Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684-1890 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 10.1057/9780230286207 - Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890, Bill Overton Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684-1890 Theories and Circumtexts Bill Overton Reader in Literature Loughborough University Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 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. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0-333-77080-3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Overton, Bill. Fictions of female adultery, 1684—1890 : theories and circumtexts / Bill Overton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-333-77080-3 1. English fiction—History and criticism. 2. Adultery in literature. 3. Literature, Comparative—English and French. 4. Literature, Comparative—French and English. 5. French fiction—History and criticism. 6. Women in literature. I. Title. PR830.A37 O94 2002 823.009'353—dc21 2002072306 10 987654321 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by - 2011-04-20 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 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 Acknowledgements ix Literary Chronology X Editions Used and References xiii I THEORIES 1 Theorizing the Novel of Wifely Adultery 3 2 Tony Tanner: Adultery in the Novel 20 3 Children and Childlessness in the Novel of Wifely 49 Adultery II CIRCUMTEXTS 4 Adultery in Early British Fiction 71 5 Ideology of Femininity and Criminal Conversation: 102 1728-71 6 Adultery, Revolution and Reaction: 1773-1814 131 7 After Madame Bovary: Female Adultery in Zola 154 8 Parody, Entropy, Eclipse: Huysmans, Ceard, 187 Maupassant Notes 219 Bibliography 249 Index 265 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 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 Fiction, 1830-1900^ is a comparative study of leading examples of a kind of fiction that flourished in the later nineteenth century. It attempts to chart how and where this tradition originated, and to suggest why it never took root in Britain or North America; but most of it is concerned with analysing nineteenth-century fiction of adultery, chiefly novels, from France, Russia, Germany, Denmark, Portugal and Spain. The wide scope of this enterprise, and the limits on what could go into a single book, made it impossible for me to deal at the same time with several other important matters: in particular, the questions of how the novel of adultery has been and might further be theorized, the role of adultery in earlier British fiction, and the development of the novel of adultery in France after 1860 to the point when it faded out about thirty years later. To treat these topics is the aim of the present book, which is intended to be read alongside its predecessor and to complement it. A companion study also affords other benefits - I hope for readers as well as author. One of these is the opportunity to take into account work on the subject published since 1996, especially the collection of essays edited by Nicholas White and Naomi Segal, Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery From Antiquity to the 1990s, and White's The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction.2 Another is the chance to refine the phrase I used in The Novel of Female Adultery to identify the type of fiction I am investigating. The reason I employed that phrase, and put it in my title, is that the term used by previous critics, 'the novel of adultery', fails to indicate a fundamental fact about the fiction to which it refers: that it is a gendered form, grounded on the representation of female experience by men. Adultery by men often figures in novels by both male and female writers of the nineteenth and other centuries, but it is very rarely their central subject, and - 2011-04-20 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 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 more precise term is 'novel of wifely adultery'. This first struck me when, researching the present book, I came across the phrase 'wifely adultery' at the start of Lawrence Stone's Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 A Because it is more accurate, the term 'novel of wifely adultery' is the one I employ most often here, though where appropriate (as in the title), and to avoid monotony, I sometimes use a phrase referring to 'female adultery', or even the term 'novel of adultery', instead. This book is divided into two parts, the first of which addresses theory. It begins with a chapter discussing what is at issue in theorizing the novel of adultery and setting out the approach and method adopted in the rest of the study. Two further chapters deal respectively with the most important contribution to the field so far, Tony Tanner's Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression,5 and, through reference to work by Loralee MacPike and Naomi Segal,6 with ways of theorizing the role in adultery fiction of patterns of childbearing and childlessness. The second part of the book considers 'circumtexts' of the novel of wifely adultery - in other words, narratives of adultery that are more or less ^marginal to the form itself. First, there are three chapters on adultery in British fiction up to the Romantic period. The chief aims of these are to demonstrate the importance of the theme of adultery in British novels up to about the end of the eighteenth century, to show how the theme was increasingly squeezed out, and so to further help account for its subsequent virtual absence from respectable British fiction till near the end of the nineteenth century. Second, there are two chapters on adultery in later nineteenth- century French fiction. Here the main objectives are to show what happened to the treatment of the theme after Flaubert, especially during the Naturalist movement in France of the 1870s and 1880s. - 2011-04-20 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 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.