Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684-1890 0 2 4- 0 1- 1 0 2 ct - e n n o C e v a gr al P o - s m o Tr et i k e ot bli bi s et sit er v ni U o d t e s n e c m - li o c ct. e n n o c e v a gr al p w. w w m o al fr eri at m ht g yri p o C 10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton 0 2 4- 0 1- 1 0 2 ct - e n n o C e v a gr al P o - s m o Tr et i k e ot bli bi s et sit er v ni U o d t e s n e c m - li o c ct. e n n o c e v a gr al p w. w w m o al fr eri at m ht g yri p o C 10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684-1890 Theories and Circumtexts Bill Overton 20 4- 0 Reader in Literature 1- 1 Loughborough University 20 ct - e n n o C e v a gr al P o - s m o Tr et i k e ot bli bi s et sit er v ni U o d t e s n e c m - li o c ct. e n n o c e v a gr al p w. w w m o al fr eri at m ht g yri p o C palgrave macmillan 10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton © Bill Overton 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. 0 2 Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication 04- may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 11- 0 2 The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work ct - in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ne n First published 2002 by Co e PALGRAVE MACMILLAN av Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and algr C17o5m pFaifnthie As vaenndu er,e pNreewse Ynotarkti,v Nes.Y t.h 1ro0u0g1h0out the world so - P m PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Tro Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. et i Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom ek aUnndio ont haenrd cootuhnetrr iceosu. nPtarligersa.ve is a registered trademark in the European bibliot s ISBN 0-333-77080-3 sitet This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully ver managed and sustained forest sources. Uni o A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. d t e s Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data en c OveFrtioctnio, nBsi llo.f female adultery, 1684—1890 : theories and circumtexts / Bill m - li o Ovpe.r tcomn.. ect.c n 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. w criticism. 6. Women in literature. I. Title. w m 8P2R38.3000.9A'3375 3O—94d c220102 al fro 2002072306 ateri m 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 ght 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 yri p o Printed and bound in Great Britain by C Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne Produced as camera-ready copy by the author using Impression Publisher on an Acorn Kinetic RiscPC. 10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton Contents Preface vi 20 4- 0 Acknowledgements ix 11- 0 2 Literary Chronology X ect - n n o Editions Used and References xiii C e v a gr I THEORIES Pal o - s 1 Theorizing the Novel of Wifely Adultery 3 om Tr 2 Tony Tanner: Adultery in the Novel 20 ket i e ot 3 Children and Childlessness in the Novel of Wifely 49 bli bi Adultery ets sit er v II CIRCUMTEXTS Uni o d t 4 Adultery in Early British Fiction 71 se n e c 5 Ideology of Femininity and Criminal Conversation: 102 m - li 1728-71 o c ct. e 6 Adultery, Revolution and Reaction: 1773-1814 131 nn o c e 7 After Madame Bovary: Female Adultery in Zola 154 av gr al 8 Parody, Entropy, Eclipse: Huysmans, Ceard, 187 w.p w Maupassant w m o Notes 219 al fr eri Bibliography 249 mat ht Index 265 yrig p o C 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 w 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 C 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 a appropriate (as in the title), and to avoid monotony, I sometimes gr al use a phrase referring to 'female adultery', or even the term 'novel o - P of adultery', instead. s m o 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 e 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 o 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 e 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 et 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 U 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 m ht g yri p o C 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