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 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 WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 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.