Adultery in Literature

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Venus and Mars are surprised by Vulcanus (painting by Alessandro Varotari , around 1631)

Adultery is a common topic in the literature. As sexual intercourse between a married person and someone other than their spouse, adultery was punishable in the countries of the Western world until the 20th century. Female adultery has traditionally been associated with the risk of cuckoo children being brought into marriage. In general, adultery is a breach of contract and trust towards the spouse. Because it is just as ubiquitous in life as it causes interpersonal conflicts and challenges moral statements, it has been described and problematized again and again in world literature at all times.

General

In many cases, writers have given the adultery issue explicit consideration. The writer Joachim Kalka suspects : "Adultery only has its sinister brilliance because marriage, with its indissolubility, has such an abysmal sadness."

Another example is David Lodge's novel Denkt (2001), in which the main female character, a writer, uses Anna Karenina as a starting point:

“Happy families are not all alike. The trouble is, they're not very interesting - unless of course you happen to belong to one. Fiction feeds on unhappiness. It needs conflict, disappointment, transgression. And since novels are mainly about the personal, emotional life, about relationships, it's not surprising that most of them are about adultery. "

“Happy families are not all created equal. The problem is, they're not very interesting - unless, of course, you are one of them. Literature lives from misfortune. It needs conflict, disappointment, transgression. And because novels are mostly about the personal, the emotional life, the relationships, it is not surprising that most of them are about adultery. "

- David Lodge : Thinks., P. 211

Not only on the part of feminist literary criticism has often been argued that the explosiveness and literary power of adultery novels such as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina stem from the “socially institutionalized oppression of women”. However, neither the various achievements of the international women's rights movements nor the liberalization of divorce law have made the topic less important in literature. In Thinks , the main female character observes:

“Civilization is based on repression, as Freud observed. But not in sex, not any more, the godless say. There is no need to pretend that sex for pleasure should be confined to monogamous marriage. True? Not if contemporary fiction is to be believed. There seems to be just as much anger, jealousy, bitterness generated by sexual infidelity as there ever was. "

“Civilization is based on oppression, as Freud observed. But not the suppression of sex, no more, say the wicked. There is no need to pretend that sex for pleasure should be limited to monogamous marriage. True? Not if current literature is to be believed. There, sexual infidelity seems to produce just as much anger, jealousy, and bitterness as ever before. "

- David Lodge : Thinks., P. 179

As Jeffrey Eugenides has argued in his novel Die Liebeshandlung (2011), a change of scenery - for example in social circumstances in which Emma Bovary could easily have divorced - would have changed little in the literary explosive power of Madame Bovary , because the actual themes Romans - sexuality, love, interpersonal relationships, marriage, and the pursuit of individual happiness - are universal human themes.

The British writer Anthony Burgess coined the bon mot that adultery is "the most creative of sins".

Antiquity

Egypt

The second story of the Westcar Papyrus (between 1837 and 1630 BC) is one of the oldest surviving literary texts dealing with the subject of adultery . It tells how the wizard Ubaon uses magic to punish his wife's lover; the unfaithful woman is executed.

Greek mythology

Zeus approaches Astraea (Marco Liberi, 17th century)

One of the oldest adulterers in literary tradition was the Olympian god Zeus , who betrayed his wife Hera with a variety of women, including Leto , Leda , Europa , Io, and Persephone . Although he had often approached these women in a cunning transformation, the revenge of the betrayed Hera was never on Zeus, but always on the beloved. In the Odyssey (8th / 7th centuries BC) Odysseus cheats on his steadfastly faithful wife Penelope with the sorceress Kirke . The Argonaut legend tells of the men from Lemnos who betrayed their wives with Thracian slaves after Aphrodite had punished their wives with bad breath; the angry wives then massacre their husbands. When her husband, the king's son Jason , turns to another woman, Medea murders not only her rival and her father, but also her own children in revenge.

In Euripides 'tragedy The wreathed Hippolytus (428 BC) in love - through a spell by the jealous Aphrodite - Theseus ' wife Phaidra hangs herself with her stepson Hippolytus and hangs herself because her love is not returned. Another famous adulteress in Greek mythology is Clytaimnestra , who, together with her lover Aigisthus, murdered her husband Agamemnon . Aërope cheats on her husband Atreus with his brother Thyestes ; Atreus drives out the rival and lets Aërope be thrown into the sea.

Heracles , who is not yet immortal at this point, attempts suicide after cheating with Iole and his wife Deïaneira torturing him with the Nessos shirt in revenge . Heracles himself is the result of an affair with his mother Alcmene , whom Zeus had approached in the form of her fiancé Amphitryon ; Already in Plautus ' adaptation of the subject ( Amphitruo , around 190 BC), Alkmene and Amphitryon are married to one another at the beginning of the plot.

Bible

The Old Testament of the Bible also contains stories of adultery. According to Gen 16: 1-4  EU , Abraham , who is married to Sarah , sleeps with the slave Hagar ; although this is initially at Sarah's request, she is later jealous. In Gen 35,22  EU it is reported how Reuben sleeps with Bilhah , the concubine of his father Jacob . King David , who at this point already has seven wives, sleeps with Bathsheba , the wife of the Hethic Uriah , and then has Uriah murdered ( 2 Sam 22.2-17  EU ). The infidelity of Gomer, the wife of the prophet Hosea, indicated in Hos 3,1-3  EU is unclear .

In the New Testament there is the story of Jesus and the adulteress in John 18 : 1-11  EU . Since the church father Hippolytus and Pope Gregory I , Mary Magdalene was often equated with this adulteress; in the late 19th century, for example, B. Paul Heyse ( Mary of Magdala , 1899) same. As, among others, Cynthia Bourgeault has shown, this equation has no biblical basis and is a fiction of later centuries.

Middle Ages and Renaissance

France

The story of Lancelot comes from the Old French , who has a love affair with Guinevere , the wife of his master, King Arthur . This material, the oldest surviving adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes ' verse tale Le Chevalier de la charrette (1177–1181), has been reinterpreted time and again up to the present day. In Geoffrey von Monmouth's Latin adaptation of the same material, Historia regum Britanniae (1136), it was still Mordred who had an adulterous relationship with Guinevere. Chrétien de Troyes also set his verse story Cligès (around 1176) in the vicinity of the Knights of the Round Table , in which the eponymous hero loses his heart to Fenice, the wife of his uncle Alis; since the latter dies, the lovers find each other happy.

The story of Tristan and Isolde is equally important , the oldest written forms of which come from the 12th century; she describes the fate of an Irish princess who inadvertently ingests a love potion , which she is supposed to drink with her groom, Marke von Cornwall , together with the latter's suitor.

Also in the 12th century, Marie de France wrote several lais dealing with female adultery, such as Equitan , Bisclavret and Yonec , in which the guilty suffer the most severe punishments.

Margaret of Navarre's Heptaméron (1558) includes, among many others, a satirical tale about King Alfonso II of Naples , who has an affair with a noble lady whose husband is harmed by sleeping with the queen.

German language area

Around the year 1240, the “ Stricker ” wrote his swank novel Der Pfaffe Amis about a deceitful priest who induces the wives who want to be considered innocent to donate their entire fortune for an alleged church building.

Probably on behalf of the Alsatian nobleman Peter Diemringer von Staufenberg, the first surviving version of the undine fabric based on popular tradition was written down around 1320 . The Versnovelle tells of the Mahrtenehe the narrator with a Merfeye that ausbedingt that he take no other wife; when he nevertheless does so under pressure from his relatives, he dies on the wedding day.

The moral satire The Ship of Fools (1494) by the Strasbourg artist Sebastian Brant contains an episode “On adultery”.

Italy

Alexandre Cabanel : The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta (1870)

One of the most famous stories of adultery of the Middle Ages is the episode by Francesca da Rimini in Canto 5 of Dante's Divina Commedia (1321); Francesca atones in hell after her unloved husband Giovanni Malatesta caught and killed her cheating with his brother Paolo. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many writers and other artists found renewed interest in this material and interpreted it in a contemporary way for their own works.

Giovanni Boccaccio's collection of novels Decamerone (1349–1353) contains the story of the Madonna Filippa, who is brought to court by her husband after an affair, but there defends herself quickly and successfully.

In Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena's comedy La calandria (1513), adultery is brought about by the lover disguising himself as a woman and thus gaining access to the house of the married lover. In Niccolò Machiavelli's thematically similar comedy La mandragola (1518), the lover poses as a doctor for the same reason.

England

Several stories of adultery can also be found in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387), including The Millers' Tale, about the student Nicholas who has an affair with the wife of his landlord; Chaucer protects against wanting to warn the reader about sin, but makes it far too entertaining to actually achieve this purpose.

In Richard Johnson's courtly novel Tom a Lincoln (1599/1607) the reader learns of an adulterous affair between King Arthur and Angelica, the daughter of the Lord Mayor of London .

In 1592 the play The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham appeared anonymously in London about a wealthy landowner whose unfaithful wife hires two murderers to get her husband out of the way. In 1603, Thomas Heywood's play A Woman Killed with Kindness , inspired by an Italian novel, followed , in which the betrayed husband renounces blood revenge, but the unfaithful woman dies of a broken heart.

It is controversial in the specialist literature whether Hamlet's mother Gertrude was an adulteress; H. whether she was already intimate with Claudius during Hamlet's father's lifetime (around 1601). "Ay, that incestuous, that adult beast," railed Hamlet's father's ghost in the 5th appearance of the 1st act. In Shakespeare's work , she would be the only character who could actually have committed adultery, because in Othello , Das Wintermärchen and Cymbeline the alleged adulterers are all innocent.

Other language areas

The Wälsungen fabric, including the story of Signy , who is married to Siggeir , but with her twin brother Sigmund, is the father of the Sinfiötli , is part of Nordic mythology . In Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen (1848–1874) these four correspond to the figures Sieglinde, Hunding , Siegmund and Siegfried .

In medium Dutch wrote sotternie Lippijn - part of literary history major Van Hulthemschen manuscripts - tells the story of a married man who indeed knows that his wife has taken a lover, but the accusations downplayed by the surroundings and even be used to his detriment.

From the 17th to the 19th century

Adulteresses in Spanish Literature (Siglo de Oro)

The Spanish playwright Lope de Vega wrote his tragedy Castigo sin venganza in 1631 about an Italian nobleman who, after having committed adultery between his young wife and his illegitimate son, is taking cruel revenge. Castigo sin venganza is one of the very few works of the Siglo de Oro in which adultery actually took place; in the dramas of Calderón , wives repeatedly die just because they are suspected of adultery (e.g. the doctor of his honor ). Even Miguel de Cervantes ' Don Quixote (1605/1615) contains such a story of obsessive male distrust in the episode El curioso impertante ; In this case, however, it is precisely with his jealousy that the man drives his wife into an extramarital affair, which he wanted to prevent at all costs. Cervantes also dealt with the subject of adultery in his one-act plays La cueva de Salamanca and El viejo celoso (both 1615).

Sensitivity and Sturm und Drang

A pacemaker for modern romance fiction was Madame de Lafayette's novella The Princess of Montpensier (1662) about a French princess who dies of a broken heart after a brief extramarital affair with Henri de Guise . The novel The Princess of Clèves , published by Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette in 1678, tells the story of a husband who breaks because his wife is outwardly loyal to him, but loves another man.

In Great Britain in 1676 Aphra Behn's play Abdelazer was premiered, the title character of which is calculated to be the lover of the Spanish Queen Isabella. Also in Great Britain, Samuel Richardson ( Pamela or the virtue rewarded , 1740) promoted a moralization of the novel in the 18th century . The novel The Fair Adultress: or, the Treacherous Brother , published anonymously in 1743, still contained some piquant elements, but it already had a strong moral message. Henry Fielding's drama The Modern Husband premiered as early as 1732 , in which a man sells his wife but is not satisfied with the proceeds and sued the buyer for adultery. With the play, Fieldings criticized contemporary law, which allowed husbands to make third parties liable for damages for infidelity of his wife. Fielding's later sensitive novel Amelia (1751) then dealt with male adultery.

In 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's tragedy Götz von Berlichingen was premiered in Berlin ; the seductive and scheming female protagonist, Adelheid, is sentenced to death by a vein court for adultery and husband murder. Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's tragedy The Suffering Woman (1775) is considered the first German-language play in which an adulteress appears as the main character; she confesses her infidelity to her husband and dies of shame, whereupon the lover takes his own life on her grave.

August von Kotzebue's Rührstück Human Hatred and Remorse (1788) is about the entanglements that a briefly unfaithful but sincerely repentant noblewoman falls victim to before she is happily reunited with her husband.

Classic and Romantic

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Elective Affinities (1809) the infidelity of the main male character leads to the death of the lovers.

The subject of adultery rarely appears in romantic literature . An exception is Sophie Mereau's epistolary novel Amanda and Eduard (1803) about a woman married to an unloved man who can only marry her lover when she is already a widow, but then has an accident. In Achim von Arnim's 1810 novel Poverty, Wealth, Guilt and Penance by Countess Dolores, the frivolous title character cheats on her husband, Count Karl, with the Markese D. and at the end of it atones for her wickedness; The actual theme of the novel, however, is the delusion of Charles, who desired Dolores for her outward beauty, while her less handsome sister Klelia would have been a more suitable partner for him.

The undine material, in which the betrayed woman brings her husband to death, experienced a revival in the 19th century, most prominently in the form of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's fairy tale novella Undine (1811).

In ETA Hoffmann 's short story The Marquise de la Pivardiere (1820) a man runs away with his lover, while his wife is charged with murder because his disappearance cannot be explained. Eduard Mörike wrote a poem Der Schatten in 1838 about an unfaithful woman who poisoned her husband; however, the murdered man returns as a ghost and kills the woman.

Biedermeier

Franz Grillparzer, celebrated as the Austrian “national poet”, published his novella Das Kloster bei Sendomir in 1827 about a count who kills his unfaithful wife, but then realizes that this act does not bring him any relief. Gerhart Hauptmann adapted the novella in 1896 as a one-act play and gave it the title Elga after the female main character .

The novel Countess Faustine (1841) by Ida Hahn-Hahn tells the life story of an educated Dresden woman who leaves her husband after a marriage toe to live with her lover; but she does not hold on to this relationship or the following one with a third man for long.

Adalbert Stifter's story Brigitta (1843) is about an Austrian landlord who only realizes how precious his wife is to him after he has betrayed her once.

Since the second half of the 19th century

Comedies

Even in the period of bourgeois realism and beyond, the adultery theme was repeatedly dealt with in a comedic way, for example in Eugène Labiche's A Florentine Hat (1851), in which a young wife loses her straw hat while on the fling and does not become suspicious before returning to the husband to make a replacement. Oscar Wilde's social comedy Lady Windermeres Fächer (1893) is thematically similar . Arthur Schnitzler completed his play Reigen in 1897 , in which a young woman cheats on her husband, who in turn cheats on his wife.

One of the most turbulent mix comedy with adultery theme is Georges Feydeau comedy The Flea in Her Ear (1907). In William Somerset Maugham's social comedy The Circle (1921), a family scandal (married woman runs away with lover) repeats itself in two successive generations with almost no variation. Maugham took up the topic again in his conversation piece The Constant Wife (1927), in which the betrayed wife first tolerates her husband's infidelity before finally recognizing her situation as unworthy and emancipating herself by making herself economically independent. Molly Bloom 's adultery in James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) has a satirical quality ; while this character actually stands for the most famous of all loyal wives in literary history - Penelope - the author lets her cheat on her husband Leopold with her manager Hugh "Blazes" Boylan.

Adultery also has a comedic note in Curt Leviant's novel Diary of an Adulterous Woman (2001) about the psychiatrist Charlie, whose married patient has a relationship with Charlie's good-for-nothing best friend; that he should actually talk her out of this brings him into conflict with his professional ethos.

Wives seduced into calculation

Up until the 20th century, female adultery was often treated in literature as the result of seduction , with the seducer mostly characterized as calculating rather than unbridled instinct. Early examples are Choderlos de Laclos ' epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782) and Stendhal's Red and Black (1830). The theme can still be found well into the 20th century, for example in Arno Schmidt's novel Das steinerne Herz (1954), in which adultery plays a role in several ways; among other things, the first-person narrator, who is on the hunt for certain historical documents, begins a relationship with the married heiress of the same.

Bourgeois Realism: Adultery Novels with Happy Endings

The subject of adultery - especially the subject of female adultery - gained a strong presence in the literature of realism . Adultery is the starting point here for both social moral studies and for psychologically accurate portrayals of people.

Honoré de Balzac , a great actor in the pursuit of female independence, has dealt with female adultery many times in his work. A striking example is his story Die Muse des Départements (1837) about the talented young Dinah Piedefer who marries a much older man. When her lover turns out to be Hallodri, Dinah not only thwarts his planned good game, but also lets him sit and returns to her generous husband, although she now has two children born out of wedlock.

With The Scarlet Letter , Nathaniel Hawthorne published an adultery novel in 1850 in which the unfaithful woman not only gets away with her life, but is even rehabilitated; The fact that the husband is a sadist contributes to their moral relief, and was also thought to be missing at the time of the love affair. Hawthorne had dealt with the subject of adultery earlier in his short story, The Hollow of the Three Hills (1830).

Like The Scarlet Letter , Theodor Fontane's novel L'Adultera (1880) also ends with the lovers being happily united under the benevolence of the society around them.

Bourgeois Realism: Dying and Failing Adulterers

Jules Arsène Garnier : The Torment of Adulterers, 1876
Female adultery

A second line of development within realistic literature are those adultery novels in which the unfaithful woman is either killed by her husband, commits suicide or dies of one or the other form of a "broken heart". Classic adultery novels are Madame Bovary (1848) by Gustave Flaubert , Anna Karenina (1873) by Lev Tolstoy and Effi Briest (1894–1895) by Theodor Fontane . All three focus on a woman who lives in a problematic marriage and succumbs to the temptation of a love affair.

Far less known is Wilkie Collins ' sensational novel Basils Liebe (1852) about a young man who secretly marries under his rank; the woman cheats on him and eventually dies of typhus. Another Victorian sensational novel with fatal female adultery is East Lynne (1861) by Ellen Wood .

The novels Vetter Basilio (1878) by the Portuguese writer José Maria Eça de Queiroz and La Regenta (1884–1885) by the Spanish writer Leopoldo Alas alias Clarín have been compared with Madame Bovary , Anna Karenina and Effi Briest ; the latter falls out of line insofar as the unfaithful woman ends up as a broken woman, but remains alive.

In Tolstoy's novella Die Kreutzer Sonata (1891), a man kills his wife without even knowing that she was unfaithful. In Berlin that same year, Felix Philippi's drama Das alten Lied (1891) premiered, in which a lawyer rebukes his client for his act of jealousy, but immediately afterwards catches his own wife cheating and killing him in affect.

Male adultery

In 1886 - eight years after Anna Karenina - Lev Tolstoy completed his play The Power of Darkness about a prominent Russian farmhand who impregnated his own stepdaughter. After killing the newborn, he faces law enforcement. Nikolai Leskov had already published his novel Without Way Out in 1865 ; it tells the story of a peasant woman who kills her unfaithful husband and his lover with an ax.

In Joseph Conrad's novel The Damned of the Isles (1896), the adulterous do-for-all is shot by his lover. Theodor Fontane published his third adultery novel in 1891, which is also his first and only novel about male adultery: Irrecoverable . Its main character undertakes the escapade as an attempt to break out of a marriage that was perceived as tight, but then immediately loses both: the lover and the wife.

Adultery in the context of larger problems

Female adultery

In some works it is not the female adultery that is the real issue, but the problems that underlie this adultery; here adultery is only a means of trying to solve the problem. Already in the three "great" novels of adultery of the 19th century - Madame Bovary , Anna Karenina and Effi Briest - the adulteresses were women who did not get along well with their husbands. In Anna Karenina and Effi Briest is of convenience to which the women have engaged mainly to be supplied economically. Theodor Fontane had already dealt with the subject of the toe toe in L'Adultera (1882) and in Count Petöfy (1883), in the latter novel in great detail. Several of the characters, including the bride, have little doubt from the start that the very unequal marriage will not work; in fact, the young woman soon turns to a lover.

One of the most striking examples of a story of adultery, which is not about conventional morals or interpersonal relationships, but rather deeper layers of the human, is the double story that Robert Musil published in 1911 under the title Associations . Heinrich Schirmbeck's novella Der Kris (1942), on the other hand - with its array of fantastic visions, exoticism and occultism - must, as Erhard Jöst noted, be judged as a thoroughly unsuccessful attempt to turn a woman's succinct cheating “into an event of philosophical importance stylize ” .

In his novel Der Ball des Comte d'Orgel , published in 1924, Raymond Radiguet is only superficially concerned with the infidelity of the main female character; The actual theme is the masquerade, which drives the characters around their true feelings in front of each other.

In the drama Betrogen (1978), one of the main works of the Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter , the disintegration of an extramarital affair is shown, which takes place parallel to the disintegration of the marriage of the main female character. Pinter had already addressed the subject in 1964 in his enigmatic drama The Homecoming , in which the unfaithful wife reveals herself to be a person with problems, who sees adultery as a means to shake off those problems. Tom Perotta's highly acclaimed novel Little Children (2004) is about the misery of a feminist intellectual who becomes a housewife and mother and ends up in the very life she can least stand; an adultery she tries proves frustrating.

Occasionally, literary works deal with cases in which a married woman makes an affair in order to get revenge on her husband for one reason or another . One example is Bernhard Schlink's story Der Seitensprung (2000), in which an East German woman does not want to let her husband spy on her on behalf of the Stasi .

Male adultery

Some authors have used the subject of male adultery as a symptom of deeper problems in their main characters. This applies, for example, to August Strindberg's Kammerspiel Die Gespenstersonate (1908), in which the various adulterous relationships existing between the characters depict how depraved the society in which they live is.

Jakob Wassermann's novel Etzel Andergast (1931) tells the story of the doctor Kerkhoven, who drives his first wife insane: a fate that almost overtakes his lover and later second wife Marie. In The Heart of All Things (1948) by Graham Greene , adultery is only one stage in the - ultimately fatal - moral crisis of the male protagonist. In Samuel Beckett's one-act play (1963), the focus is on the guilt that the three participants, after they have become miserable, each seek in the other two.

Herta Müller, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, published her volume of stories Niederungen in 1982 , in which ubiquitous adulteries shape the sinister anti-idyll that Müller associates with the vanishing world of the Banat Swabians . In André Dubus' romance trilogy We Don't Live Here Anymore (1984), the joyless adulteries that the two male main characters commit with the other's wife reflect the misery they found themselves in as they grew up. As Bryant Burnett found, Peter Straub's adultery novel The Stranger Woman (1992) ranks among those works in which the attempt to make something deeper and more meaningful out of the basic idea of ​​cheating has more or less failed.

Joanna Murray-Smith's drama Honor (1995) uses the confrontation between wife and lover to ask what actually makes a good partnership. In his novel Der Liebeswunsch (2000), Dieter Wellershoff used the adultery theme to demonstrate the destructive power that rationality has when trying to make it the yardstick in matters of love.

According to realism: dying and failing adulterers

Female adultery

As in the Kreutzer Sonata , the unfaithful wife dies in Alexandre Dumas fils ' novel The Polish Countess (1864) by the hand of her husband. In Arthur Conan Doyle's short story The Cardboard Box (1893), a betrayed husband kills his wife; as Sherlock Holmes finally finds out, it is not he who is actually to blame.

The motif of the adulteress who dies as a result of her infidelity can also be found in the literature of the turn of the century and the 20th century, for example in Heinrich Mann's debut novel In einer Familie (1893), in The Gänsemännchen (1915) by Jakob Wassermann , When the war was over (1947, Drama) by Max Frisch , the end of the affair (1951) by Graham Greene , at night under the stone bridge ( "the plague in the Jewish quarter", 1953) by Leo Perutz , the latest in November (1955) by Hans Erich Nossack , Die Schöne des Herr (1968) by Albert Cohen , The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje and Vogelweide (2013) by Uwe Timm .

Javier Marías described the strangest death of an adulteress in his novel Tomorrow in the Battle think of me (1994), where the lover suddenly finds himself with a corpse after the one-night stand and doesn't know how to get out of this situation properly should come out.

Per Olov Enquist's novel The Visit of the Personal Doctor (2001) tells the story of British Princess Caroline Mathilde , who is married to the insane and politically weak Danish King Christian VII , but then starts an affair with his personal doctor Struensee , who wants to help, Christian to make a strong and progressive regent. Caroline Mathilde is banished in the end, Struensee is executed.

Male adultery

In 1911 Edith Wharton published her novel Ethan Frome about a man bullied by a sickly wife who falls in love with a young girl; the lovers' attempt at joint suicide ends with the girl's paraplegia . Wharton again took up the subject of male adultery in the age of innocence (1920); the man renounces his beloved and chooses the unloved wife who is expecting his child. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tenderly Is the Night (1934) is about the inner breakdown of a doctor who rises to the upper class by marrying a patient , but then falls in love with another woman. In Lion Feuchtwanger's novel Goya or the arge path of knowledge (1951) it is an extramarital affair that becomes the main cause of the downfall of the main male character.

Male adultery is sometimes portrayed as a station in a midlife crisis , where it then has disastrous consequences, as in Piers Paul Read's A Married Man (1979). This novel is about a lawyer who is encouraged by one of his lovers to run for Labor . It is only when his wife and her lover are murdered that he begins to understand how much his life was made up of lies. In 1991 Josephine Hart published her novel Doom for a married British member of parliament who begins a relationship with his son's fiancée and is unwilling to be complicit when the son is ultimately killed in an accident. The career of the main male character in Tim Parks ' novel Doppelleben (2005), an aspiring judge, collapses rapidly when he has one extra-marital affair too many.

In 1953 Roald Dahl published his satirical, creepy short story Lamb to the Slaughter (1953) about a pregnant housewife who kills her unfaithful husband with a leg of lamb. The title character in Ana Consuelo Matiella's story The Truth about Alicia (2002) shoots the unfaithful husband together with the lover.

Consequences of adultery for the beloved or for the lover

Male adultery

Male adultery was often told early on from the perspective of the lover, for example in Berthold Auerbach's novel Auf der Höhe (1865), in which the mistress of a married monarch breaks up because of the guilt she has incurred with her adulterous behavior. In Émile Zola's novel Ein Blatt Liebe (1877), a lonely widow falls in love with a married doctor and, through negligence, owes the death of her young daughter. Zola used the adultery theme several times in his novels: besides Thérèse Raquin (1867), also in Nana (1880) and in Ein feines Haus (1882). Ricarda Huch's debut novel Memories by Ludolf Ursleu the Younger (1893) tells the story of Galeide, who wishes the wife of the man she loves dead; when she actually dies and the way for a marriage with her beloved is free, Galeide breaks.

William Somerset Maugham's debut novel Liza von Lambeth (1897) depicts male adultery from the perspective of the beloved, who is socially stigmatized by the love affair and dies in the end as a result of a brawl with the physically superior wife. Like Maugham, Colette has dealt with the subject of adultery repeatedly in her novels. Chéri (1920), one of her main works, tells of the complex feelings of Léa, a 49-year-old whose much younger lover marries someone else, but initially refuses to give up and cheats on his young wife with her, until Léa reluctantly releases him .

In 1981 Brian Moore's novel The Temptation of Eileen Hughes appeared about a married man who wants to make a much younger woman his lover; At the center of the story are the reactions of the loved one and the wife. The novels Pechrabenschwarz (1983) by Renata Adler and Bleibtreu (2003) by Martina Zöllner offer modern views of the situation of the beloved, whose partner neither wants to give up the comfort of the wife nor the bed companion .

An interesting variation on the adultery novel , which is told from the perspective of the loved one, is Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier (1915); the story of adultery is told from the point of view of the husband of one of the lovers of a married man.

On the other hand, the infidelities in Richard Ford's collection of short stories A variety of sins (2002) remain frighteningly free of consequences , because the people involved are unable to take the risk of real feelings even when cheating.

Female adultery

Some literary works on female adultery also show its consequences for the beloved. One of the most drastic examples is Camillo Boito's diary novella Sehnsucht , published in 1883 . She tells of a calculating but impulsive woman whose lover is cheating on her. The fact that he also happens to be a deserter enables her to denounce him, and in the end she even witnesses his shooting. In Doctor Faustus (1947), too , the unfaithful lover (the violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger) does not get away with his life, but is shot by the angry adulteress Ines Rodde; in Thomas Mann's oeuvre this is one of the very few cases of marital infidelity.

Hermann Sudermann's artist drama Sodoms Ende (1890) tells of the fate of the young painter Willi, who is seduced by his married patroness ; the play ends with the death of three people.

An example of the portrayal of female adultery from the lover's perspective is - besides Greene's The End of an Affair - F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925). Gatsby has an affair with married Daisy; after she accidentally runs over her husband's mistress, he takes the blame, which ends fatally for him. Another example of the lover's perspective is Martin Mosebach's novel A Long Night (2000) about a good-for-nothing man who finds help in life from a married woman. In Markus Werner's novel Am Hang (2013), a cynical man only learns about the value of love in the course of a chance encounter with the husband of his former lover.

Murderous adulterers

Spouse murderesses

In Nikolai Leskov's story Die Lady Macbeth von Mzensk (1865), which owes its fame today primarily to Dmitri Shostakovich's opera adaptation ( Lady Macbeth of Mzensk , 1934), the wife kills her husband with the help of her lover, but in the end commits suicide. Émile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), which was in turn inspired by Adolphe Belot and Ernest Daudet's novel La Vénus de Gordes (1866), and James M. Cain's detective novel When the Postman Rings Twice (1934) have similar actions . The Finn Minna Canth used the topic in her play Sylvi (1893) to promote the liberalization of divorce law.

Quite out of the ordinary common narrative pattern falls Ernest Hemingway's short story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936), in which an unfaithful wife her husband when he threatens to slip out of their control shoots.

Wife killer

In intentional. The Story of an Ordinary Crime (1931) Anthony Berkeley Cox wrapped the promiscuity of a doctor suppressed by his wife in a detective novel; to become free for his beloved, he murders his wife; The crime does not pay off for him any more than it does for the adulteresses in Thérèse Raquin and When the Postman rings twice . Hugh Whitemore's crime play Disposing of the Body (1999) is also about a (suspected) murder of the woman standing in the way .

Early female prospects

In addition to Minna Canth, several other authors have used the topic of female adultery to denounce the social hardships women were exposed to in their time, including George Sand . In her novel Le dernier amour (1866), the inventor of a bizarre theory of adultery monitors his wife in an inhuman way and thus drives her straight into the behavior that he actually wanted to prevent.

In Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's novel Unsühnbar (1890), a young noblewoman renounces the partner who would suit her in order to make a “game”; half against her will she later cheats on her husband with her youthful lover and then breaks down because of her guilt. Even the feminist Hedwig Dohm in her novel Sibilla Dalmar (1896) lets the title character die of childbed fever after an affair .

In her novel The Awakening (1899), Kate Chopin described the fate of a wife who undertakes an insignificant affair with one man but loves and desires another; to protect her, he evades her; Desperate about her lack of freedom, she ends up committing suicide.

Consequences of adultery for the betrayed spouse

Male adultery

Henrik Ibsen's family drama Ghosts (1881) is about the fate of a woman who has to cope with the consequences of the repeated adulteries of her husband, who has since died; one of them is the congenital syphilis of the common son. The theme of adultery is omnipresent in Guy de Maupassant's work . His first novel Ein Leben (1883) already tells the life story of a woman who is not only betrayed by her husband, but later has to discover that her son also has loose morals. In Alan Dale's A Marriage Below Zero (1889), one of the first English-language novels about homosexual love, it is told from the perspective of the wife of one of the two men.

In André Gide in 1902 publicized novel The immoralist is about a non- outed gays, whose wife the mixed oriented marriage and her husband's infidelity can not cope and eventually dies. Henry James has covered the subject of adultery several times, most prominently in his novel The Golden Bowl (1904). This evolutionary novel tells of the coming of age of a young heiress who, in the course of the plot, develops enough strength and dexterity to drive out infidelity from her husband and teach him conjugal love. Ellen Glasgows novel Virginia , published in 1913, is also told from the perspective of the betrayed wife ; here, however, the wife is abandoned by her husband. In Katherine Anne Porter's short story Maria Concepcion (1922), the betrayed wife stabs her rival and is then protected from prosecution by her husband.

Penelope Mortimer's 1962 novel Can You Love Jake? tells the strange story of a woman who, while cheating on her husband, cannot stop giving birth. In Manfred Bieler's novel Der Kanal (1978), a woman who wants to win back her unfaithful husband takes extraordinary measures. The really banal plot in which a married man falls in love with a younger, sexually attractive woman wins in Peter Nichols' drama Passion Play a special Twist (1981) in that both the adulterer and his shocked wife with an alter ego equipped be, d. H. Each of these two characters is accompanied by a second actor who, in contrast to the character, bluntly expresses what is moving him.

In the novel Dept. of Speculation (2014), Jenny Offill described the complex emotions experienced by a woman whose husband is having an affair. The First Day (2017) by Phil Harrison unfolds over a period of 30 years the fate of a family in which the father has an affair.

Female adultery

Some literary works show in detail how a man's life is destroyed by the infidelity of his wife, for example Oskar Maria Graf's novel Bolwieser (1931) about a station master who is too dutiful and benign to stand up to the calamity of his unfaithful wife and bring their lovers over him to fight back. The title of Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust (1934) expresses what remains of the deceived male main character after the war of the roses and being abandoned. The diplomat cheated by his wife ends in suicide in Joseph Roth's novella Triumph der Schönheit (1934). The starting point for the misery of the main character Beckmann in Wolfgang Borchert's drama Outside Before the Door (1947) is the infidelity of his wife, who does not want him back after his return home from the war.

The betrayed husband is less helpless in Max Frisch's Schwank, which premiered in 1958, The Great Anger of Philipp Hotz : he takes revenge by pretending to have had an affair himself. In 1982, Uwe Johnson published a short story called Hinterhands Unglück (in: Sketch of an Unlucky Man ) about a writer who, after learning of his wife's adultery, suffers writer's block .

Unexpected consequences of adultery

In some works, the focus is less on adultery itself than on the woman's confrontation with the consequences that this unexpectedly brings about. This applies, for example, to Arthur Schnitzler's short story Die Toten Schweigen (1897), in which a married woman has to find a way out of the shock and the fix that arises for her when her lover unexpectedly dies in her presence. In Stefan Zweig 's novella Angst , written in 1910, an unfaithful wife goes through the agony of blackmail. The adultery committed by the title character in Irwin Shaw's novel Lucy Crown (1956) also leads to an unexpected complication : since her 13-year-old son betrays her, the marriage is preserved, but the relationship between mother and son falls apart.

In the GDR literature , topics from private life were not welcome and therefore adultery novels were very rare. One of the few literary works from the GDR that deals with female adultery is Karl-Heinz Jakobs ' novel Description of a Summer (1961), the main character of which is tormented by conscience during adultery not only because of the pain she inflicts on her husband, but also because of their violation of socialist morals.

In Botho Strauss ' stage play Unexpected Return (2002), the accidental re-encounter of a man with his former lover and her husband causes a long-suppressed crisis between the spouses to break out.

Celebrities adulterers

Male adultery

Male adulterers are often characterized in the literature as womanizers who, even after their marriage, simply cannot manage to keep their hands off other women. This applies u. a. for Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's famous story The Lady with the Dog (1899), whose prominent male main character falls seriously in love; Chekhov leaves it open whether he will really leave his wife. In Beate and Mareile (1903) by Eduard von Keyserling , the unfaithful husband only lets go of his antics after he is wounded in a duel and thus brought to his senses. There is also a duel in Arthur Schnitzler's tragic comedy Das weite Land (1911); however, here the unfaithful husband challenges his wife's lover. Mackie Messer in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera (1928) goes to a whore house immediately after his wedding.

That Uncertain Feeling (1955) by Kingsley Amis deals in a humorous way with the bitterly serious dichotomy of a man who on the one hand wants to remain decent and loyal to his wife, but on the other hand does not know how to deny his preference for attractive women. Male adultery has a large presence in the novels by Max Frisch ( Stiller , 1954; Homo faber , 1957) and Martin Walser ( marriages in Philippsburg ; 1957, Anselm-Kristlein-Trilogy, 1960–1973; Zürn-Romane, 1980–2004; Angstblüte , 2006), in which the main male characters hold lovers with great nonchalance, without foregoing the convenience of being married. In Iris Murdoch's satirical novel Maskenspiel (1961), an unfaithful husband loses all women he cares about to their lovers. A constant theme is adultery in John Updike's novels , for example in Ehepaare (1968), where the adulterous relationships of the characters are the visible expression of an underlying social decline. Rabbit Angstrom, the main character in Updike's Rabbit Pentalogy (1960–2002), constantly cheats on his wife because he believes that middle-class family life unreasonably restricts his possibilities.

Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) about a man whose wife can endure his constant affairs without complaint ends with the suicide of both. The promiscuous male adulterer also has a permanent place in Philip Roth's novels , for example in Sabbath's Theater (1995), whose hero, however, finds himself in a serious crisis after the death of his long-time lover. In 1990 Roth had published his novel Deception , which consists entirely of the dialogues that a married American writer conducts before and after sex with his also married English lover.

In Michel Houellebecq's 1994 novel Expansion of the Battle Zone there is no adultery; however, the first-person narrator develops an interesting theory:

“Like economic liberalism - and for analogous reasons - sexual liberalism creates phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some have sexual intercourse every day, others five or six times in their life, or never at all. Some get on with a hundred women, others with none. [...] In a sexual system in which adultery is forbidden, everyone finds a bedfellow, right or wrong. [...] In a completely liberal sexual system, some have a varied and exciting sex life, others are limited to masturbation and loneliness. "

- Michel Houellebecq : Expansion of the combat zone, p. 99

David Lodges Denkt (2001) about a charismatic cognitive scientist who is adored by women is just as playful as it is pointedly intellectual . Jed Mercurio's novel American Adulterer (2009) traces the motives of the notorious adulterer John F. Kennedy .

Female adultery

With Julia Lambert, William Somerset Maugham ( Julia, you are magical , 1937) has created a female adulteress who can measure up to promiscuity with married male philanderers like John Updike's character Rabbit Angstrom. In 1954 Anaïs Nin published her novel Spy in the House of Love about a married woman who takes all the sexual freedoms that men normally claim for granted. In Binnie Kirshenbaum's novel A Brief Outline of My Adulterous Career (1996), the fun-loving female main character only gets a husband in order to cheat on him immediately: her most difficult lover had revealed a weakness for married women.

According to realism: adultery novels with happy endings

In the 20th century, more literary works emerged in which adulteresses more or less had a happy ending. In Eduard von Keyserling's novel Dumala (1907), for example, the unfaithful wife is abandoned by her lover, but at least inherits the fortune of her indulgent husband. Keyserling published another adultery novel with a happy ending in 1919 with the children of public holidays . The fate of the unfaithful Irene Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) by John Galsworthy was also light . After a long tribulation she got a divorce and was able to marry her lover. 1928 followed Lady Chatterley by DH Lawrence with a similar theme.

A more recent example of an adultery novel with a happy ending is Deborah Moggach historical novel Tulip Fever (1999), which tells the story of a Dutch woman who drives in the 17th century before the husband a risky juggling to be free for her lover.

Indecisive adulterers

Female adultery

In some literary works, the husband proves to be the better of the two partners, for example in the novel Das Heim und die Welt (1916) by the Bengali Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore , in which an educated and gentle man is still an educated and gentle man for his wife, who is still inexperienced in the world gives free rein as she falls in love with someone else. William Somerset Maugham's novel The Colorful Veil (1925) tells the story of a young wife who cheats because she learns to appreciate the qualities of her husband too late; when she realizes that the lover has a bad character, the husband dies. In Frank Thiess ' novel Frauenraub (1927), the husband tries to blame himself for his wife's infidelity and flight, and tries to win her over again. In 1932 Jean Giono's novel Jean the Dreamer was published , from which Marcel Pagnol then borrowed the material for his screenplay for the 1938 film The Baker's Wife ; this tells the story of a Provencal villager who lovingly pardons his unfaithful wife after her affair. Jérôme Savary later adapted Pagnol's work for the stage (1985). Werner Bergengruen's novella Das Netz (1956), in which a betrayed husband saves the life of his wife who is about to be executed, has a similarly conciliatory tone .

B. Traven , who has often appeared as a mocker of the emancipatory aspirations of contemporary women, published a story in 1954, An Unexpected Solution , about an initially complaining wife who, after having committed adultery and having a child conceived out of wedlock, regrets the will of her own heart Man submits. In the novel Elizabeth Appleton (1963), bestselling author John O'Hara told the story of a woman living in conventional circumstances who, after a passionate, secret escapade, decides against her lover and in favor of her marriage.

1972 appeared Joyce Carol Oates ' short story The adulteress ( The Lady with the Pet Dog ) about Anna, a woman who can not decide between lover and husband. Jane Gardam's novel The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) tells the story of a woman who cannot be faithful but also fails to leave her husband over a decade-long plot. In Alles über Sally (2010) by Arno Geiger , the title character turns back to her husband after the lover leaves her for another woman. The emancipated heroine in Paulo Coelho's novel Untreue (2013) finds a deeper love for her husband through her affair.

Male adultery

A small number of literary works deal with men unable to choose between their lover and wife, such as Georges Simenon's 1961 novel The Train . The book is about the brief love affair of a married French man with a Jewish woman of unknown nationality who is on the run from the Nazis; although the encounter with her touches him deeply, he cannot manage to leave his wife and children for his beloved. Richard Yates ' debut novel Times of Riot , also published in 1961, has a very similar theme , in which a man tries in vain - with the help of adultery, among others - to dream his way out of his ready-made American suburban life.

After describing a summer ( see above ) appeared in the German Democratic Republic with Günter de Bruyn Roman Buridan's ass 1963 adultery novel for the second time, this time with an unfaithful husband, Karl Erp, a socially arrivierter intellectuals, undertakes the affair in an attempt from To break out of his inexhaustible ease, but in the end meekly returns to his wife. In 1964, Erik Neutsch's trail of the stones followed , in which the married SED party secretary Horrath was demoted to an unskilled laborer because of an extramarital affair. Even in Ingo Schulze's novel Adam and Evelyn , which was only published in 2008 , as Oliver Junge has noted, adultery is still laden with socialist symbolism.

Nicholas Mosley's novel Natalie Natalia (1971) tells the story of a conservative member of parliament whose indecision between his lover and wife is a true reflection of the ambivalence he also feels about his political career.

Liberation, self-knowledge and self-discovery

Female adultery

In some literary works, the main female character achieves not only a satisfaction of her sexual desires with her adultery , but also achieves liberation and self-discovery . This was already the case with Lady Chatterley (1928), whose affair helped her to free herself from the bodily hostility of the contemporary intelligentsia; Nature is in Lady Chatterley experienced as ecstatic as sex. Lawrence's novel can be compared to Albert Camus ' story Die Ehebrecherin (1957), in which Janine, unsatisfied in her marriage, finds a fulfilling sensual experience not at all in an affair with a man, but in an experience of nature. A related topic appears in Marguerite Duras ' novel Moderato cantabile (1958), whose heroine Anne, also a bored wife, works towards adultery, whose completion - which she deliberately delayed for this reason - is ultimately disappointing.

Mary McCarthy's debut novel You and the Others (1965), in which a woman shaken by adultery, experiences the complexity of her own personality, has a feminist tone . In 1973 Doris Lessing published an exemplary female liberation novel with The Summer Before Darkness ; For the main character, adultery is an essential step on the path to self-discovery. Similar ideas for action can be found in Erica Jong's bestseller Afraid of Flying (1973), in Joan Didion's Democracy (1984) and in Elke Schmitter's wife Sartoris (2000). In Alix Kates Shulman's novel Ménage (2012), it is the husband himself who gives his intellectually bored wife a lover.

Male adultery

There are also occasional literary works in which a man finds himself through adultery. A relevant example is the unfinished last novel by the Nobel Prize winner for literature Samuel Agnon , Shira (1971). In this romance novel, a married Jewish scholar in British-occupied Palestine has an affair with a seemingly unsuitable partner: a love that frees him from his intellectual encapsulation.

With her popular debut novel Such Good Friends , the feminist-inspired Lois Gould published a literary work in 1970 in which a wife finds herself through the infidelity of her husband - or through the discovery of the same - to herself, in this case, of course, to a suffering, passive one Even a woman who, as John Seelye has shown, is unable to break out of her victim role. In Margaret Drabble's 1969 novel The Waterfall , it is the lover who indulges in endless reflections.

Adultery in the romance novel

In many romance novels , adultery is not the main theme at all, but just a means that allows the author to introduce the topic that actually interests him: the love of the couple who found each other. This applies, for example, to Elizabeth Taylor's novel Hide and Seek (1951), in which a married woman reunites with her youthful lover and asks herself again what the very complicated relationship she had with him at the time has to do with love. In Doctor Schiwago (1957) by Boris Pasternak , the (smaller) love of the main male character for his wife is compared more or less directly with the (larger) love for the beloved. Also Bodo Kirchhoff , whose work often involves (adultery Love in broad terms , 2012; longing and melancholy , 2014), always asks again after what the final nature of love actually is.

Even in Tom Stoppard's formally very demanding piece The Only True (1982) it is primarily about the question of what true love actually is, while adultery appears as a matter that only casually gets in the way of the search for love .

Beyond morality

In line with the liberalization that adultery experienced in the western world in the course of the 20th century, some of the more recent adaptations of the subject show a fundamental change in perspective. The authors use adultery here neither as a trigger for tension between the characters nor as a scandal , but can fulfill any other function in the narration. One example is the feminist-inspired romance novel Les vaisseaux du cœur (1988) by Benoîte Groult , in which the man is married and the woman is also bound for much of the plot. An unbridgeable educational gap also separates the lovers. However, it is precisely these external obstacles that allow the couple to keep a lifelong sexual attraction extremely lively, which under the sobering conditions of everyday coexistence would have died out after a short time.

Another example is Alice Munro's short story What Is Remembered (2001), which features the stream of consciousness of a married woman reminding herself of a passionate one-time sexual encounter with another man. Sibylle Berg's novel The Day when My Wife Found a Man (2015) is also free of the moral implications of classic bourgeois adultery literature , which rather fundamentally asks the question of the necessity of sex and whose plot ends in the grotesque. Edward Albee's play The Goat or Who is Sylvia? Deals with a special variant of adultery . with a goat as the third person in the game, and in which Albee also asks fundamental questions about what is “moral” in our society and what is not.

Related topics and motifs

The adultery theme often overlaps with other, related themes and motifs in the literature:

literature

  • Tracie Amend: The Adulteress on the Spanish Stage Gender and Modernity in 19th Century Romantic Drama . McFarland, 2015, ISBN 978-0-7864-9692-1 .
  • Elizabeth Amann: Importing Madame Bovary: The Politics of Adultery . Palgrave MacMillan, New York 2006, ISBN 1-349-53668-7 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • Barbara Leckie: Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914 . University of Penn Press, Philadelphia 1999, ISBN 0-8122-3498-7 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • Laurence Lerner: Love and Marriage: Literature and its Social Context . Edward Arnold, 1979, ISBN 0-7131-6227-9 .
  • Bill Overton: The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830-1900 . Macmillan, Houndmills, London 1996, ISBN 1-349-25175-5 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • Tony Tanner: Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression . Johns Hopkins, 1980, ISBN 0-8018-2178-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

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