Adultery as a Literary Theme
Adultery as a literary theme explores the complexities of infidelity and its repercussions within various social and cultural contexts. It encompasses a range of concepts such as desire, sexuality, and personal identity, positioning adultery not merely as a private act but as a socially significant event that affects individual and societal dynamics. Historically, the theme has been a central narrative device in Western literature, often depicted through characters who navigate the moral and emotional turmoil associated with betrayal. The portrayal of adultery has evolved, from tragic tales in ancient epics like the Trojan War to comedic interpretations in works like Chaucer's *The Canterbury Tales*.
In the 19th century, a psychological approach emerged, emphasizing the inner struggles of characters grappling with societal norms, as seen in Nathaniel Hawthorne's *The Scarlet Letter*. In modern literature, authors such as John Updike and Arthur Miller reflect on the shifting values of society, often framing adultery as both a personal crisis and a commentary on broader societal decay. The theme remains relevant, raising questions about morality, identity, and the implications of human relationships across cultures and eras.
Adultery as a Literary Theme
Terminology
Discussion of adultery in literature must recognize a far-reaching network of terms and categories into which the term “adultery” fits, and in which it must be differentiated. On the one hand, there are terms such as “desire,” “passion,” “sexuality,” and “sexual liaison,” which pertain to individuals. Taken by themselves, such terms could be encompassed by a category such as the erotic in literature, or even pornography. However, adultery (sexual relations by a married person with someone other than their spouse) is a social act, and literature deals with the social or socioreligious repercussions of unfaithfulness in marriage as well as with questions of individual identity. Shifts in the social identity of the adulterer or adulteress are ultimately shown to be of more significance than the personal in certain literary genres and historical periods.
Background
It has been claimed that adultery is central to Western literature. For example, Tony Tanner, in his groundbreaking study, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (1979), suggests that it is “the unstable triangularity of adultery rather than the static symmetry of marriage that is the generative form of Western literature as we know it.” This is too large a claim: The classic nineteenth-century novel, for example, deals with an unmarried hero or heroine and the revealing of a true identity in marriage. It is certainly true, however, that the plot of adultery has been mythically generative from ancient times: The Trojan War, centered on Helen’s unfaithfulness, inspired Greek epics and drama. The Arthurian cycle contains as a central feature Guinivere’s adultery with Sir Lancelot, leading to the fall of the Round Table. Such transgressions are heroic not only in that are they of highborn heroes and heroines but also in that they cause their society to become tragically uprooted.
Several other literary traditions have developed and form part of the ongoing treatment of adultery in literature. One is the comic tradition of the cuckold, often an older man with a young wife, as in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) or in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–1351; English translation, 1620). These are tales in which adultery has relatively little moral, religious, or social implication. Some of the earliest novels picked up on this, as did Restoration drama of the late seventeenth century, in which sex is a social game. In Moll Flanders (1722) by Daniel Defoe, the genre of the confession is employed to give a very loose moral framework to Moll’s sexual misdemeanors, possibly because females have been expected to be chaster than men. Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) has no such repentant libidinous hero.
Another literary tradition in the treatment of the theme of adultery developed in the nineteenth century novel and might be termed the Protestant tradition. It is heralded by Fielding’s eighteenth-century contemporary, Samuel Richardson, and deals primarily with the psychological aspects of adultery, so that seduction and temptation, rather than romance and heroism, are central. The New Testament defines adultery as being in the mind and links it with the body, the “temple of the Holy Spirit.” It is in this faith that Richardson’s heroine in Clarissa withstands sexual control over her body by Robert Lovelace. Charlotte Brontë’s protagonist in Jane Eyre similarly withstands Rochester’s blandishments. Both prefer death or exile to inner defilement; they insist on marriage.
American Identity
In the light of this discussion, certain key American texts stand out in their unique development, especially of this last tradition. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) has an unremitting Protestant and patriarchal society as its setting. There is no interest at all in Hester’s physical act of adultery: The whole romance is quite unerotic. The stress is on the inner states of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. The attempt to flee society by going into the forest or overseas is thwarted by the sense of inner violation rather than social pressure. In the end, confession, death, and atonement are the necessary price to be paid for redemption. In romance, the hope for a less legalistic, more graceful social identity for the sexually fallen is a common theme.
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) likewise appeals to a society in transition from patriarchy to female self-determination. A contemporary, Henry James, uses traditional American themes of innocence in What Maisie Knew (1897) to make a child’s identity central to the novel of adultery. The ironies generated are rich and complex: What Maisie knows is not the knowing of a sophisticated adult society accustoming itself to adultery and divorce, but its falsity, its breaking of all its vows and promises. Adultery becomes, as in much of the modern American novel, a sign of a society losing its values and descending into meaningless personal relationships. John Updike’s Couples (1968) is a good example of this: In the novel, the social and sexual games of the Restoration comedy returns. In an attempt to find new plots, the old games are constantly replayed.
Arthur Miller makes perhaps the last expression of family values in which adultery is significant transgression. In Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), single acts of adultery form defining moments, not in their action, but in their confession or denial, making protagonists take on new authentic or inauthentic identities that, for Miller, become American archetypes. Pioneering psychologist Sigmund Freud pointed out that the price of civilization is repression; much modern American literature prefers the anarchy of undifferentiated sexual libido, with the result that adultery in literature no longer signifies.
Bibliography
Belsey, Catherine. Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994.
Fletcher, Christine. "Love in a Time of Adultery: The Moral Vision of Jane Austen and Dorothy Sayers." ABC, 11 Feb. 2014, www.abc.net.au/religion/love-in-a-time-of-adultery-the-moral-vision-of-jane-austen-and-d/10099408. Accessed 23 Aug. 2019.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.
McLaren, Leah. "Cheatin’ Hearts: On Our Enduring Love of Adultery in Fiction." The Globe and Mail, 9 May 2018, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/cheatin-hearts-on-our-enduring-love-of-adultery-in-fiction/article5833656/. Accessed 23 Aug. 2019.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. "How Infidelity Helped Create the Novel." Town & Country Magazine, 2 May 2019, www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a27011169/how-infidelity-helped-create-the-novel/. Accessed 23 Aug. 2019.
Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.