Abstract
Given the importance of matters of inheritance and legitimacy in the novel of wifely adultery, it is not surprising that two of the most interesting critical approaches to this kind of fiction have focused on questions raised by the transgressive woman’s childbearing. As I have indicated in Chapter 1, one of the main tenets by which the double standard of sexual morality was rationalized in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe was that of legitimate inheritance. On the grounds of rights to inheritance and the continuance of the male line, it was generally held that the wife should not have sexual contact with any man but her husband, in case offspring conceived outside the marriage might covertly supplant his own. On such grounds alone, and leaving aside what may underlie them,1 much is at stake in the role of children in the fiction of wifely adultery. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, through reference to a range of examples, mostly novels of wifely adultery but also several that border on or foreshadow the form, it analyses patterns both of childbearing and childlessness. Second, it considers and evaluates two previous treatments of the question from approaches that are in several respects quite different. My approach is the one I employ throughout the book.
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Notes
In The Name of the Mother: Writing Illegitimacy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), Marie Maclean identifies three possible motives for a husband acknowledging children not fathered by himself: ‘convenience, such as acquiring an heir’, ‘hypocrisy, such as not losing face’, and ‘love’ (p. 50). Balzac’s novel gives no priority to the third reason and little to the second.
See Kathryn J. Crecelius, Family Romances: George Sand’s Early Novels (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 127–40.
See C. J. G. Turner, ‘Divorce and Anna Karenina’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 23 (1987), 97–116; and A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1993), pp. 150, 158, 162.
See, e.g., J. P. Stern, Re-Interpretations: Seven Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964; repr. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 322; and F. W. J. Hemmings, ‘Realism in Spain and Portugal’, in The Age of Realism, ed. by F. W. J. Hemmings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 265–322 (p. 317).
For a discussion of Eca’s relation to Naturalism and other movements of the time, see Alexander Coleman, Ega de Queiros and European Realism (New York and London: New York University Press, 1980). 19. Partly on this ground, Alison Sinclair argues that ‘La Regenta is a novel only apparently about adultery’ (‘The Need for Zeal and the Dangers of Jealousy: Identity and Legitimacy in La Regenta’, in Scarlet Letters, pp. 174–85 [p. 175]). It is, however, undeniable that the action of the whole novel pivots on the heroine’s seduction, and that the novel has much in common with previous adultery fiction. 20. See Harriet S. Turner, ‘Family Ties and Tyrannies: A Reassessment of Jacinta’, Hispanic Review, 51 (1983), 1–22; and Benito Perez Galdós: Fortunata and Jacinta (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 62–70.
Two Novellas: The Woman Taken in Adultery and The Poggeripuhl Family, trans. by Gabriele Annan (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995); Theodor Fontane: Werke urid Schriften, 54 vols, ed. by Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nurnberger, VII, L’Adultera (Carl Hanser: Munich, 1971; repr. in Fontane Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna: Ullstein, 1991).
Effi Briest, trans. by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2000); Werke und Schriften, XVII (1974), repr. in Fontane Bibliothek (1979).
E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 76–106; Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 117–34.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality [3 vols; vol. 11, trans. by R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978; London: Allen Lane, 1979).
See Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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© 2002 Bill Overton
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Overton, B. (2002). Children and Childlessness in the Novel of Wifely Adultery. In: Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684–1890. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286207_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286207_3
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