Abstract
This article seeks to challenge interpretations of the adultery plot as a subversive current in nineteenth-century literature by examining two texts that are often dismissed by contemporary critics: Les bourgeois de Molinchart (1854), a novel by the French writer Champfleury (the pseudonym of Jules Husson), and El gran Galeoto (1881), a play by the Spanish playwright José Echegaray. In each of these works, the rumor of the adultery precedes and to a large extent precipitates the infidelity at the end of the work. In committing adultery, therefore, the protagonists are not rising up against social norms so much as capitulating to the expectations of society, enacting a plot that has been projected upon them. The essay compares and contrasts the treatment of the rumor mill in the two works and examines the literary strategies that the writers use to undercut a transgressive reading of the infidelity plot.
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Notes
For an overview of theories of the adultery novel, see the introduction to Amann (2006).
In what follows, I will cite the 1859 edition of the novel.
In what follows, I cite the Castalia edition of the play.
This inversion is clear in the dedication of the work, which he attributes “a la buena voluntad de todos, no a méritos míos” (p. 71).
Some critics have considered the in-laws as the incarnation of public gossip. Samper, for example, describes Mercedes, Severo and Pepito as a “trio secondaire des bourreaux […] porteparole de la calomnie et cause du conflit initial” (1992, pp. 88–89), and Goenaga and Maguna (1971, p. 399) call them “los victimarios, el trío que se convierte en portavoz de la calumnia”. Gonzalo Sobejano (1978, p. 104) points to the absence of an “intermediario […] entre los protagonistas y el coro de murmuradores”. It is important to note, however, that the three characters differ considerably in their reactions and their interpretations. Pepito’s long monologue in Act II suggests a very nuanced understanding of the situation, one that recognizes the positions of both Ernesto and society at large. It is perhaps more accurate to describe the three characters as representatives of ideological and social codes—particularly, the notion of the importance of appearances—rather than as incarnations of the gossip or of evil in society. They function as intermediaries to the extent that they attempt to reconcile the conduct of the family with the expectations of society.
As Paolini observes, “el público siente su responsabilidad en lo sucedido, sin embargo, estéticamente purificado, aplaude frenéticamente mientras algo queda adentro, en su conciencia” (1995, pp. 485–486).
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Amann, E. Adultery and the rumor mill: Les bourgeois de Molinchart and El gran galeoto . Neohelicon 40, 183–197 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0178-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0178-9