No
one could guess from his book that the significance of adultery
might have been controversial, even in the nineteenth century. For
instance, as I wiII show, female novelists such as George Sand and
Emilia Pardo Bazan challenged orthodox thinking about marriage
and adultery; and not all of their male cowlterparts constructed
adultery in conventional ways. A case in point is the relationship
between attitudes to adultery and the availability or otherwise of
divorce, which varied across Europe. When Tanner remarks that
divorce is not an issue in the novels he considers, he fails to take
into account whether it was obtainable or not, and he refrains from
viii Preface
examining the assumptions which could allow it to be dismissed so
easily. Yet, as Chapter 7 will demonstrate, the novel of female
adultery took a different form in the few countries in which divorce
was both legal and, though not without difficulty, acceptable.
This book offers, then, a comparative approach to the history of
the novel of adultery from the perspective of gender. The opening
chapter defines the terms 'adultery' and 'novel of adultery', and
discusses how the form arose in Continental Europe, but failed to
appear in Britain. The next three chapters show how the novel of
female adultery developed in France from the traditions of the
libertine text and the Romantic confession during a period of
political reaction and of bourgeois consolidation; and the fifth
illustrates some alternatives, including the challenges mounted by
George Sand and other Frenchwomen. The final three chapters deal
with examples of the novel of female adultery from Russia,
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and Spain, demonstrating how it
functioned within various national traditions and ideologies.
To compare examples of the form from different cultures is to put
in question the common assumption that the novel of adultery is all
of a piece. Each writer whose work is discussed here used the form
in his own way and for his own purposes; each text is inflected by
the particular culture and history within which it was written. But
there is no canonical novel of female adultery written by a woman.
The agenda of the form is intrinsically male.
Acknowledgements
No study of any scope can be completed without incurring many
debts, and this is no exception. However, it is difficult to obtain
funding for so heterodox a project as mine has been, especially
within the prevailing climate of higher education in Britain. I
therefore have no grant-awarding bodies to thank for their support;
but I am very grateful to Loughborough University for allowing me
a year's study leave during which I could work on the project
almost uninterruptedly. I also wish to express my very great
appreciation of the help given by staff at the Pilkington Library,
Loughborough University, and at the other libraries I have used,
especially the British Library and the libraries of Nottingham,
Leicester and Cambridge Universities.
Most of my debts, however, are to individuals. I am grateful to
Professors Malcolm Jones and Richard Stites for their kindness and
courtesy in answering queries arising from Chapter 6; to Bill
Leatherbarrow, Michael Robinson and Hilary Owen for their help
in reading and commenting on drafts of Chapters 6, 7 and 8
respectively; to John Lucas and Marion Shaw for reading through
and commenting on the completed book in draft; to Chris White for
her suggestions of reading for Chapter 1 and of the drawing by
Gustav Klimt for the cover illustration; to Grace Overton, Susan
Overton and Helen Peberdy for encouragement and support; and
to colleagues in the Department of English and Drama at
Loughborough University for their backing and forbearance.
Finally, I wish to express special thanks for the help I have received
from two people who have read through and commented on the
book while I have been drafting it: Elaine Hobby, who also advised
on questions of translation from the Russian; and Keith Overton,
who also advised on questions of translation from the German. The
book has benefited greatly from all the help I have received;
responsibility for the failings which remain is mine.